It sounds like Facebook's approach is to provide free wifi to specific websites (which presumably includes Facebook) while Google's approach is to just provide free wifi. Is that true?
Facebook was trying to provide free 2G/3G, not wifi.
That's a lot more powerful, and a lot more expensive.
A huge percentage of India lives, works, and travels in areas that are unlikely to ever be reached by Google's wifi, but most of the country is now reached by at least one telecom.
EDIT: I did not mean to put Facebook forward as a hero; I wanted to explain the difference, and provide a hypothesis as to why it would be prohibitively expensive for Facebook to provide unfettered internet access in this case, but not for Google.
> That's a lot more powerful, and a lot more expensive.
It's not more powerful when Zuck wanted to limit it to Facebook.com and whatever other sites he felt like allowing Indians to access. It was just insulting and that's why it went down in flames.
It was worse than insulting, it would have limited the people using it, to the small list of sites (compared to the whole Internet) decided by others. It's like saying to someone: here's a free communication mechanism, you can only use it to access services run by us ... and in the process, be made to view our ads willy-nilly. For Internet newbies, it also has the side effect, that many of them might not even get to know (for a while, or ever) that other / better sites existed.
For me it's the super transparent self interest in that you only want these poor people online so that you can count their eyeballs in your DAUs and continue hitting higher numbers for your investors. You might not find that objectionable, but I do. Apparently India does as well!
It would be like McDonalds offering to feed the hungry, but only if they exclusively ate McDonalds food. Yes they are hungry, but no they should not only be eating McDonalds food.
They basically wanted to serve as a middleman between you and your visitors.
They use a "dual certificate" model, where they encrypt the data between readers and their own servers with their own certificate, and then access your website through your certificate.
They explain the process quite a bit when you try to submit a website to the Free Basics program. I went through the process to see how complicated it is (I got denied because I didn't want to get rid of SVGs and some JavaScript code from my website) and blogged about it here: https://blog.r3bl.me/en/why-not-everyone-can-get-involved-wi.... Pay attention the screenshot I posted under the HTTPS Support heading.
> A huge percentage of India lives, works, and travels in areas that are unlikely to ever be reached by Google's wifi,
Please define "huge". Googling shows me that Google's wifi was setup at mass transit stations. Wikipedia says:
"
In 2014-15, IR carried 8.397 billion passengers annually or more than 23 million passengers a day
"
Given that there are fewer than 8.3 billion people on the planet, we're going to have to assume a high percentage of repeat users.
If people who use IR use it on average once every ten days (most may use it daily?), you'd project 230 million people would use IR in a year.
That's still only a fifth of the Indian population; I would call 80% a "huge" percentage.
Really, though, the point is that nobody spends much time at railway stations (at least, not a majority of their day), so even if everybody used the wifi once, it wouldn't have a major effect on their lives.
Compare that to 2G/3G, which blankets much larger swathes of land – places people actually live and work.
Again, this assumes that telcos in India are actually doing their job to service these areas.
Telcos begrudge the cost of servicing the rural areas, and are concentrating a majority of their data dev to help metros.
The Facebook freebasic fiasco was also targetted at metros and young teens. They know which target markets would respond to free basic.
The high sounding promises were rhetoric - studies on who used the data showed that the market was users who used it to connect to other facebook users for free - college students.
Most of India is not educated in English, or literate - full internet which allows the sharing of images (not possible on FB) is significantly more useful.
In India, IRCTC (railways website) is used a lot. so having free connectivity on a train station is actually very useful. It may not be blanket coverage but it is practical, targetted and impactful coverage.
India needs more of that kind of work, because investment is slow and money hard to come by. Solving multiple use cases at one go with low resources is a great solution.
Facebook's approach is to work with the telecoms in order to have them offer a subset of the internet for free on mobile devices (notably Facebook, Wikipedia and some others).
Part of this is that people who have never been online before don't understand the value of getting online. This allows them to have some access in order to better understand the value. The model is a bit like the old shareware model DOOM used - give a few levels for free and if they like it they can pay for the rest.
The backlash was the argument that Zuckerberg was only giving access to a few websites (mostly Facebook) in order to get more control of the internet without following net neutrality. To me this seems to be an oversimplified and overly pessimistic view of what happened.
The telecoms are not going to just give free access of the entire web to everyone, but by giving access to some valuable websites for free people may start to see the value and demand better infrastructure/start paying for mobile internet. I think Zuckerberg is being earnest here and not attempting to manipulate people for some malicious power grab - this seemed like a good approach (unfortunately the PR fallout was not).
In comparison it looks like google is just setting up free wifi hotspots which requires you to go to one in order to use it and is generally a lot less useful.
To clarify - convincing telecoms to offer a subset of the Internet for free on mobile devices (because it will lead to more customers) is different from telling the telecoms that they should give away complete access for free.
The second one isn't and never has been a realistic option.
Sure it has, just make the connection slow (but usable). Enough people will get hooked and want faster Internet. Aircel did this in India. There were some other programs that did similar things and were successful IIRC.
That's a good point. I wonder what the conversion rates would be comparing high speed unlimited access to a subset vs. low speed limited access to the entire network.
Would be interesting to see what people preferred if both had happened.
Wrong, after differential pricing was banned, at least two Indian telecom operators began offering free Internet access (with a data cap and speed limit, but no restrictions on which websites you can visit).
See my other comment above about alternate revenue models (which have worked!) for free-internate-for-everyone.
IIRC facebook wasn't even paying for the data in Free Basics (this may have changed?). They were spearheading/funding a marketing campaign, but the actual service was funded by telecom operators on the business model that a large enough fraction of people will switch to a paid plan. Facebook didn't even need to exist in this scheme (but nevertheless painted it as them being charitable)
This is India we're talking about, they'll figure something out. Might not be something cool like point to point IR links, maybe more like kids on bikes with a basket full of internet on HDDs.
This comment made me laugh, but the sentiment is actually painfully accurate. There is an actual term for it: 'Jugaad' [0]; resourcefully making use of anything available to get what you want.
> The backlash was the argument that Zuckerberg was only giving access to a few websites (mostly Facebook) in order to get more control of the internet without following net neutrality. To me this seems to be an oversimplified and overly pessimistic view of what happened
I'm Indian – and if you are someone here who ordinarily can't afford any sort of Internet access, Facebook and the other e-commerce websites that were on the Free Basics platform weren't exactly the first things you'd want to access. They made zero effort to make things like government websites, local newspapers, utility websites etc. accessible through this platform. If they had done so, I bet they would have had a lot more support from the intended target audience of this platform.
Please note that they also were MITMing people's traffic using a dual-certificate model. [1] "When people use the Free Basics mobile website, information is temporarily decrypted on our secure servers to ensure proper functionality of the services and to avoid unexpected charges to people." This was part of the reason people were more pessimistic about it and viewed it as a way for Facebook to cheaply acquire a lot more users and a ton of free user data about them.
Google on the other hand seems to be basically giving unrestricted access, albeit at specific spots to whatever people want to access, which is (in my opinion) way better than the sort of AOL-style walled garden Facebook was trying to create in India.
Government website access sounds like one of those things that's nice in theory, but in practice something people don't really use that often and don't care about that much.
The websites in Free Basics are websites that many people use all of the time. Though including utility type sites may have been the right call from a marketing perspective.
Not sure what the reasons were behind the MiTM - possible it was to prevent people using Free Basics to access everything by spoofing the domains and encrypting the traffic? Not everything is a conspiracy.
Definitely agree that access to everything is better, but wifi hotspots are nothing new and require you to actually go to them. Plus if you had Free Basics you could still use the wifi hotspots anyway - now those people have nothing.
If what you are saying is true that sites that Indians want are not available on FB Basics, then FB won't get traction because it's not what Indian people want. Recall FB Basics is an on-ramp to give people a place to start so they can choose whether paying for Internet is something that's important for them.
I say let the users decide with their feet and not some government bureaucrat.
Also regarding what Google is doing, the key difference is scale. Google Wifi will be limited and reach relatively few.
So I ask is it better to have a few people served with everything or is it better to give a little to everyone?
