Internet.org is currently offered on only one carrier (Reliance) and this is a clear net neutrality violation. Even if it were offered on all carriers, this is a violation. Also, this is hypocritical since FB supports NN in US!
What's worse is that some companies are using this as an example to push for legalisation of zero rating. This is worsened by our regulator's stancce which is pro telecom companies.
Even worse is that a lot of decision makers in our country's administration can be misled into accepting the practice as digital status quo, because a large company like facebook says so.
Sometimes preventing fragmentation of the network is more important. A mobile operator can't, for instance, use licensed spectrum to run a service that doesn't interoperate with others or with emergency services - even if it's free.
If Verizon were to sign up for this, it would fall foul of FCC's rules too (it is clearly paid prioritization when all websites that don't pay are blocked.) It's not for nothing that net neutrality laws in a bunch of countries (Chile, the Netherlands, Brazil and probably a few more) explicitly forbid zero-rating.
I'd say Facebook's moves here are more sinister than Microsoft's (or Apple's - they do the same thing). In the MS/Apple cases, it's simply about pushing product. In FB's case it's about pulling up the ladder after they've climbed it (balkanized Internet means dominant services like FB stay dominant).
After the fwd.us debacle and now this, why should anyone trust Zuck and Facebook in terms of "philanthropy"?
It really isn't surprising for anyone who has read his history that he is not a very moral person.
He made the precursor to Facebook by hacking servers and stealing people's pictures.
Then he lied to the Winklevoss twins that he would build their website for them to stall them for as long as he could so he could release Facebook before them.
What is the difference between this service and the free busses at the airport that only take you to a certain hotel or car rental offices or say cheap chartered air flights sponsored by a casino and of course packaged with the casino stay? I consider myself 100% pro-NN but I'm having a hard time resolving these analogies.
Today was phenomenal. The campaign has sent more than 620,000 email to TRAI (Indian equivalent of FCC) who wanted public opinion on whether Internet (or as they say, "Over-the-top services") should be regulated or not.
Cleartrip showed courage in being the first one to opt out of Internet.org. A few more soon followed.
One thing to note is that there's no EFF like organisation and this is mostly done by volunteers [1].
This has also been largest response to any consultation by Indian government having received 600K+ responses through campaign sites[2][3]. Previous highest was 20000 mails in 1999.
[1]: Disclaimer: I am associated and helping the group.
The original consultation paper also had similar figures. I don't remember correctly but telcos are expected to lose $400 billion from call and SMS decline by 2020. However, they are expected to earn $1.2 trillion from data growth.
Imagine what number would that $1.2 trillion blow up to, if they have it their way of zero-rated apps and differential rating.
The TRAI has been clearly unabashedly lobbying on television media for telcos.
Isn't the "Telecom Regulatory Authority of India" supposed to act in the benefits of consumer!?
>>Isn't the "Telecom Regulatory Authority of India" supposed to act in the benefits of consumer!?
Ideally yes, but like every other Government institution in India these people are neck deep in corruption[New term: Lobbying].
The key issue is, telcos realize they are being reduced to mere data pipe suppliers and on the long term[May be a few years] their margins will drop like stone falling in a pit. They are being disrupted through software apps[Calls and SMS going through apps like Viber/Skype/Whatsapp]. So while data growth will happen for a while, post that they will be nothing more than data pipe suppliers.
This will just ensure massive flattening of positions in the market. Don't be surprised if BSNL does better than these people in that kind of a world. Because it will be all about infrastructure, and with a unlimited government funding, these people lose out against BSNL if all they will remain is data pipe suppliers.
These people once heralded as champions of free market economy and capitalism now want the government to bail them out with regulations in their favor. This was exactly the cry of all PSU's in the 90's when the government wanted to bring in privatization big time.
This is all about software disruption. These people disrupted BSNL's business, Now there business is being disrupted.
Funny how capitalism works when you are at the receiving end.
Globally, the overall revenues in the telecom/ICT sector are expected to continue rising because of growth in users, traffic and applications. Even though there may be a loss of up to 6.9 per cent in cumulative voice revenues (representing $479 billion) because of OTT services, the total revenue for TSPs is likely to grow to $2.4 trillion in 2019 from $2.1
trillion in 2014
Having no organization like EFF is something that needs to be fixed. Depending on volunteers for such activity may not always be feasible in long term fights like this. #Sec66A fight took 3 years of dedication by many individuals to reach some conclusion and we can be sure many such fights will come in future. https://wethegoondas.in/ is such issue which still hasnt got enough attraction. Are there efforts in forming a non-profit organization which will work on such issues on long term basis. Crowd funding for the same when the issue in limelight seems to be the best thing if we have committed people coming forward to work and lead the organization.
