[zinghaboi]

I hope this turns into a more permanent decision. Indians need to keep sending emails to TRAI. Indian government should be worried about handing over private details of Indians to the NSA on a silver platter. But even without that risk, Free Basics can evolve into something disastrous for Indian startup scene and jobs/innovation.

Lets look at two extreme scenarios.

->India without net neutrality: Everyone has free Facebook. "Free basics" didn't help in advancing electrification of the country but it did provide free facebook/wikipedia to everyone. So 30% of the country is still in dark. But 50% of the rest of India doesn't pay for internet and it thinks there is no need to because that is ALL the internet has to offer. A young founder launches a new education app to teach reading/writing to poor villagers. But she first needs to get a 'license' from facebook. Facebook doesn't think it is a good idea for its users to 'waste' time on other services instead of watching ads on FB, so it declines. Startups don't receive as much funding because of the 'licensing' issues and there aren't as many Indian tech companies as there could've been. News is censored by Facebook and Facebook can now influence Indian politics. 100,000 fewer jobs were created because the Indian tech scene didn't take off.

->India with net neutrality: 50% of the country cannot pay for internet. They still don't have access to internet. They use other forms of communication to get their daily, unfiltered news. The startup scene in India is growing at its natural pace and the culture has become more innovative. In another 10-15 years everyone will have internet. 100's of thousands of poor were lifted out of poverty due to tech jobs in India.

One is a short term 'fix' which ruins the future. Another is a little bit harder but provides for a better future.

[aianus]

> But 50% of the rest of India doesn't pay for internet and it thinks there is no need to because that is ALL the internet has to offer.

The majority of the content on my Facebook feed is links to external websites. I'm skeptical of this argument that poor people will be forever satisfied with just chatting and browsing Facebook and will never upgrade to full internet.

[alephnil]

In several other Asian countries (e.g. the Philipines, Indonesia, Thailand), a much larger percentage say they are on Facebook than the portion that say they are on Internet [1]. Of cause they can't be on Facebook without being on Internet, but those users have no idea that Facebook require internet, and that it usually means that they also have access to other Internet services.

A lot of users in these countries answer yes to the question "Facebook is the internet", and claim they never follows links out of Facebook. Of cause these answers reveal widespread ignorance, and it may be that they don't know if they leave Facebook or not, but it does mean that Facebook is the gateway to Internet for them. Thus a lot of users will stay satisfied with internet.org, especially if that is what most people in their local communities use.

[1] http://qz.com/579502/the-winners-and-losers-of-2015s-10-most...

[peteretep]

Who cares what they think they're connected to? In Thailand, like everywhere else, most of the links Facebook shows are off-network.

AOL's walled garden didn't stop people exploring the big wide world, it was a gateway drug.

[eggie]

> AOL's walled garden didn't stop people exploring the big wide world, it was a gateway drug.

For many it may have been a gateway to facebook ;)

[schandur]

> The majority of the content on my Facebook feed is links to external websites.

Not sure if you are joking, but with features like "Instant Articles", Facebook has every reason to keep people on facebook.com rather than sending them to external websites.

When you are locked down in a walled garden that allows messaging (within the garden) and every other service is blocked, people will simply believe that walled garden is all there is.

[pmontra]

Plenty of dystopic scifi movies end with the breach of a wallet garden and the hope for a better world outside. It's fiction but it should be telling.

[parennoob]

> I'm skeptical of this argument that poor people will be forever satisfied with just chatting and browsing Facebook and will never upgrade to full internet.

It's not just Facebook that's a part of Free Basics, it is Facebook, Wikipedia, and a bunch of other services that are "approved" by Facebook. So the chance is greater that people will become used to these free services (not just Facebook) being perceived as the Internet.

[peteretep]

Nobody has provided the tiniest shred of evidence for this being true. Unless Indians are dramatically different from other Facebook users, and don't post many external links, everyone in the free service will be bombarded with what they're missing.