They wouldn't have had to prop up a single company. Just let any company provide whatever data services and let the users decide what they want to use.
So - let me get this straight - if I want to provide VoIP services to India, I'd have to make deals with all my competitors - the telecoms companies - to do so? Where's their incentive to do that? What if I'm running a personal blog, or small informational site? It becomes even harder to do than today.
The Internet, as it stands, with some hiccups, allows anyone to put up a website and have the globe be able to access it. If you have to make deals with ISPs to allow their customers to see your content, or never be seen because nobody will pay for "the real Internet" as long as they have Facebook and Wikipedia and Amazon... the result of that is that the Internet becomes a means of commerce, not a means of communication. Another system by which companies and Governments and the rich can market to people, but people are silenced from criticizing them and building alternatives.
Stop twisting words - this isn't about "free Internet access", this is about free access to specific websites as chosen by the telecoms companies.
Nobody is restricting anything. You can still pay for Internet. It's only a free service tier.
Don't forget that these are mostly 2G connections and so a full internet experience is likely to be a poor one. The limited services here are serving up lite versions of their products that should provide a better user experience on a 2G connection.
Honestly this model is not too different from what we had here in the US prior to iPhone. My Verizon phone had a very limited amount of Internet connectivity that was mostly restricted to Verizon's walled garden. I could pay for more connectivity but it was not a good experience. Pages were slow loading and the whole thing was more frustrating than anything else.
The issue is that it's a free service tier which ensures that certain companies will always have the upper hand - you can be guaranteed everyone can access Facebook, you can't be guaranteed everyone can access whatever the next thing is, so Facebook wins by default. Facebook also wins vs any criticism of it.
You can offer a lite version of any service on the public Internet, you don't need a free service tier.
There is chance that people can get hooked on Facebook and may not miss real internet at all since they don't even know what real internet is. There is a distinct issue with "Free", something that SaaS businesses have often struck themselves with. Once people are hooked on to the "Free", they don't really want to upgrade. A majority would try workarounds, create multiple accounts but not upgrade to pay.
I am very skeptical of a scenario in which people would find Internet important enough to upgrade to a paid plan. Quite likely, there would be a lot of free FB users who are content with limited Internet and that's the whole gist of the issue.
It's easy to be against something when you already have that something. All of the activists that defeated Free Basics are not going without internet access today.
It was Indians exercising their rights as people in a democracy that got Facebook's initiative banned. I'd say that's exactly how the world should work, instead of huge mega-corps being left to willy-nilly regulate access to one of the biggest revolutions in the past 30 years.
I don't think I am that old that I remember the time before the internet, and why the internet worked - and why it mattered so much.
This argument is insidious.
I don't think I am that old that I remember the time before the internet, and why the internet worked - and why it mattered so much.
The internet is not Wikipedia, or amazon or facebook. It is the substrate that allowed those systems to exist! Its what allowed geocities, ask jeeves, craigslist, dwarf fortress, ebay, kickstarter, watsi, cnn.com, wikileaks, irctc.com, pets.com, Bloomberg, google, optimizely, twitter, reddit and so many more to exist.
The internet is the system that enables any creator of content to access any consumer of content sans a gatekeeper.
That is fundamentally what the internet is about. I feel as if I am tip toeing around defining walled gardens and open internet.
FBasics is NOT the internet. It is categorically the opposite of what makes the internet work and why the internet is a force multiplier or worth passionately fighting for.
Side note: The top bureaucrat in TRAI is actually assessing the inputs provided in a clear technical process. Theres bureaucrats who are close to telecom who are pushing for freebasics. So if you want to know the truth, then you should also be ready to denounce Freebasics wholesale, the telcos are pushing to get middle man status via bureaucrats who are in the rank and file.
The NN people followed procedure, telcos are not. So its hard to take your particular accusations of Bureaucracy seriously
>Part of this is that people who have never been online before don't understand the value of getting online.
Yes, and therefore they will understand even less, the value of the whole Internet as opposed to selected sites. So it is misleading.
>The telecoms are not going to just give free access of the entire web to everyone, but by giving access to some valuable websites for free people may start to see the value and demand better infrastructure/start paying for mobile internet. I think Zuckerberg is being earnest here and not attempting to manipulate people for some malicious power grab - this seemed like a good approach (unfortunately the PR fallout was not).
This whole thing (internet.org / Free Basics) was discussed to death in the Indian tech and even mainstream media, and also a good amount on HN (and I'm sure plenty of other general Internet discussion sites) when the topic was more current.
The arguments of the people (many Indian) objecting to it boiled down to one thing: the telecoms / FB can easily give access to the whole Internet, not just their selected sites, but for a limited amount of bandwidth per month, e.g. 500 MB or 1 GB, for the same cost as their original plan, which discriminated against all other sites than their selected ones. Then why did they not try to do that?
As I understand it, that is the gist of the argument against internet.org.
While Google isn’t targeting those using its Wi-Fi with
advertising, it’s aiming to get more people online and betting
that they will use the company’s services and see more ads.
Essentially, Google is happy that those who would possibly never connect their phones to the Internet do that. (And, in the process, give it more data.)
“If we don’t address it, a few generations of Indians will
feel left behind.”
Maybe it should also consider giving away free smartphones so that those not having one so that they don't feel left behind.
As a matter of fact, millions of Indians are left behind every year due to lack of education. Free education would help them much more than free wi-fi. (It wouldn't help Google, though.)
I'm pretty sure it's more "increase the size of the market" than it is "give it more data". The latter is just a side effect of the former.
By getting more people online, they have more connected eyeballs for which advertising can be sold. It must be hard to sell adverts to Indian companies today when the target markets of those advertisers are not online (or not online enough).
It is fundamentally about growing the size of the pie, and everyone benefits from that (though yes, Google and other big internet companies perhaps benefit most).
Why can't it be both? Frankly, the outrage seems disproportioned. Unlike Facebook with its Internet.org site, Google didn't even paint it as charity, they only said it's a problem that they (along with others) are addressing, which is what every companies does. "General upliftment" and "benefit of mankind at large" are your words.
> It must be hard to sell adverts to Indian companies today ...
Not aware of the state of affairs presently but until a couple of years ago, I used to run AdSense on a handful of India-centric sites and while there were a good number of advertisers, I almost never got anything more than a crappy 1 or 2 cents per click out of it. (By contrast, on several other sites with a global audience, I used to easily average 12 to 15 cents per click.)
I think this might be more a reflection of the income disparity between the Indian and the Western market. People have a lot more disposable income in the West, which allows them to actually purchase the things being advertised.
Seems like a stretch to compare the choice of connecting 2 million people a month by offering wifi at 24 train stations to providing users that pass through the station with phones. More to the point, having a phone is not the issue, having a free way to connect to the net is.
I think providing free internet is a much smaller problem to solve than providing education. Google can just not do anything at all. So I'm glad they are providing this service (for now, at least).
$0.02: I honestly feel that Google's CEO being Indian hastened the adoption. In India, Sundar Pichai is a celebrity. There are billboards, advertisements, and the whole country is cheering for him, a "local".
There is more to it than this (of course), but I think that the community view Google through the friendly face that is their CEO, while viewing Facebook as the big blue tech conglomerate which that have become.
To add to your point, facebook's whole internet.org thing didn't help them in India as well. Majority of the tech-literate population was against that.
It probably didn't hurt. And it definitely didn't hurt as much as Zuckerberg's nearly colonialist attitude towards the Indian people and their government.
That was Marc Andreessen, not Mark Zuckerberg. Marc A is on FB's board, though, and sadly a parody of his former self -- classic case of someone who got rich for luckily being in the right place at the wrong time, and coming out thinking he is a god.
Basically when the Indians started to sway against him, his PR campaign boiled down to, "we know what's best for you."
It's not a popular stance for a rich white westerner to take towards a previously (abusively) colonized country. Well, or anyone else. But especially not them.
I didnt have a problem with facebooks effort, till I saw the patronizing ads they put out. Zuck read India wrong or maybe it was Marc - either which ways India will be closed for anything like this for facebook now.
Maybe Zuck needs to work harder on his Chinese, not that its going to help when that mirage unfolds.