In long term, yes this needs to be fixed. However, this time, the voluteers kept most of the stuff low profile. As of now, I am not aware of any non-profit organization like this. Maybe this is something that can be done after this debate settles down.
> Having no organization like EFF is something that needs to be fixed.
I think the closest organization to EFF that India has is the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS). Though, the aim of CIS isn't about digital civil rights like EFF. It is more to study Internet related policy with respect to India. Many times, CIS does take similar stands to that of EFF would given the situation.
Because there is no tradition of funding civil society organisations in India, CIS is mostly foreign-funded. That puts them under the purview of FCRA, which means they are explicitly forbidden from lobbying and politics, at risk of having their funding cut off. They necessarily have to limit themselves to policy research.
CIS is not and will never be the EFF of India until the FCRA rules change. We need another organisation.
[Offtopic] The campaign provides a bcc address to keep track of the number of emails people actually send. However when I sent a response it bounced for this bcc address, although it was delivered to TRAI.
This happened on the first day of the campaign (the day the AIB video came out) and it is probably fixed now, but this count could be understating things a bit.
The only reason why Mark Zuckerberg is bold enough to make irrational statements about the benevolence of Internet.org is the lack of such strong opposition. I hope India becomes a model for the world in this issue.
After limited protest/outrage in communities like /r/india, the news finally hit big when a comedy group AIB decided to make a video explaining what Net Neutrality is: https://youtu.be/mfY1NKrzqi0 and then it finally hit mainstream media. Amid pressure from everywhere, Flipkart finally withdrew from the Airtel Zero deal which would have been a blow to Net Neutrality in India.
Of course, next step was Internet.org and similar initiatives, which on paper sound like a fantastic idea until you look deeper and begin to see the NN violation problem. This is welcome news indeed. Btw, this was Zuckerburg's response when posed this question: https://i.imgur.com/PAwf6e3.png "Some connectivity is better than no connectivity, hence the violation of NN is justified"
Last few days have been a mixture of anxiousness and excitement. :)
Bullshit. Facebook cannot become AOL (which is what all the platforms desperately want to become) unless they can vertically integrate with the network.
They cannot currently do that in the US and most of the global north because of antitrust and the growing support and knowledge of net neutrality (thanks, Tim[1]).
But maybe they can get away with it in the global south ... plenty of market share there ...
This is their plan exactly. However, we have been able to get 6 out of 39 brands to pull their support back. Hopefully, tomorrow we will see even better support!
Lots of factors at play here. Till a few months ago, India didn't even have a competition commission. We have no anti-trust laws.
You also have to understand the history of telecom in India, especially the Value-Added-Services on mobile. They killed startups ( http://rashmiranjanpadhy.com/2015/04/12/airtel-kills-startup... ), they activated services without users' consent and so on. Can you imagine how big this fraud was in India where 40% of the people are not even literate? It was plain and simple fraud.
Everyone and his uncle learned to curse the telcos in that era. Now they're coming for the web, disparagingly calling it "Over-The-Top services".
Denzil - we have bodies and committees for every thing but no action takes place. Our CCI is a joke. There is no anti-trust. And less said about our courts & justice system the better.
Just a small eg: Satyam chief, Ramalingam Raju, picked up the phone and gave himself in to SEBI (US version of SEC) confessing to financial fraud of INR 4000 crores+ massive job losses, massive losses/harakiri in pension/taxes owed to the govt (due to inflated employee #) to the extent of he had one of the big4 auditors in his pocket who signed over falsified bank balance statements. This resulted in govt having to take over the co and auctioning it out to TechMahindra. At the time Satyam was the #3 Software services company in India by sheer revenue and employee size.
Raju gave detailed proofs of each of his wrongdoings ("when he could not ride this tiger anymore") and yet it took our courts 7 years + to impose a rap-on-knuckles 7 years of imprisonment and 5 crores of fines. An amount which he could've made bamboozled off in one day of stock manipulation on the exchanges.
So my point is it's one thing to have all these fancy bodies and titles and quite another to have them act on anything.
This recent action against zero-rated apps by one of our telcos, Airtel, is a heartening move which ofcourse morphed into heat brought upon FB's internet.org which is a bigger culprit on net neutrality front.
Way to go online activism in India!
(Disclosure: I'm a member of the #SaveTheInternet volunteer group)
I do understand that most of these bodies are toothless but we do have a CCI. The parent comment mentioned that we don't have one and I thought I would mention the fact that we do. As we speak, the CCI seems to be probing Indian telecoms.
I'm not in favor of zero rating or violations of net neutrality as we know it.