[pmontra]

I checked my feed right now. First 20 posts: 8 are content created on FB (text, pictures snapped for uploading, etc), 12 are shares of external content. Hopefully you are right but don't underestimate a fact: the have not (the ones in the walled garden) won't see any of those content if they don't have friends on the open internet. And even if so, FB might choose not to show them content that they can't see anyway.

[necessity]

>But 50% of the rest of India doesn't pay for internet and it thinks there is no need to because that is ALL the internet has to offer.

I think you underestimate people's intelligence. More so, if they only want to use Facebook, or don't want to use anything else enough to pay for it, what's the problem?

>A young founder launches a new education app to teach reading/writing to poor villagers. But she first needs to get a 'license' from facebook.

Only if Facebook is the only ISP, which could only happen if government passed a law or regulation that made that so. Or if people are not interested in anything else, in which case they should not be forced to pay for anything else.

>They use other forms of communication to get their daily, unfiltered news.

Are you implying they wouldn't without net neutrality?

>The startup scene in India is growing at its natural pace and the culture has become more innovative

Not, it isn't. It would be more innovative if it was forced to compete with Facebook.

In Brazil where net neutrality is sort of in place the only thing that happened was people being deprived of "free WhatsApp + Facebook" mobile data plans (which didn't forbid them from acquiring a more expensive plan to access other things as you suggest it would!). Now you just have to pay expensive prices even if you just want to chat with your friends.

[zinghaboi]

> I think you underestimate people's intelligence. More so, if they only want to use Facebook, or don't want to use anything else enough to pay for it, what's the problem?

Would people have moved to Facebook from Myspace if they had to pay $10 per month just to access it? Would people have tried Google if they had to pay $10 per month to access it?? This is a tax on innovation. The innovation from big players doesn't get taxed while a founder would need to innovate 100x instead of the current 10x to make people move. Founders have limited resources. Creating 100x innovation will take a lot more time than getting people to move to 10x innovation, making some money and innovating further. What do you think this would do to the angels in India who have recently started investing in startups rather than gold/land/stocks? They would go back to land/stocks.

> Only if Facebook is the only ISP, which could only happen if government passed a law or regulation that made that so.

Facebook intends to use data services (3g,4g) to deploy its free basics. There aren't many companies providing data services because of obvious spectrum limitations.

>Are you implying they wouldn't without net neutrality?

They primarily get information on radio and newspapers. If those sources are corrupt, lets not add another corrupt source into the mix.

>Not, it isn't. It would be more innovative if it was forced to compete with Facebook.

Really? There was a time in India when you had to be REALLY REALLY REALLY innovative (in many different ways) to merely get a license to start a business from the govt. We called it 'license raj'. You know what it did. It killed all the innovation. You have to let smallest of innovations thrive for them to grow into bigger ones!!

>Now you just have to pay expensive prices even if you just want to chat with your friends.

Better than the possibility of being stuck with that same 'chat' for the next 20 years. India needs jobs more than 'free chat'. Jobs will come from Indian companies. And Indian companies cannot thrive unless the field is even. Plus, its not about Indian vs Foreign. If a small guy produces 2x innovation, his innovation should triumph over facebook. Facebook's coffers shouldn't prevent progress happening in the world. That 2x innovation, if given a chance will grow to 200x.

[roansh]

>>But 50% of the rest of India doesn't pay for internet and it thinks there is no need to because that is ALL the internet has to offer.

>I think you underestimate people's intelligence. More so, if they only want to use Facebook, or don't want to use anything else enough to pay for it, what's the problem?

I think this is totally possible, not at 50% though. Imagine the people who have never used Internet before and are not-so-educated. If Free basics is what they are going to use for the first time, it's possible for them to think that what they get to use through that, is all of the Internet.

[firasd]

Not, it isn't. It would be more innovative if it was forced to compete with Facebook.

Just FYI, startups in India already go head-to-head with Facebook and Amazon. What Free Basics does is make them compete for preferential treatment by network operators, which changes the whole game.

[cubancigar11]

Facebook is asking its users in India if 'you support free internet to poor people?' and then giving them a text-box and a submit button to write an email to TRAI in support for Free Basic.