A lot of indians who come to this country never want to go back to india. They seem to kind of hate their country. So the fact Indians are celebrating someone who made it out is quite ironic.
Any person of Indian origin successful in west becomes local celebrity unless that person makes his dislike for India very public. India as a nation has very few contemporary role models to look up to so either they resort to mythology or look for successful PIO in west.
Not true at all. We have a lot of contemporary role models to look up to. In fact I can bet that 99% of Indians know nothing about Sundar Pichai. However, I can also bet that 99% would have heard of J.R.D Tata, Kirloskar, Narayan Murthy or Azim Premji. Have you heard of any of these people? I'm sure you haven't. These are local celebrities in India, not Sundar Pichai.
For us, an Indian going abroad and making it has a different charm. That's all. It does not suddenly accord him a celebrity status and put him on par with the likes of Tatas, Kirloskars etc. Don't look too much into it.
Indian here. Not true, most of us love our country. And people do love to go back. Relocation in general is tough, once you have a family and kids going to school, its really tough to go back
You can't raise a family in india? Once you get used to that 150k salary you ain't going back. Pretty much all my cousins and stuff are trying to get out of the country.
I am not going to blame you are anyone else trying to make it, but I find it quite hypocritical that Indian publications glorify people who have pretty much left the country for good.
Why is it hypocritical? As you say, a lot of Indians do like to work abroad, and someone who has accomplished the very best of that particular ambition would definitely be of much interest to the Indian public.
It is hypocritical that Indian publications glorify people who have left the country for good? I think your statement is hypocritical.
Has the West not done the same? Who was Mother Teresa? When she adopted India as her home, leaving her birthplace for good, to help the distressed, did the West not glorify her as a "savior" and elevate her status to a "Saint"? Heck even after her death, lots of Western publications still continue to praise her work (and rightfully so). Should we call the West hypocritical then?
Just because Sundar Pichai left India for good does not make him any less Indian. At the same time, he is also not a celebrity.
If you bother to look at other articles published by the same publications you referred to, you'll notice that they praise a lot of other, more powerful Indian entrepreneurs as well. Sundar Pichai is not even on the same plane as those of Tatas, Birlas, Kirloskars etc. These are the local celebrities (household names if you will). Not Sundar Pichai. Go ask any Indian about Tata and s/he will tell you everything they know. Then ask about Sundar Pichai. That is when you'll understand who is the real celebrity in India.
Indian schools are very different. Indian education (up to but not including college) is very different. While top IB schools and whatnot (which are super expensive and may not be affordable even if you have earned money in the States -- besides, you will be earning less money now) exist and are closer to the Western model of education, most likely you will be in something less expensive. There is an enormous focus on rote learning. There is a very high competitive attitude. These things are _very hard_ to adjust to. Rote learning especially; that's not taught in the US, and is a very hard skill to pick up at a later age. This is not something that can be trivially brushed away.
(The reverse is true too; I know Indian kids who have had a hard time when moving to the West.)
And really, schools are often why people avoid moving from state to state in a country, forget moving to another country altogether. Its generally about not wanting to uproot your family's life. Schooling is a big part of that.
Nobody's saying schools don't exist in India.
Source: I'm an Indian-American who came back to India and had to switch schools. I know many other families who have done this.
--------
Edit: Some other things that I missed:
The school year is different. Furthermore, many schools (at least in Mumbai) start the year in feb-apr before summer vacation.
Languages. Depending on your location and the grade you're in, you may have to learn one or two languages other than English. If the child is very young this is okay, but you can't expect older kids to pick up the new language and get to the level of proficiency expected at that age. Most Indian-American kids do speak one Indic language, but not necessarily to the degree of proficiency required. They may not speak Hindi at all.
Many exam boards allow for some flexibility with choosing a different language, like French. But most schools won't have the faculty for that.
In my case there was exactly one school in all of Mumbai where I would not have had to have Hindi as a subject AND would not have had to sit out a year of school (this was after leaving my American school a few months early -- they were okay with that because I had good grades. Imagine the situation people would be in if they didn't have the grades necessary to be able to leave school early.)
I actually still started after the school year was underway, but fortunately this school was okay with that. Didn't help the transition between education systems though.
I stay in New Delhi and visit Bangalore often. Don't remember seeing Sundar Pichai on a single public Billboard or Ad. Go on with your fantasy stories!
That tweet, omg! Marc Andreessen got hit so hard because of it that he apologized on his Twitter account and said he won't participate on any political discussion about India again. I like his work, but the particular tweet was grotesque.
However the tweet came late. The activism against FB's Free Basics was in full force already.
I am willing to bet that there are none. You'll find billboards of politicians, bollywood celebrities or businesses at the max. Billboards are expensive. I'm sure even Sundar Pichai wouldn't want his photo plastered on a billboard anywhere... especially in India.
Have you seen a billboard of Sundar Pichai in the US? If you haven't, then why would you expect to see one in India? He is no celebrity here. We are proud of the fact that he achieved a lot. But that does not mean he automatically achieves stardom.
No worries. Can you, if possible, point me to the article so I can see who wrote it? Typically you never find billboards of founders/CEOs etc in India and if there is one that is a first.
Facebook isn't interested in getting India connected to the internet. They want India connected to Facebook. Google benefits from increasing the population of general internet users, but facebook's business model does not benefit from this to the same extent.
It's good that India has strict Net neutrality rules which ban zero rating. That's what Facebook was bitten by. In US various ISPs still get away with it.
Is it? Say Google did not take the initiative. Would it be better that people have no internet whatsoever than to have Facebook for free? Moreover, it is each individual who should decide what is better for him, Facebook or nothing, not you nor their government.
> Say Google did not take the initiative. Would it be better that people have no internet whatsoever than to have Facebook for free?
If you allow it, monopolists will abuse it. That's what Net neutrality prevents. Network must be equal, no preferential treatment for Facebook or the like. Of course they'll use an excuse of "providing free Internet". But if they care about free access, they should give access to Internet, not to Facebook. They aren't doing that. So what they are doing is simply monopolizing the market. That is not good.
> Moreover, it is each individual who should decide what is better for him
Facebook doesn't let them decide. Because they only provide Facebook. It's an illusion of choice.
How are they monopolizing the market? It seems that the prevention allowed Google to monopolize the market, instead of competing with Facebook if it was allowed.
>Facebook doesn't let them decide. Because they only provide Facebook. It's an illusion of choice.
They can decide between having Facebook or not, no one is forcing them to use it. Government is forcing them to not use Facebook. That's an illusion of protection.
By turning Internet access into Facebook access. Try explaining how it's not a monopoly.
> Government is forcing them to not use Facebook.
No, government is forcing Facebook to play by the same rules as everyone else. That's fair and necessary. If Facebook wants to be exempt from data caps, then all traffic and services should be.
> Would it be better that people have no internet whatsoever than to have Facebook for free?
Yes, it's better, because it creates the incentive for telecom operators to lower costs. And the problem with FB's initiative is that nobody can compete against free, establishing the status quo, not to mention a precedent for other monopolies.
Besides, nothing in life is free of cost, not even air, as Delhi's citizens are finding out.
> it is each individual who should decide what is better for him, Facebook or nothing, not you nor their government
That's strange logic. The purpose of government is to ensure the proper use of force in order to protect the rights of the citizens and ensure their well-being. Governments exist because the people themselves prefer to defer such matters to people that presumably know what they are doing. And in a democracy you decide by voting for people representing your interests, and/or by making your voice heard in some way, like protesting in the streets or in writing maybe. But other than that, there are plenty of cases where the individual cannot decide what's best for him, because the law exists (ideally for everybody, can't speak for India).
No one can compete against free? But that free is limited to Facebook. I bet a lot of people would like more than that and would be willing to pay for it.
>Governments exist because the people themselves prefer to defer such matters to people that presumably know what they are doing.
That's strange logic. Considering that people often do not prefer such deferment and are often pissed at government decisions.
I'm merely stating that it is not the government's roll to determine if the individual should or should not have access to a certain product.
> it is not the government's roll to determine if the individual should or should not have access to a certain product.