Disclosure : I'm a passive member of the #SaveTheInternet volunteer group (anonymously) too. I really appreciate your efforts and work. I am trying to tell all my colleagues and friends about you guys. Keep going!
> Facebook cannot become AOL (which is what all the platforms desperately want to become) unless they can vertically integrate with the network.
Maybe you could also interpret the backlash against Zero/AOL as an indication that customers do not want corporations regulating their access to information. So perhaps network carriers should think twice about aiming for a captive audience with "vertical integration".
Popular support for net neutrality rallied at the last minute by comedians, eh? Comments sent en masse to a regulatory body? Sounds familiar! Hopefully the result will be the same.
That video is wonderful. Anyone know of a video that outlines the importance of net neutrality as it pertains to America? This video covers the core idea excellently, but some of the details are very specific to India and their struggle with neutrality. I'd love to have something to show people that think Neutrality is some government overstep. But I feel like they'd be too distracted by the fact that it's not specifically discussing the new American laws (which is stupid, I know).
I was against this zero movement from the start. I'm really happy to see that it is started to be seen as anti-NN. Wishing for Turkey Operators to pull out too.
There are ways to provide free internet to millions, while NOT compromising on neutrality or providing convenient network leverage to Facebook and Reliance to pick winners.
How is X megabytes / month for free but with ads (this is network neutral) not better than Internet.org's current model? Why not let those millions decide which are the essential internet services for them? Do the poor millions don't deserve choice?
Let the user chose for himself. How hard can this be?
Why ads? Facebook would be providing internet.org for free, right? If the goal is getting more people on the internet, then internet.org could provide unfettered access to the internet and still reach their goal. However, if the aim is to get more people on their platform and increase Facebook's bottom line, then the goal is about manipulating one of the most disenfranchised people.
A way out for the zero rated schemes and internet.org is to sponsor bandwidth for the end user. The telecom service providers could offer 100mb per month free to the end users and bill internet.org et al for the service.
If you provide free capped connections to the end-users (with selected services not counting toward the cap), that would be a totally different discussion indeed.
Except providing free access to Facebook is not "free internet." It is just free Facebook (and whatever related services). It is not truly "the internet" if it is restricted to Facebook (and associated services).
It's like McDonald's building "free" roads that you can use to reach McDonald's, but if you want to go anywhere else you have to pay tolls. It is unbelievably self-serving and for Zuckerburg to dissemble on that point is wildly disingenuous.
"Well, at least they can reach McDonald's" is not a good argument against just building roads and letting people drive wherever.
I like this analogy with roads because land like wireless spectrum is a very finite resource especially at the last mile.
Personally, I wish there was a better scheme to allocate precious wireless spectrum other than giving a 100 year license to the highest bidder in an auction. (Whether the auction is rigged or not is besides the point.)
We talk about common carrier when it comes to wireline communication but why can't we do the same for wireless?
I don't know about others but it sickens me to think that we consider it an achievement to raise a couple of billion dollars for granting exclusive license to prime low frequency spectrum to Cingular/Verizon. Wouldn't it be better if wireless carriers didn't have to fight over who has the least bad coverage? There has to be a better way...
To me it sounds like McDonalds sending out a free shuttle bus to pick you up, but the shuttle only takes you to McDonalds (and not Wendy's or whatever). This actually exists with things like free hotel airport shuttles.
No, what he's doing is providing free Facebook so that his user base increases, so he has more people's privacy to exploit, mine for data, and then sell to the highest bidder.
The precedent already exists, at least here in Australia. Luckily it hasn't caused too many problems thus far, but whether that is merely an outlier remains to be seen.
To clarify for the global audience: (most) broadband in Australia is metered, so back when ADSL started getting big, ISP's would offset 14GB bandwidth cap with 'free zone' content - data which is unmetered. This still continues today, the most recent competitive offering is unmetered Netflix - http://www.optus.com.au/netflix
Wow, there are actual countries with bandwidth cap and privileged content for Home Internet? Damn, I thought that was just the hypothetical scarecrow of NN defenders =/
eh. It's something that made sense over ten years ago. Very little content was hosted locally within Australia so most traffic had to go over the expensive links to other countries (which are obviously constrained in bandwidth). Privileged/unmetered content was often things like local Steam mirrors or whatnot which was closer to the user/ISP.
Now that more and more content is cached locally, there's less and less of a need for it both bandwidth caps and privileged content.
But then why didn't they give you a shitty bandwidth when you try to access such remote content? That would be fair game, instead of capping the global data transferred over a month..