It is government's role however to make sure that products don't get preferential treatment, i.e. there is fair competition on the market. Because otherwise things turn into monopolies. That's what Net neutrality prevents. Facebook can't be treated preferentially (i.e. be exempt from data caps). Either axe all caps, or have everyone be subjected to them. Facebook exempt and everyone else no? That shouldn't happen.
The Indian example is Google receiving preferential treatment over Facebook because of net neutrality. I'm not saying Facebook should not respect nn while everyone else does, I'm saying no one should.
Did they plan to provide Google only connection? As far as I understood, they planned regular Internet access. Not "Google or nothing". So it's not comparable to what Facebook were planning.
> I'm saying no one should.
Well, FB tried not to. Luckily, they were put in place by the law. And you propose not to have such law, giving monopoly abusers free reign.
>> _I'm merely stating that it is not the government's roll to determine if the individual should or should not have access to a certain product._
Like an Atom Bomb :) ... Or an AK-47. It's completely government's role actually, and again, that's why we elect them. Your ideas (after reading multiple of your comments) are very close to that of anarchy.
Why don't we go ahead and give everyone's security in people's hands too, instead of creating laws then? This simplistic thinking is the reason it took so long for the Net neutrality debate to start in India and Facebook's campaign to be banned (thankfully it eventually was). No, not everyone is educated enough about the issue in hand and to decide what's good for the country, that's why we form governments.
So you are educated enough to decide what is better for people, Facebook or no Facebook? This simplistic and self important thinking is the reason we got so tangled in regulations and limited our own freedom.
Yes, in this particular matter I am educated enough to know what's right and wrong for the people of the country. In a whole lot of other matters, I'm not. The freedom you're talking about is how animals live where anyone is killing and eating anyone - there's no 'regulation'. The only problem with that is, everyone is thinking about themselves, not about society as a whole.
Free Basics isn't internet, it's a walled garden controlled by Facebook. Comparing what Google and Facebook are doing in India is comparing apples to oranges.
The article re-iterates the convenient lie promoted by Facebook that Free Basics was "designed for people who can’t afford expensive mobile-data charges."
The cost of internet access is really low in India. For less than $2 a month, you can easily get 500MB/month of 3G access [1]. Even cheaper for $2G access. The cost of a getting a phone is the bigger barrier. But in Facebook's world everyone already has a phone but cannot afford internet.
The example Mark Zuckerberg usually talks about is US where it costs around $2000 for a plan over two years. Which makes it makes a convenient case for Free Basics.
It was disappointing to see how major publications are just re-iterating FB/Zuckerberg words. The only journalism I saw was from Buzzfeed[2][3] and Backchannel[4].
I remember thinking Buzzfeed's long form articles (I think they have a name, but I forgot it) are actually really good. Not just "good for Buzzfeed", but legitimately interesting, insightful and well written.
I've had someone who has worked as a journalist assure em that BuzzFeed isn't all garbage. I think the perception of the quality of Buzzfeed content is out of whack with the actual quality. I assure you I have no skin in the game. Admittedly the name literally does not inspire confidence and they do seem to have a ridiculously high clickbaity noise to signal ratio so you'd be easily forgiven for jumping to the wrong conclusion.
Remember the target demographic though. These are people who presumable require internet access first and foremost simply to access some basic online data; not to stream youtube/netflix.
Basic online usage like web searches, text messages, emails, etc. None of which are data-intensive.
It's almost unbelievable how disconnected from reality we've become if we think that 500 MB per month is useless. Ignoring gaming and media, 500 MB is more than I use per month on my phone, and I use it a lot every day. I remember when the web first became a thing and I was first able to contact people using IMs and emails. It was a huge, life-changing deal. You need to think back to your own experience with this, assuming you lived through it anyway. The difference between no Internet at all and 500 MB of Internet per month easily captures 95% of the total value that the Internet actually delivers to your daily life compared to the difference between 500 MB and unlimited.
I get a 120MB monthly plan when I travel internationally. Yes, I use it judiciously and don't do big downloads or stream audio/video but it suits me fine for email and looking up info.
The folks who are downvoting you are likely not considering the fact that (1) the average web page size in 2016 is now up to 2.2MB and (2) if your phone is your sole source of internet access, you'll use a lot more data than you would somewhere where you have wifi access at home and work which aren't counting against your 500MB limit per month.
$2 for you monthly is cheap. but not for people being targeted by facebook.
People don't even recharge their phones so that they can do voice calls. people like farmers who buys some low end feature phone but wont top up so that they can call others, instead they just load some songs in their low end phones and chill sleeping in their farms. Similarly I can see people who buy phones but wont topup their internet monthly thinking there is no use or not worth it.
facebook wanting to provide free internet for people already having smart phones or internet enabled phones is not without basis..
I got my uncle a smartphone.. he fills data once in some 3-4 months.. and pings me in whatsapp.. hi hello tata bye bye see you.. and does the same thing after 3-4 months.
These are all anecdotal experiences.. but I also would like to see some related stats..
Net neutrality applies when your network provider holds destinations hostage. It doesn't apply when the destination volunteers to pay for your connectivity.
You accidentally approached the net neutrality mindset from an utility maximizing point of view.
A central premise of its advocats is that net neutrality is a value on its own. (More like a natural right.) Therefore, utility arguments that might favor a position in disagreement with netneutrality don't apply simply on a value basis.
That's probably the reason you got downvoted.
edit: There do exist a lot of utility arguments in favor of net neutrality. But most advocats use them as parallel constructs for their deeper reason of believe. A simple emotional test one could exercise: If you can not construct a case in which the violation of net neutrality could lead to a greater overall benefit, your position is probably more a believe than a result of rational consideration.
This is not true. Were you in India when FB launched Free Basics? Lot of journalists covered it. AIB channel's video, for instance, actually made it simple for non-tech people to understand. Major TV channels covered it critically.
While we could go on and on about how MZ doesn't live on the same planet than the rest of us, and how we don't buy MZ's pseudo-philanthropic PR, strictly speaking, that 2 USD/month is comparable to the paying capability and cost of living over there vs. the USA. The average income is $130/month in India ($4,500 in the US), which means that the ratios between incomes (34-fold), or internet affordability (41-fold, if using your $2000), are similar (I am talking cost here, not quality or quantity of service).
The average web page size in 2016 is 2.2MB. Which means that 500MB plan can only load 227 first load web pages (excluding secondary pages on the same site with cached CSS, JS and images for navigation and title/footer). This is entirely excluding any video or audio or any real photo downloads or uploads.
500MB may be enough for you who is a light LTE user and who has access to separate free wifi at work and separately paid for wifi at home. But if your phone is your only access to the internet, 500MB can't do much. Unless you consider loading 7 web pages per day a reasonable restriction.
The average income in India was $1,497 in 2013 or $124.75 a month. So that $2 for 500MB means 1.6% of your monthly income is spent on internet to download a few hundred individual pages with no audio or video. In the US, with an average income of $3,769 a month, the equivalent 1.6% of monthly income ($60) can get you unlimited LTE data on a lower-tier provider or MVNO. Quite a big difference between 500MB and unlimited.
So, yes, internet access in India is comparably much more expensive than it is in the US.
The average income in India was $1,497 in 2013 or $124.75 a month. So that $2 for 500MB means 1.6% of your monthly income is spent on internet to download a few hundred individual pages with no audio or video. In the US, with an average income of $3,769 a month, the equivalent 1.6% of monthly income ($60) can get you unlimited LTE data on a lower-tier provider or MVNO. Quite a big difference between 500MB and unlimited.
This shows just how much we're getting ripped off here in Canada. For a 1GB plan from Rogers you're looking at $90/mo! [0] Rogers doesn't even offer an unlimited data plan; their largest plan is $385/mo for 60GB.
In Romania I got a special offer on a prepaid card for 10 GB of bandwidth for 6 EUR per month.
And my regular contract is 24 EUR per month and includes 3 GB, in addition to unlimited national calls and SMS in any network and included international and roaming minutes. And for the first year I paid only 12 EUR due to special offer. Data is 4G of course and works well.
Where do you live? Thats a very good plan. Whats your carrier's name. Is the plan truly unlimited or does it have reduced speed once it hits fair usage limits
I see that CAN$90/month is for a plan that subsidizes the phone. Bring your own phone, it's... $80/month for 1GB. That's awful, but it does include unlimited calling. Here in New Zealand, which also has a low population density (though 4x higher than Canada), you would pay around CAN$20-30/month for 1GB depending on the company.
(But most Canada is uninhabited, isn't it? So NZ might actually have a lower average density in inhabited areas.)
You're probably disconnected from limited data plans. The average web page size may be 2.2MB, but this number requires a source. I find it hard to believe that 2.2MB is the average for mobile websites or the actual download payload that mobile phones actually have to pull.
The reason is that for mobile websites bandwidth is not the only bottleneck. I assume you're talking about a gzipped payload, along with images. Feed a megabyte of compressed HTML, CSS and Javascript to your average feature smartphone and you'll find that the phone's CPU and RAM can be an even bigger bottleneck than bandwidth. Therefore webmasters have a serious incentive to cut down on the download size. Also popular Javascript libraries, like JQuery and Angular get served by Google's CDN or cdnjs.com and thus cached locally and reused across websites. Even more, static assets on a website get reused between visits, and if say, you're vising a news website regularly, you're not going to receive the whole payload every time, just the HTML.
The reason for why I object to your claim is that I've lived with a 500MB data plan for the whole of last year, consuming between 10 and 30 MB per day chatting, reading/writing email and yes, visiting a lot of websites. And I still experience what it's like to have such limitations when in roaming, as I do a fair amount of traveling in Europe. As long as you don't stream videos or music or download apps, it's totally fine.
My plan on China Unicom is 300 MB and I rarely go over. Many of the sites I want to visit are blocked of course, but for my daily needs, it is more than adequate.
The average web page that an Indian mobile user is downloading is CERTAINLY not 2.2 MB. You can't just take a statistic from desktop US-centric sites and generalize it to other nations and usage patterns. Keep in mind that a lot of the advantages of bringing mobile phones and mobile Internet to developing nations is simple text communication -- 500 MB is essentially an unlimited number of texts through apps like WhatsApp.
And anyway, I am a heavy smartphone user here in the US on a data plan I don't pay for (i.e. I never think twice about accessing anything on my phone), and I average 2-3 GB per month, most of which is mobile games (Ingress and Pokemon Go) and viewing images and videos on Reddit. I could easily make do on 500 MB/month if I had to, and the only thing that would be affected is entertainment.
Facebook may have self-interest but Indian elites unilaterally deciding what is good for poorer Indians is far more obnoxious.
The ARPU for telecom companies in India is $2/month. So calling cost of internet really low in India shows you are a part of know it all Indian elites who have no clue what low cost for most of Indians means.
The major problem with Internet service providers in India is the way they set their pricing. They put huge caps on mobile internet data. I pay like $40 for my high speed internet connection(our internet speeds are very poor compared to the rest of the world), which is on the higher side in India, but the download cap restriction is at 60GB. I work mostly from home and I am living in a shared accommodation with 1 other person, so effectively 30GB per person which I feel is very low. The ISP's in India still use the pricing model based on voice calls that they use to do 30 years back. They seriously need to re-evaluate the way the pricing should work for internet.
When I was in UAE, I remember a telecom company called du provide facebook for free on a website called 0.facebook.com.
Basically, it was the normal mobile facebook, but without any images (and for some reason, they decided to make it all black and white as well).
The funny thing is, I and a lot of my friends switched to du from a much better company just for this service - because for us it was either no internet on our phones, or free facebook - and we chose free facebook.
Over time we felt limited and decided to opt for a social package (facebook, twitter, BBM, etc.) but had it not been for the initial free facebook hook - we'd never have bothered with mobile data for a much longer time.
I want to urge everyone to read and internalize this perspective because it is a genuine one and it is what Facebook is betting will happen with their efforts.
Something you shouldn't discount is the value that ohstopitu got from the initial free service that compelled him to upgrade to a larger phone package. Facebook didn't trick ohstopitu, they just showed him/her what was possible.
You don't have to agree with the hook, and you may not want to believe that ohstopitu actually derived value from Facebook, but understanding it is far more valuable than mindless pessimism.
It's not that users are being tricked, it's that it doesn't deserve to be called "free internet". And if the happy ending here is getting a "social package", and still no real internet access, that's not great either.
Limited text-only access can be a great hook without restricting it to a particular site or tiny set of sites.
The issue is that I'd bet that those in the UAE are much more aware of the choices they have. Facebook was targeting some of the poorest people, and moreover were taking a pretty colonialist view towards things. Not the same scenario.
Yeah, there was a lot of backlash against fb and it has resulted in a lot of people being weary of anyone trying to provide free internet again.
To answer your question though: they don't need to monetize it at all. That's the beauty of being Google: they only need to expand the advertising market. And the simplest way to do this is to get more people on the internet using Google.
I'd argue that they need to get more people on the Internet, they don't even have to use Google when you consider that Google Adsense is in pretty much every website that tries to monetize by serving ads.
I may also point to a subtle subconscious factor that might be helping Google.
Google posted the free WiFi on Railway stations. Indian Railways is huge and celebrated as a backbone to the countries transportation. On the other hand FB's Free Basic, broke net-neutrality and partnered with Reliance & Airtel, two companies in India that put people's guards up already.
Google's hotspots simply don't seem like a 'scheme', while FB's offer does.
> Indian Railways is huge and celebrated as a backbone to the countries transportation.
This is not only true but a bit of an understatement as well. Railways has been treated as a very important part of the whole Indian economy since the time of independence. Isn't it the only department of the Government of India that merits its own, separate union budget? It may not be an exaggeration to say that railways is an integral part of the very fabric of life for a huge cross-section of the population of India.
From this perspective, I'd say offering free wi-fi at railway stations is a brilliant strategic move.
"Google began offering free Wi-Fi at about two dozen train stations in the country earlier this year, and now has 2 million people using the service each month, Pichai said in a recent earnings call. Millions more will gain access as the service expands to 100 locations by the year end. The search provider’s goal is to reach 400 stations."
It's great that Google is doing this, but I don't think offering wifi at 400 train stations counts as "getting India connected to Internet." It's a great convenience, but the vast majority of the time that people spend is at home/work. The amount of time that people spend at train stations is pretty miniscule.
The fact that 2 million people used the service at all, is not surprising. I think a far better metric would be the number of man-hours that the service has been used for.
Well, besides that it is truly an eye-opening experience, have you traveled through the train stations in India? Agreed, it would be better to get internet wired all the way to the home, but train stations are very, very much a part of many Indians lives!
I run a startup called Mhire, it helps companies hire blue-collar workers. These workers are one of the target audience of the FB's Free basics program, from my understanding it will be helpful for them to get free internet, but it would be bad for startups like ours as it would give a huge unfair advantage to our competitor BabaJobs which is a Free Basics partner. It would be extremely bad for competition. And would prevent competition from finding unique models which try to eschew the problem of low internet penetration in this marketplace. There are many unique ideas startups are utilizing to solve this problem, like using miss call marketing, call based broadcast of jobs, human social network to name a few. It will be extremely bad for the whole startup ecosystem.
Off topic, but anyone else think this newish white background cutout look for the title on Bloomberg looks really terrible? The first time I saw it, I thought it was a CSS mistake that slipped through.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadThat's a lot more powerful, and a lot more expensive.
A huge percentage of India lives, works, and travels in areas that are unlikely to ever be reached by Google's wifi, but most of the country is now reached by at least one telecom.
EDIT: I did not mean to put Facebook forward as a hero; I wanted to explain the difference, and provide a hypothesis as to why it would be prohibitively expensive for Facebook to provide unfettered internet access in this case, but not for Google.
It's not more powerful when Zuck wanted to limit it to Facebook.com and whatever other sites he felt like allowing Indians to access. It was just insulting and that's why it went down in flames.
It would be like McDonalds offering to feed the hungry, but only if they exclusively ate McDonalds food. Yes they are hungry, but no they should not only be eating McDonalds food.
They use a "dual certificate" model, where they encrypt the data between readers and their own servers with their own certificate, and then access your website through your certificate.