Video Games, Songs on iTunes, Internet, Phone Services... The list goes on, pretty much everything is expensive over here, even digital products with zero shipping or handling costs are triple or more the price in the US. For example I pay $70/month for 200GB of 'broadband' that peaks at 500kb/s and is totally incapable of streaming video. My mobile phone costs $95/month and I get 5GB of data.
actually the problem comes from the profit seeking companies. The original intention was provide help to the poor people who can't afford it. I remember wikipedia and some other non profit companies were initially interested in providing this for free. As far as I know aircel still provides it for free. It not just in India though many countries like Russia Indonesia also offer something. The situation changes when you have profit seeking companies trying utilise the situation. Cleartrip response exposes this perfectly.
In some ways I agree with Zuckerburg here, except that I don't think Facebook (or any other privately held company) should be the one to do it. An initiative to bring the Internet to people who cannot afford it or are so remote they are out-of-touch with modern economies should be done by the public sector and/or charities.
Besides, I fail to see how this sort of thing would even be technically feasible. If you can provide some connection to the Internet, you can provide connections to all of the Internet, yes?
> Btw, this was Zuckerburg's response when posed this question: https://i.imgur.com/PAwf6e3.png "Some connectivity is better than no connectivity, hence the violation of NN is justified"
That is not a literal quote. Here is the actual quote from that image -
"For people who are not on the internet though, having some connectivity and some ability to share is always much better than no ability to connect and share at all. That's why programs like Internet.org are important and can co-exist with net neutrality regulations."
Presenting it as a direct quote is intellectually dishonest. Please don't use that kind of manipulation here, even if you think your cause warrants it.
In case you didn't notice, I also pasted the exact statement he gave as a screenshot. I only see an honest mistake (which was really just having the quotes around the thing -- I can't edit it otherwise I would have) instead of intellectual dishonesty. But thanks for the lesson.
Google and Twitter are not on internet.org. They are Facebook competitors after all. So much for Facebook's mission of "connecting the world". As ClearTrip said today in its statement: "it is impossible to pretend there is no conflict of interest".
So, ultimately it's still the user who pays. But he pays relatively more, because now there is less competition (leveraging the network/access to acquire and retain users).
Initially, Amazon pays. Once the users are locked in - ISPs demand more money from Amazon. Of course, Amazon passes on these costs to the consumer in small little $1-2 unnoticeable amount. In the end, the consumer pays Amazon to have special access on the ISPs plus the ISPs to make money from Amazon despite no additional service or product.
Happy that someone wrote about this. We don`t need Facebook's walled garden. It is surprising to see "Wikipedia" aka champion of free speech part of internet.org.
Because the access to information is extremely constrained. The Internet is much bigger than just wikipedia. There have been studies which showed that people in such situations who used these so called "Free services" didn't even realize they were actually a part of the much bigger Internet, and just considered them standalone. I guess a similar situation would be people in the old days thinking AOL was synonymous with the Internet.
Do you want to live in a world where your access to information is constrained to one site only?
Give the choice between that and no internet (Wikipedia alone could be transformative, conditional on literacy), then yes, I'd probably make that choice.
Its not ideal, but marrying the commercial incentives of telcos to get people paying for data and the gateway drug of free access seems more likely to get more people connected faster than anything else.
The difficulty in analogies like this (and other arguments against net neutrality, such as saying partnerships between Facebook and network companies are the equivalent of promotional marketing or bundling) is that controlling the availability of specific sites or apps on a network inherently introduces bias in the network. So this is like an organization that gives away food creating roads that only they and their partners can use, given a government license to build roads (the same way network companies have a government license to build on the wireless spectrum and other channels.)
Net Neutrality supporters have their priorities out of whack when they attack Wikipedia for getting free zero rating.
Net neutrality is a means to an end, not the end itself. And wiki being available to millions or billions of people for free doesn't threaten the "open internet."
Wikipedia's charter requires them to increase access to Wikipedia, so signing up for internet.org was the right thing to do as long as it is not illegal. Let's put them aside for now and focus on the others.
That doesn't make sense. Zero-rating does not, as far as I know, inject ads into your other content. If you don't want to access Wikipedia you needn't see his popover.
Happy to see Cleartrip, times, NDTV, newshunt out of internet.org. Let's talk to every other Indian company which is there, request, cajole, nudge, whatever it takes to get them to withdraw. That's the best way to make this irrelevant in india.
The Indian regulator's egregiously biased consultation paper (which sparked this protest) has been exposed on reddit as being written by the telecom industry's lobbyist:
Apparently they even doctored an alleged quote from The Economist, inserting text that was not in the original article, to make it more biased towards operators.
Awesome news and thanks for standing up to a dual-standards company and CEO. You can't be for NN in the US and against it elsewhere. Internet.org is purely a vehicle to get more users on to FB....not the internet.
I can understand. The question then becomes (1) who decides what is included in "limited internet" and (2) who bears the costs?
For-profit company making these decisions on the basis of commercial arrangements will take away all the potential of the Internet as we know it. Would there have been a KhanAcademy if ComcastAcademy ("limited internet access") was offered "for free"?
Only if you ignore the opportunity cost. If we didn't give free Wikipedia access, we could have given something else for free. Now who should decide what is a better choice? The user of course! This is NOT the case in internet.org. Facebook picks the choices as breadcrumbs for the poor - while there are alternative approaches that can work.
Now, combine this with the fact that picking who gets on internet.org gives the telcos and FB huge leverage, the ulterior motives seem much more likely cause.
Those who don't currently have internet access will be hurt by this in absolute terms but the opposite outcome would be that a dangerous precedence is set that will have a larger impact on competition.
It's not "free connectivity" and shouldn't be discussed as such. It's "free access to a bundle of sites", which isn't the same thing - basically it's a monopoly doing a loss-leader program.
i think we need both Net Neutrality and internet.org. There should not be a choice of one over the other. Please let me know if I am missing something.
Can someone give me a good argument as to why no internet is better than free limited internet with facebook + google search + wikipedia?
If Facebook will provide free limited internet (and as always, you can pay regularly to get full internet access) for a lot of basic service, it only seems reasonable they will package their facebook and messenger apps as well.
On the whole, do you think internet.org is a bad, negative effort?
Because it's the opposite of net neutrality. It's picking winners and losers. If Facebook is free, but you have to pay for local home grown Indian social networking sites, well then how will those businesses ever compete?
Personally, I'm torn. I'm all for free access to Wikipedia. The problem is, not all of the world's knowledge exists there, so you therefor are only giving people a taste of knowledge.
With Facebook and Google, you are choosing the silos for people, and making it very very difficult for competitors. And without competition, localized monopolies tend to stagnate, which ultimately hurts consumers.
I see the argument for competition, but I don't think that freedom is as important as the freedom of communication and education.
Imagine someone in the slums of India (there are tens of millions in these conditions) wanting to learn more about irrigation. Is it more important that they have no limited internet for the sake for competition, or limited internet?
Neither is important if they have offline-cached copies of Wikipedia (all the content of which is readily available for download and made available under a CC-BY-SA / GNU GFDL dual-license), which can then be distributed on optical media, thumb drives, or some other relatively-inexpensive data distribution medium.
This is something that's totally compatible with net neutrality while providing the same benefits you're advocating.
Old PCs are actually much cheaper nowadays than even the cheapest smartphones of equivalent computing power, and typically include more than enough storage space for the entirety of Wikipedia. One shared PC in a community would solve that problem right quick.
Even without that, thumb drives are usable with smartphones via OTG cables.
Fair enough. But consider the fact that there ARE alternative solutions and internet.org is not the most optimal.
Why not give X megabytes/month data to the user for free and let HIM chose what the "essential internet services" for HIM are? Internet.org is a non-profit so it would be completely fine giving it for free. But even if they wanted to recover their costs, they could do it in a neutral manner - by ads.
Even with your premise accepted, there are better solutions. Internet.org's current model makes sense only when you consider the ulterior motives as well.
Funny thing is, people could probably use Wikipedia to fulfil all the functions that Facebook fulfils for users (not the function it fulfils for Facebook/advertisers).
I could see pages used as public group walls, profile pages as personal walls, "discuss"-pages as discussion. Only thing missing is "private" chat/pages -- but a browser-plugin with support for OTR/GPG (encrypt to many recipients...) could fix that, and be way more secure/private than Facebook...
This is not a black and white scenario as you have characterized or how Mark Z has characterized.
As more and more people come out of poverty, they will be able to access basic services such as water, electricity and data plans. There is no reason why data plans is the only service among the three services that needs to be free. If it is free, it is the government that should provide it rather than private corporations whose single interest is profit.
Now, people who are super poor may not be able to pay for electricity let alone will access free internet.
Either way, FB and bunch of other companies want to profit out of the people who are uninformed and these people may end up buying only services and products from those limited free websites that they get from free internet.
It also looks like the telecom services might take advantage of this and partner with some companies provide selective access to some websites and the biggest losers of this kind of partnership could be companies that dont have enough capital to pay each of the telecom providers to be in their "basic package"
Actually, if they only provide Facebook services, one might argue that they are not providing Internet connectivity at all; they're providing Facebook.
It is surprising that both Flipkart and Times Group pulled out of Facebook's initiative, but unsurprising that they pulled out in tandem. Both Flipkart and Times Group have taken multi-million dollar investments from early Facebook employees and some even sit on their board. They must have really felt the heat to take such an action. Ironically, a lot of awareness in India around net-neutrality spread through WhatsApp and Facebook!