They explain the process quite a bit when you try to submit a website to the Free Basics program. I went through the process to see how complicated it is (I got denied because I didn't want to get rid of SVGs and some JavaScript code from my website) and blogged about it here: https://blog.r3bl.me/en/why-not-everyone-can-get-involved-wi.... Pay attention the screenshot I posted under the HTTPS Support heading.
Please define "huge". Googling shows me that Google's wifi was setup at mass transit stations. Wikipedia says: " In 2014-15, IR carried 8.397 billion passengers annually or more than 23 million passengers a day "
23 million people a day is not a trivial number.
If people who use IR use it on average once every ten days (most may use it daily?), you'd project 230 million people would use IR in a year.
That's still only a fifth of the Indian population; I would call 80% a "huge" percentage.
Really, though, the point is that nobody spends much time at railway stations (at least, not a majority of their day), so even if everybody used the wifi once, it wouldn't have a major effect on their lives.
Compare that to 2G/3G, which blankets much larger swathes of land – places people actually live and work.
Telcos begrudge the cost of servicing the rural areas, and are concentrating a majority of their data dev to help metros.
The Facebook freebasic fiasco was also targetted at metros and young teens. They know which target markets would respond to free basic.
The high sounding promises were rhetoric - studies on who used the data showed that the market was users who used it to connect to other facebook users for free - college students.
Most of India is not educated in English, or literate - full internet which allows the sharing of images (not possible on FB) is significantly more useful.
In India, IRCTC (railways website) is used a lot. so having free connectivity on a train station is actually very useful. It may not be blanket coverage but it is practical, targetted and impactful coverage.
India needs more of that kind of work, because investment is slow and money hard to come by. Solving multiple use cases at one go with low resources is a great solution.
Thank you for putting the point across so nicely because this is the root of all the confusion.
Facebook was trying to serve a few sites via their platform.
In no way was it 3G or 2g which is full internet.
Free Basics was delivered over 2G/3G, instead of being delivered over wifi.
I am not defending Free Basics here.
Part of this is that people who have never been online before don't understand the value of getting online. This allows them to have some access in order to better understand the value. The model is a bit like the old shareware model DOOM used - give a few levels for free and if they like it they can pay for the rest.
The backlash was the argument that Zuckerberg was only giving access to a few websites (mostly Facebook) in order to get more control of the internet without following net neutrality. To me this seems to be an oversimplified and overly pessimistic view of what happened.
The telecoms are not going to just give free access of the entire web to everyone, but by giving access to some valuable websites for free people may start to see the value and demand better infrastructure/start paying for mobile internet. I think Zuckerberg is being earnest here and not attempting to manipulate people for some malicious power grab - this seemed like a good approach (unfortunately the PR fallout was not).
In comparison it looks like google is just setting up free wifi hotspots which requires you to go to one in order to use it and is generally a lot less useful.
The second one isn't and never has been a realistic option.
Would be interesting to see what people preferred if both had happened.
Aircel is one, I forgot the other.
Telecoms aren't giving out free internet access out of the goodness of their heart.
IIRC facebook wasn't even paying for the data in Free Basics (this may have changed?). They were spearheading/funding a marketing campaign, but the actual service was funded by telecom operators on the business model that a large enough fraction of people will switch to a paid plan. Facebook didn't even need to exist in this scheme (but nevertheless painted it as them being charitable)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad
I'm Indian – and if you are someone here who ordinarily can't afford any sort of Internet access, Facebook and the other e-commerce websites that were on the Free Basics platform weren't exactly the first things you'd want to access. They made zero effort to make things like government websites, local newspapers, utility websites etc. accessible through this platform. If they had done so, I bet they would have had a lot more support from the intended target audience of this platform.
Please note that they also were MITMing people's traffic using a dual-certificate model. [1] "When people use the Free Basics mobile website, information is temporarily decrypted on our secure servers to ensure proper functionality of the services and to avoid unexpected charges to people." This was part of the reason people were more pessimistic about it and viewed it as a way for Facebook to cheaply acquire a lot more users and a ton of free user data about them.
Google on the other hand seems to be basically giving unrestricted access, albeit at specific spots to whatever people want to access, which is (in my opinion) way better than the sort of AOL-style walled garden Facebook was trying to create in India.
[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org/platform-t...
The websites in Free Basics are websites that many people use all of the time. Though including utility type sites may have been the right call from a marketing perspective.
Not sure what the reasons were behind the MiTM - possible it was to prevent people using Free Basics to access everything by spoofing the domains and encrypting the traffic? Not everything is a conspiracy.
Definitely agree that access to everything is better, but wifi hotspots are nothing new and require you to actually go to them. Plus if you had Free Basics you could still use the wifi hotspots anyway - now those people have nothing.
If Chrome can include unique identifiers, what could one say of Android?
I say let the users decide with their feet and not some government bureaucrat.
Also regarding what Google is doing, the key difference is scale. Google Wifi will be limited and reach relatively few.
So I ask is it better to have a few people served with everything or is it better to give a little to everyone?
If the Indian government want to help their people they could focus more on stopping slavery rather than free internet access http://qz.com/695565/india-has-18-million-modern-slaves-at-l...
The Internet, as it stands, with some hiccups, allows anyone to put up a website and have the globe be able to access it. If you have to make deals with ISPs to allow their customers to see your content, or never be seen because nobody will pay for "the real Internet" as long as they have Facebook and Wikipedia and Amazon... the result of that is that the Internet becomes a means of commerce, not a means of communication. Another system by which companies and Governments and the rich can market to people, but people are silenced from criticizing them and building alternatives.
Stop twisting words - this isn't about "free Internet access", this is about free access to specific websites as chosen by the telecoms companies.
Don't forget that these are mostly 2G connections and so a full internet experience is likely to be a poor one. The limited services here are serving up lite versions of their products that should provide a better user experience on a 2G connection.
Honestly this model is not too different from what we had here in the US prior to iPhone. My Verizon phone had a very limited amount of Internet connectivity that was mostly restricted to Verizon's walled garden. I could pay for more connectivity but it was not a good experience. Pages were slow loading and the whole thing was more frustrating than anything else.
You can offer a lite version of any service on the public Internet, you don't need a free service tier.
I am very skeptical of a scenario in which people would find Internet important enough to upgrade to a paid plan. Quite likely, there would be a lot of free FB users who are content with limited Internet and that's the whole gist of the issue.
I don't think I am that old that I remember the time before the internet, and why the internet worked - and why it mattered so much. This argument is insidious.
I don't think I am that old that I remember the time before the internet, and why the internet worked - and why it mattered so much. The internet is not Wikipedia, or amazon or facebook. It is the substrate that allowed those systems to exist! Its what allowed geocities, ask jeeves, craigslist, dwarf fortress, ebay, kickstarter, watsi, cnn.com, wikileaks, irctc.com, pets.com, Bloomberg, google, optimizely, twitter, reddit and so many more to exist.
The internet is the system that enables any creator of content to access any consumer of content sans a gatekeeper.
That is fundamentally what the internet is about. I feel as if I am tip toeing around defining walled gardens and open internet.
FBasics is NOT the internet. It is categorically the opposite of what makes the internet work and why the internet is a force multiplier or worth passionately fighting for.
Side note: The top bureaucrat in TRAI is actually assessing the inputs provided in a clear technical process. Theres bureaucrats who are close to telecom who are pushing for freebasics. So if you want to know the truth, then you should also be ready to denounce Freebasics wholesale, the telcos are pushing to get middle man status via bureaucrats who are in the rank and file.
The NN people followed procedure, telcos are not. So its hard to take your particular accusations of Bureaucracy seriously
Yes, and therefore they will understand even less, the value of the whole Internet as opposed to selected sites. So it is misleading.
>The telecoms are not going to just give free access of the entire web to everyone, but by giving access to some valuable websites for free people may start to see the value and demand better infrastructure/start paying for mobile internet. I think Zuckerberg is being earnest here and not attempting to manipulate people for some malicious power grab - this seemed like a good approach (unfortunately the PR fallout was not).
This whole thing (internet.org / Free Basics) was discussed to death in the Indian tech and even mainstream media, and also a good amount on HN (and I'm sure plenty of other general Internet discussion sites) when the topic was more current.