>>It is surprising that both Flipkart and Times Group pulled out of Facebook's initiative
They were counting on people's sentiments to fall for free services/products. They realized it could back fire big time. That 'we are for net neutrality' argument is plain B.S. They are making a virtue out of compulsion.
Flipkart has a string of screw up's off late. The Xiaomi flash sale, the big billion dollar sale, other price related issues.
They are already falling out of fashion. Last thing they need is to perceived as a 'yet another baniya company'.
202 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] threadWhat's worse is that some companies are using this as an example to push for legalisation of zero rating. This is worsened by our regulator's stancce which is pro telecom companies.
If Verizon were to sign up for this, it would fall foul of FCC's rules too (it is clearly paid prioritization when all websites that don't pay are blocked.) It's not for nothing that net neutrality laws in a bunch of countries (Chile, the Netherlands, Brazil and probably a few more) explicitly forbid zero-rating.
internet.org isn't about the internet at all - it's more a proprietary network similar to Compuserve or AOL.
It's the same brand of philanthropy that Microsoft practices when it offers discounted Windows and Office to schools.
After the fwd.us debacle and now this, why should anyone trust Zuck and Facebook in terms of "philanthropy"?
He made the precursor to Facebook by hacking servers and stealing people's pictures.
Then he lied to the Winklevoss twins that he would build their website for them to stall them for as long as he could so he could release Facebook before them.
Cleartrip showed courage in being the first one to opt out of Internet.org. A few more soon followed.
Tomorrow could be amazing!
Edit: Very similar to US, comedians played a pivotal role in popularizing this issue. Here is the video that went viral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfY1NKrzqi0
This has also been largest response to any consultation by Indian government having received 600K+ responses through campaign sites[2][3]. Previous highest was 20000 mails in 1999.
[1]: Disclaimer: I am associated and helping the group.
[2]: http://savetheinternet.in/ People can submit response here.
[3]: http://netneutrality.in/ Info site.
Edit: Corrected URL #3.
Ideally yes, but like every other Government institution in India these people are neck deep in corruption[New term: Lobbying].
The key issue is, telcos realize they are being reduced to mere data pipe suppliers and on the long term[May be a few years] their margins will drop like stone falling in a pit. They are being disrupted through software apps[Calls and SMS going through apps like Viber/Skype/Whatsapp]. So while data growth will happen for a while, post that they will be nothing more than data pipe suppliers.
This will just ensure massive flattening of positions in the market. Don't be surprised if BSNL does better than these people in that kind of a world. Because it will be all about infrastructure, and with a unlimited government funding, these people lose out against BSNL if all they will remain is data pipe suppliers.
These people once heralded as champions of free market economy and capitalism now want the government to bail them out with regulations in their favor. This was exactly the cry of all PSU's in the 90's when the government wanted to bring in privatization big time.
This is all about software disruption. These people disrupted BSNL's business, Now there business is being disrupted.
Funny how capitalism works when you are at the receiving end.
I know they'll make up for in data, but $1.2 trillion?
Globally, the overall revenues in the telecom/ICT sector are expected to continue rising because of growth in users, traffic and applications. Even though there may be a loss of up to 6.9 per cent in cumulative voice revenues (representing $479 billion) because of OTT services, the total revenue for TSPs is likely to grow to $2.4 trillion in 2019 from $2.1 trillion in 2014
I was way off base. :)
[1] Consultation paper: http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReaddata/ConsultationPaper/Docum...
I think the closest organization to EFF that India has is the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS). Though, the aim of CIS isn't about digital civil rights like EFF. It is more to study Internet related policy with respect to India. Many times, CIS does take similar stands to that of EFF would given the situation.
http://cis-india.org
CIS is not and will never be the EFF of India until the FCRA rules change. We need another organisation.
This happened on the first day of the campaign (the day the AIB video came out) and it is probably fixed now, but this count could be understating things a bit.
There is a long history or nationalism in India.
Of course, next step was Internet.org and similar initiatives, which on paper sound like a fantastic idea until you look deeper and begin to see the NN violation problem. This is welcome news indeed. Btw, this was Zuckerburg's response when posed this question: https://i.imgur.com/PAwf6e3.png "Some connectivity is better than no connectivity, hence the violation of NN is justified"
Last few days have been a mixture of anxiousness and excitement. :)
Bullshit. Facebook cannot become AOL (which is what all the platforms desperately want to become) unless they can vertically integrate with the network.
They cannot currently do that in the US and most of the global north because of antitrust and the growing support and knowledge of net neutrality (thanks, Tim[1]).
But maybe they can get away with it in the global south ... plenty of market share there ...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu#The_Master_Switch
You also have to understand the history of telecom in India, especially the Value-Added-Services on mobile. They killed startups ( http://rashmiranjanpadhy.com/2015/04/12/airtel-kills-startup... ), they activated services without users' consent and so on. Can you imagine how big this fraud was in India where 40% of the people are not even literate? It was plain and simple fraud.
Everyone and his uncle learned to curse the telcos in that era. Now they're coming for the web, disparagingly calling it "Over-The-Top services".
http://www.cci.gov.in/index.php?option=com_content&task=view...
Just a small eg: Satyam chief, Ramalingam Raju, picked up the phone and gave himself in to SEBI (US version of SEC) confessing to financial fraud of INR 4000 crores+ massive job losses, massive losses/harakiri in pension/taxes owed to the govt (due to inflated employee #) to the extent of he had one of the big4 auditors in his pocket who signed over falsified bank balance statements. This resulted in govt having to take over the co and auctioning it out to TechMahindra. At the time Satyam was the #3 Software services company in India by sheer revenue and employee size. Raju gave detailed proofs of each of his wrongdoings ("when he could not ride this tiger anymore") and yet it took our courts 7 years + to impose a rap-on-knuckles 7 years of imprisonment and 5 crores of fines. An amount which he could've made bamboozled off in one day of stock manipulation on the exchanges.
So my point is it's one thing to have all these fancy bodies and titles and quite another to have them act on anything.
This recent action against zero-rated apps by one of our telcos, Airtel, is a heartening move which ofcourse morphed into heat brought upon FB's internet.org which is a bigger culprit on net neutrality front.
Way to go online activism in India! (Disclosure: I'm a member of the #SaveTheInternet volunteer group)
http://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/industry/cc...
I'm not in favor of zero rating or violations of net neutrality as we know it.
Disclosure : I'm a passive member of the #SaveTheInternet volunteer group (anonymously) too. I really appreciate your efforts and work. I am trying to tell all my colleagues and friends about you guys. Keep going!
"Crore" means 10 million (it's a modifier like "hundred" or "thousand" and does not necessarily relate to money).
10 000 000 Indian rupees = 160 310 U.S. dollars
Maybe you could also interpret the backlash against Zero/AOL as an indication that customers do not want corporations regulating their access to information. So perhaps network carriers should think twice about aiming for a captive audience with "vertical integration".
http://www.theopeninter.net
Does he really not see the enormous liability that a precedent like this can create?
Zuckerberg is providing free internet to millions.
How is X megabytes / month for free but with ads (this is network neutral) not better than Internet.org's current model? Why not let those millions decide which are the essential internet services for them? Do the poor millions don't deserve choice?
Let the user chose for himself. How hard can this be?
It's about net neutrality. Unconnected people in India shouldn't destroy the bad impression we associated with this policy in the first place.
Why ads? Facebook would be providing internet.org for free, right? If the goal is getting more people on the internet, then internet.org could provide unfettered access to the internet and still reach their goal. However, if the aim is to get more people on their platform and increase Facebook's bottom line, then the goal is about manipulating one of the most disenfranchised people.
A way out for the zero rated schemes and internet.org is to sponsor bandwidth for the end user. The telecom service providers could offer 100mb per month free to the end users and bill internet.org et al for the service.
But that's not the case here.
It's like McDonald's building "free" roads that you can use to reach McDonald's, but if you want to go anywhere else you have to pay tolls. It is unbelievably self-serving and for Zuckerburg to dissemble on that point is wildly disingenuous.
"Well, at least they can reach McDonald's" is not a good argument against just building roads and letting people drive wherever.
Personally, I wish there was a better scheme to allocate precious wireless spectrum other than giving a 100 year license to the highest bidder in an auction. (Whether the auction is rigged or not is besides the point.)
We talk about common carrier when it comes to wireline communication but why can't we do the same for wireless?
I don't know about others but it sickens me to think that we consider it an achievement to raise a couple of billion dollars for granting exclusive license to prime low frequency spectrum to Cingular/Verizon. Wouldn't it be better if wireless carriers didn't have to fight over who has the least bad coverage? There has to be a better way...
Also, to be in good books McDonalds is giving access to school and hospital also for free.
Which, the latest news is that Netflix regrets signing these deals in the first place http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/04/netflix-regrets-signing-un...
Now that more and more content is cached locally, there's less and less of a need for it both bandwidth caps and privileged content.
Besides, I fail to see how this sort of thing would even be technically feasible. If you can provide some connection to the Internet, you can provide connections to all of the Internet, yes?
That is not a literal quote. Here is the actual quote from that image -
"For people who are not on the internet though, having some connectivity and some ability to share is always much better than no ability to connect and share at all. That's why programs like Internet.org are important and can co-exist with net neutrality regulations."