The arguments of the people (many Indian) objecting to it boiled down to one thing: the telecoms / FB can easily give access to the whole Internet, not just their selected sites, but for a limited amount of bandwidth per month, e.g. 500 MB or 1 GB, for the same cost as their original plan, which discriminated against all other sites than their selected ones. Then why did they not try to do that?
As I understand it, that is the gist of the argument against internet.org.
As a matter of fact, millions of Indians are left behind every year due to lack of education. Free education would help them much more than free wi-fi. (It wouldn't help Google, though.)
By getting more people online, they have more connected eyeballs for which advertising can be sold. It must be hard to sell adverts to Indian companies today when the target markets of those advertisers are not online (or not online enough).
It is fundamentally about growing the size of the pie, and everyone benefits from that (though yes, Google and other big internet companies perhaps benefit most).
It's obvious that the returns from these sorts of investment are much higher.
Not aware of the state of affairs presently but until a couple of years ago, I used to run AdSense on a handful of India-centric sites and while there were a good number of advertisers, I almost never got anything more than a crappy 1 or 2 cents per click out of it. (By contrast, on several other sites with a global audience, I used to easily average 12 to 15 cents per click.)
There is more to it than this (of course), but I think that the community view Google through the friendly face that is their CEO, while viewing Facebook as the big blue tech conglomerate which that have become.
It's not a popular stance for a rich white westerner to take towards a previously (abusively) colonized country. Well, or anyone else. But especially not them.
Maybe Zuck needs to work harder on his Chinese, not that its going to help when that mirage unfolds.
For us, an Indian going abroad and making it has a different charm. That's all. It does not suddenly accord him a celebrity status and put him on par with the likes of Tatas, Kirloskars etc. Don't look too much into it.
I am not going to blame you are anyone else trying to make it, but I find it quite hypocritical that Indian publications glorify people who have pretty much left the country for good.
Has the West not done the same? Who was Mother Teresa? When she adopted India as her home, leaving her birthplace for good, to help the distressed, did the West not glorify her as a "savior" and elevate her status to a "Saint"? Heck even after her death, lots of Western publications still continue to praise her work (and rightfully so). Should we call the West hypocritical then?
Just because Sundar Pichai left India for good does not make him any less Indian. At the same time, he is also not a celebrity.
If you bother to look at other articles published by the same publications you referred to, you'll notice that they praise a lot of other, more powerful Indian entrepreneurs as well. Sundar Pichai is not even on the same plane as those of Tatas, Birlas, Kirloskars etc. These are the local celebrities (household names if you will). Not Sundar Pichai. Go ask any Indian about Tata and s/he will tell you everything they know. Then ask about Sundar Pichai. That is when you'll understand who is the real celebrity in India.
I have seen from most of my friends in US, their love for India is mainly remitting dollars there and talking about politics/cricket/cinema.
Indian schools are very different. Indian education (up to but not including college) is very different. While top IB schools and whatnot (which are super expensive and may not be affordable even if you have earned money in the States -- besides, you will be earning less money now) exist and are closer to the Western model of education, most likely you will be in something less expensive. There is an enormous focus on rote learning. There is a very high competitive attitude. These things are _very hard_ to adjust to. Rote learning especially; that's not taught in the US, and is a very hard skill to pick up at a later age. This is not something that can be trivially brushed away.
(The reverse is true too; I know Indian kids who have had a hard time when moving to the West.)
And really, schools are often why people avoid moving from state to state in a country, forget moving to another country altogether. Its generally about not wanting to uproot your family's life. Schooling is a big part of that.
Nobody's saying schools don't exist in India.
Source: I'm an Indian-American who came back to India and had to switch schools. I know many other families who have done this.
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Edit: Some other things that I missed:
The school year is different. Furthermore, many schools (at least in Mumbai) start the year in feb-apr before summer vacation.
Languages. Depending on your location and the grade you're in, you may have to learn one or two languages other than English. If the child is very young this is okay, but you can't expect older kids to pick up the new language and get to the level of proficiency expected at that age. Most Indian-American kids do speak one Indic language, but not necessarily to the degree of proficiency required. They may not speak Hindi at all.
Many exam boards allow for some flexibility with choosing a different language, like French. But most schools won't have the faculty for that.
In my case there was exactly one school in all of Mumbai where I would not have had to have Hindi as a subject AND would not have had to sit out a year of school (this was after leaving my American school a few months early -- they were okay with that because I had good grades. Imagine the situation people would be in if they didn't have the grades necessary to be able to leave school early.)
I actually still started after the school year was underway, but fortunately this school was okay with that. Didn't help the transition between education systems though.
However, he is hardly a celebrity in India. Google has been popular here much before he became a CEO.
Also what damaged FB was the tweet by Marc :http://www.forbes.com/sites/saritharai/2016/02/10/marc-andre...
Directly implying that India was better off colonized.
However the tweet came late. The activism against FB's Free Basics was in full force already.
I would be willing to be that there are at least two such billboards somewhere in the country, making his statement factual.
If you allow it, monopolists will abuse it. That's what Net neutrality prevents. Network must be equal, no preferential treatment for Facebook or the like. Of course they'll use an excuse of "providing free Internet". But if they care about free access, they should give access to Internet, not to Facebook. They aren't doing that. So what they are doing is simply monopolizing the market. That is not good.
> Moreover, it is each individual who should decide what is better for him
Facebook doesn't let them decide. Because they only provide Facebook. It's an illusion of choice.
>Facebook doesn't let them decide. Because they only provide Facebook. It's an illusion of choice.
They can decide between having Facebook or not, no one is forcing them to use it. Government is forcing them to not use Facebook. That's an illusion of protection.
By turning Internet access into Facebook access. Try explaining how it's not a monopoly.
> Government is forcing them to not use Facebook.
No, government is forcing Facebook to play by the same rules as everyone else. That's fair and necessary. If Facebook wants to be exempt from data caps, then all traffic and services should be.
Any other company can provide internet access, e.g. Google.
>No, government is forcing Facebook to play by the same rules as everyone else. That's fair and necessary.
Of course, given that there is nn everyone should respect it. My point is that nn is harmful.
Yes, it's better, because it creates the incentive for telecom operators to lower costs. And the problem with FB's initiative is that nobody can compete against free, establishing the status quo, not to mention a precedent for other monopolies.
Besides, nothing in life is free of cost, not even air, as Delhi's citizens are finding out.
> it is each individual who should decide what is better for him, Facebook or nothing, not you nor their government
That's strange logic. The purpose of government is to ensure the proper use of force in order to protect the rights of the citizens and ensure their well-being. Governments exist because the people themselves prefer to defer such matters to people that presumably know what they are doing. And in a democracy you decide by voting for people representing your interests, and/or by making your voice heard in some way, like protesting in the streets or in writing maybe. But other than that, there are plenty of cases where the individual cannot decide what's best for him, because the law exists (ideally for everybody, can't speak for India).
>Governments exist because the people themselves prefer to defer such matters to people that presumably know what they are doing.
That's strange logic. Considering that people often do not prefer such deferment and are often pissed at government decisions.
I'm merely stating that it is not the government's roll to determine if the individual should or should not have access to a certain product.
It is government's role however to make sure that products don't get preferential treatment, i.e. there is fair competition on the market. Because otherwise things turn into monopolies. That's what Net neutrality prevents. Facebook can't be treated preferentially (i.e. be exempt from data caps). Either axe all caps, or have everyone be subjected to them. Facebook exempt and everyone else no? That shouldn't happen.
> I'm saying no one should.
Well, FB tried not to. Luckily, they were put in place by the law. And you propose not to have such law, giving monopoly abusers free reign.
Like an Atom Bomb :) ... Or an AK-47. It's completely government's role actually, and again, that's why we elect them. Your ideas (after reading multiple of your comments) are very close to that of anarchy.
The cost of internet access is really low in India. For less than $2 a month, you can easily get 500MB/month of 3G access [1]. Even cheaper for $2G access. The cost of a getting a phone is the bigger barrier. But in Facebook's world everyone already has a phone but cannot afford internet.
The example Mark Zuckerberg usually talks about is US where it costs around $2000 for a plan over two years. Which makes it makes a convenient case for Free Basics.
It was disappointing to see how major publications are just re-iterating FB/Zuckerberg words. The only journalism I saw was from Buzzfeed[2][3] and Backchannel[4].
[1] http://www.plansinfo.com/reliance-gsm-prepaid-mumbai-plans.h...
[2] https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/heres-how-free-bas...
[3] https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/how-facebooks-plan-t...
[4] https://backchannel.com/how-india-pierced-facebook-s-free-in...
I'd wager these people still want to be able to view pics, watch videos and download music like anyone else.
And in any case, what does "basic online data" even mean today when you consider the size of the average javascript-laden site.
It's almost unbelievable how disconnected from reality we've become if we think that 500 MB per month is useless. Ignoring gaming and media, 500 MB is more than I use per month on my phone, and I use it a lot every day. I remember when the web first became a thing and I was first able to contact people using IMs and emails. It was a huge, life-changing deal. You need to think back to your own experience with this, assuming you lived through it anyway. The difference between no Internet at all and 500 MB of Internet per month easily captures 95% of the total value that the Internet actually delivers to your daily life compared to the difference between 500 MB and unlimited.
People don't even recharge their phones so that they can do voice calls. people like farmers who buys some low end feature phone but wont top up so that they can call others, instead they just load some songs in their low end phones and chill sleeping in their farms. Similarly I can see people who buy phones but wont topup their internet monthly thinking there is no use or not worth it.
facebook wanting to provide free internet for people already having smart phones or internet enabled phones is not without basis..
I got my uncle a smartphone.. he fills data once in some 3-4 months.. and pings me in whatsapp.. hi hello tata bye bye see you.. and does the same thing after 3-4 months.
These are all anecdotal experiences.. but I also would like to see some related stats..
Whatsapp is not a part of free basics. Your uncle would have to buy a special'Whatsapp upgrade' if he wanted to message you on Whatsapp.
It's a clear violation of Net Neutrality principles and Facebook spent over $40 million trying to lobby for this to happen.
A central premise of its advocats is that net neutrality is a value on its own. (More like a natural right.) Therefore, utility arguments that might favor a position in disagreement with netneutrality don't apply simply on a value basis.
That's probably the reason you got downvoted.
edit: There do exist a lot of utility arguments in favor of net neutrality. But most advocats use them as parallel constructs for their deeper reason of believe. A simple emotional test one could exercise: If you can not construct a case in which the violation of net neutrality could lead to a greater overall benefit, your position is probably more a believe than a result of rational consideration.
500MB may be enough for you who is a light LTE user and who has access to separate free wifi at work and separately paid for wifi at home. But if your phone is your only access to the internet, 500MB can't do much. Unless you consider loading 7 web pages per day a reasonable restriction.
The average income in India was $1,497 in 2013 or $124.75 a month. So that $2 for 500MB means 1.6% of your monthly income is spent on internet to download a few hundred individual pages with no audio or video. In the US, with an average income of $3,769 a month, the equivalent 1.6% of monthly income ($60) can get you unlimited LTE data on a lower-tier provider or MVNO. Quite a big difference between 500MB and unlimited.
So, yes, internet access in India is comparably much more expensive than it is in the US.
This shows just how much we're getting ripped off here in Canada. For a 1GB plan from Rogers you're looking at $90/mo! [0] Rogers doesn't even offer an unlimited data plan; their largest plan is $385/mo for 60GB.
[0] http://www.rogers.com/consumer/wireless/smartphone-plans?ipn...
And my regular contract is 24 EUR per month and includes 3 GB, in addition to unlimited national calls and SMS in any network and included international and roaming minutes. And for the first year I paid only 12 EUR due to special offer. Data is 4G of course and works well.
(But most Canada is uninhabited, isn't it? So NZ might actually have a lower average density in inhabited areas.)
The reason is that for mobile websites bandwidth is not the only bottleneck. I assume you're talking about a gzipped payload, along with images. Feed a megabyte of compressed HTML, CSS and Javascript to your average feature smartphone and you'll find that the phone's CPU and RAM can be an even bigger bottleneck than bandwidth. Therefore webmasters have a serious incentive to cut down on the download size. Also popular Javascript libraries, like JQuery and Angular get served by Google's CDN or cdnjs.com and thus cached locally and reused across websites. Even more, static assets on a website get reused between visits, and if say, you're vising a news website regularly, you're not going to receive the whole payload every time, just the HTML.
The reason for why I object to your claim is that I've lived with a 500MB data plan for the whole of last year, consuming between 10 and 30 MB per day chatting, reading/writing email and yes, visiting a lot of websites. And I still experience what it's like to have such limitations when in roaming, as I do a fair amount of traveling in Europe. As long as you don't stream videos or music or download apps, it's totally fine.
The average web page that an Indian mobile user is downloading is CERTAINLY not 2.2 MB. You can't just take a statistic from desktop US-centric sites and generalize it to other nations and usage patterns. Keep in mind that a lot of the advantages of bringing mobile phones and mobile Internet to developing nations is simple text communication -- 500 MB is essentially an unlimited number of texts through apps like WhatsApp.
And anyway, I am a heavy smartphone user here in the US on a data plan I don't pay for (i.e. I never think twice about accessing anything on my phone), and I average 2-3 GB per month, most of which is mobile games (Ingress and Pokemon Go) and viewing images and videos on Reddit. I could easily make do on 500 MB/month if I had to, and the only thing that would be affected is entertainment.
The ARPU for telecom companies in India is $2/month. So calling cost of internet really low in India shows you are a part of know it all Indian elites who have no clue what low cost for most of Indians means.
I may be lacking local context. Where do I find out more about your reference to "Indian elites unilaterally deciding"?
Basically, it was the normal mobile facebook, but without any images (and for some reason, they decided to make it all black and white as well).
The funny thing is, I and a lot of my friends switched to du from a much better company just for this service - because for us it was either no internet on our phones, or free facebook - and we chose free facebook.
Over time we felt limited and decided to opt for a social package (facebook, twitter, BBM, etc.) but had it not been for the initial free facebook hook - we'd never have bothered with mobile data for a much longer time.
Something you shouldn't discount is the value that ohstopitu got from the initial free service that compelled him to upgrade to a larger phone package. Facebook didn't trick ohstopitu, they just showed him/her what was possible.
You don't have to agree with the hook, and you may not want to believe that ohstopitu actually derived value from Facebook, but understanding it is far more valuable than mindless pessimism.
Limited text-only access can be a great hook without restricting it to a particular site or tiny set of sites.
p.s. This whole thread has been disappointing, seems like everyone had some angst and needed some venting outlet against fb.
To answer your question though: they don't need to monetize it at all. That's the beauty of being Google: they only need to expand the advertising market. And the simplest way to do this is to get more people on the internet using Google.
Google posted the free WiFi on Railway stations. Indian Railways is huge and celebrated as a backbone to the countries transportation. On the other hand FB's Free Basic, broke net-neutrality and partnered with Reliance & Airtel, two companies in India that put people's guards up already.
Google's hotspots simply don't seem like a 'scheme', while FB's offer does.
This is not only true but a bit of an understatement as well. Railways has been treated as a very important part of the whole Indian economy since the time of independence. Isn't it the only department of the Government of India that merits its own, separate union budget? It may not be an exaggeration to say that railways is an integral part of the very fabric of life for a huge cross-section of the population of India.
From this perspective, I'd say offering free wi-fi at railway stations is a brilliant strategic move.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12243500 and marked it off-topic.
It's great that Google is doing this, but I don't think offering wifi at 400 train stations counts as "getting India connected to Internet." It's a great convenience, but the vast majority of the time that people spend is at home/work. The amount of time that people spend at train stations is pretty miniscule.
The fact that 2 million people used the service at all, is not surprising. I think a far better metric would be the number of man-hours that the service has been used for.
Well, besides that it is truly an eye-opening experience, have you traveled through the train stations in India? Agreed, it would be better to get internet wired all the way to the home, but train stations are very, very much a part of many Indians lives!
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Jios-monthly-...