If ISPs doesn't charge for facebook usage, then who _actually_ pays?
Someone has to...right? Just curious.
If Wikipedia want to give away free access to information, suddenly its an unfair advantage in the market of free information?
Do you want to live in a world where your access to information is constrained to one site only?
Its not ideal, but marrying the commercial incentives of telcos to get people paying for data and the gateway drug of free access seems more likely to get more people connected faster than anything else.
Actually some do claim that:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/world/americas/14iht-food....
edit: In case you are hit by the paywall,
> Charity finds that U.S. food aid for Africa hurts instead of helps, Celia W. Dugger, 2007-08-14
So I would argue that Wikipedia is the perfect candidate for such a program, and Facebook the worst.
Net neutrality is a means to an end, not the end itself. And wiki being available to millions or billions of people for free doesn't threaten the "open internet."
Except for the high likelihood of having a pop over of Jimmy Wales asking for money show up on all your content.
You can follow that at http://www.zodvik.com/2015/04/15/damn-trai-paper-1/ and contact me if you feel there are improvements to be made (or submit them via PR)
https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/32o00z/proof_the_tra...
Apparently they even doctored an alleged quote from The Economist, inserting text that was not in the original article, to make it more biased towards operators.
My guess-- limited Internet access is preferable to no Internet access and ideological purity.
For-profit company making these decisions on the basis of commercial arrangements will take away all the potential of the Internet as we know it. Would there have been a KhanAcademy if ComcastAcademy ("limited internet access") was offered "for free"?
Its sad, whatever you think about FB, getting more people access to Wikipedia is clearly a good thing (fixing illiteracy would be better, clearly).
Now, combine this with the fact that picking who gets on internet.org gives the telcos and FB huge leverage, the ulterior motives seem much more likely cause.
If Facebook will provide free limited internet (and as always, you can pay regularly to get full internet access) for a lot of basic service, it only seems reasonable they will package their facebook and messenger apps as well.
On the whole, do you think internet.org is a bad, negative effort?
Personally, I'm torn. I'm all for free access to Wikipedia. The problem is, not all of the world's knowledge exists there, so you therefor are only giving people a taste of knowledge.
With Facebook and Google, you are choosing the silos for people, and making it very very difficult for competitors. And without competition, localized monopolies tend to stagnate, which ultimately hurts consumers.
Imagine someone in the slums of India (there are tens of millions in these conditions) wanting to learn more about irrigation. Is it more important that they have no limited internet for the sake for competition, or limited internet?
This is something that's totally compatible with net neutrality while providing the same benefits you're advocating.
Even without that, thumb drives are usable with smartphones via OTG cables.
Why not give X megabytes/month data to the user for free and let HIM chose what the "essential internet services" for HIM are? Internet.org is a non-profit so it would be completely fine giving it for free. But even if they wanted to recover their costs, they could do it in a neutral manner - by ads.
Even with your premise accepted, there are better solutions. Internet.org's current model makes sense only when you consider the ulterior motives as well.
I could see pages used as public group walls, profile pages as personal walls, "discuss"-pages as discussion. Only thing missing is "private" chat/pages -- but a browser-plugin with support for OTR/GPG (encrypt to many recipients...) could fix that, and be way more secure/private than Facebook...
I don't know, but I can conceive of it as a possibility that Internet.org would hinder the propagation of NN "real internet" providers.
Eventually these companies will work towards making internet difficult to access so their own sites can have the monopoly.
Internet isn't impossible to provide eventually every one will have access. But to do it this way will create problems which takes decades to solve.
No propaganda is better than free limited propaganda (even if it does come packaged with google seach and wikipedia).
As more and more people come out of poverty, they will be able to access basic services such as water, electricity and data plans. There is no reason why data plans is the only service among the three services that needs to be free. If it is free, it is the government that should provide it rather than private corporations whose single interest is profit.
Now, people who are super poor may not be able to pay for electricity let alone will access free internet.
Either way, FB and bunch of other companies want to profit out of the people who are uninformed and these people may end up buying only services and products from those limited free websites that they get from free internet.
It also looks like the telecom services might take advantage of this and partner with some companies provide selective access to some websites and the biggest losers of this kind of partnership could be companies that dont have enough capital to pay each of the telecom providers to be in their "basic package"
They were counting on people's sentiments to fall for free services/products. They realized it could back fire big time. That 'we are for net neutrality' argument is plain B.S. They are making a virtue out of compulsion.
Flipkart has a string of screw up's off late. The Xiaomi flash sale, the big billion dollar sale, other price related issues.
They are already falling out of fashion. Last thing they need is to perceived as a 'yet another baniya company'.