[witty_username]

According to a post on Reddit, they are sending this petition to people outside India too.

https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3xrzly/facebook_allo...

[witty_username]

Infact it only costs 0.01$/GB (probably less with peering) to offer access to the entire internet. Suppose a 50 MB daily data cap is provided to users and there are 50 million users, that's 50000$/day i.e. 18.25$ million/year, certainly not impossible for Facebook (and probably data costs can be cut down 50% with better peering). And I would not mind the government funding a portion of this.

[zinghaboi]

Facebook rather spend that money on Billboards, advertising "Free Basics". Facebook should come clear on what it is gaining from "Free Basics" instead of acting as an angelic, non-profit. Or is all the money they're spending to advertise 'free basics' in India for a non-profit motive?? Should mention the profit motives in their ads.

Indians were taken aback by the amount of money Facebook chose to spend to advertise Free Basics. Premium Billboards, 2 page advertisements on major publications, other ads...They must have a plan to make profit out of all this spending. They should come clean on it in their ads.

[gamekathu]

seriously, todays front page of a leading Kolkata newspaper had a large two page advertisements of free basics, citing "What Net neutrality activists wont tell you" : http://imgur.com/a/hb3nt.

[User0124]

Assuming they are honest, I don't get their argument. If most people are paying for the internet, they why do they need Free Basics in the first place? An internet connection costs a fraction of the hardware cost, or is embedded in the hardware subscription.

So you can either afford hardware and internet, or you can't afford internet in which case you also can't afford the hardware, so the free internet is useless.

Assuming their motives are truly altruistic, making internet free doesn't make any sense!

[gamekathu]

you have a good point.

India desperately needs faster internet rather than free internet. If we assume even the cheapest hardware, say a laptop costing less than 300$, the internet costs in a range of 7$ to 45$ a month (inr to usd conversion estimates, might vary). The faster connection u want, the more u have to pay. Sadly, the avg internet speed of our country is at the very bottom of global rankings. If they really are altruistic, they should provide faster internet in cheaper deals.

[wormseed]

1c/GB is a tenth of the price of datacenter bandwidth, a hundredth of residential DSL or cable access bandwidth and a thousandth the price of mobile bandwidth.

You're off by three orders of magnitude.

[witty_username]

I forgot to clarify I meant DC<->Internet costs. This is the incremental cost of allowing full internet access.

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2011/04/cost-to-send-a-gb/

[comex]

The purpose of the limitation isn't to save peering costs, it's to ensure users click on Facebook's ads and compensate them for the costs of providing cellular access.

[mkagenius]

> 0.01$/GB

How? What I get here is INR 275/GB which is $6/GB (for 3G), and approx. INR 100/GB for Edge.

[eggie]

witty_username may have been exaggerating, but it's worth pointing out that this is substantially cheaper than prepaid internet access is available in the US. I pay $10/GB/week, which works out to something like $30/GB as I'm not trying to finish the GB/week allotment. This may be somewhat unusual in the US, and I'm assuming you prepay for a set amount of data, rather than data/time.

Anyway, I came to posit a different question. How much would it cost if it were a nonprofit that provides the internet access? What kind of margins are made on top of the prepaid data plans we're using?

[mkagenius]

If you compare Airtel (Private) vs BSNL[1] (government) one, the pricing is almost same.

In poorer regions Indian government tries to subsidise it as well, and ends up with loses every year (barring 2015), so I guess we can approximate it to a non-profit org?

1. http://bsnl.in/opencms/bsnl/BSNL/services/mobile/3g_prepaid_...

[witty_username]

Sorry, I mean their DC<->internet price. Most of the bandwidth costs are in the last mile connectivity. In any case they are paying for mobile towers; I am just saying that the incremental cost of providing full internet access is not very large. But you are right my figures are wrong.

[shas3]

> But she first needs to get a 'license' from facebook.

How is this different from the iPhone and the closed app store? If people don't like closed app store eco-system of the iPhone, they buy Android. Similarly, if the poor don't like Free Basics, they will opt out of it for a competitor.

Also, the licensing thing will be less of an issue, if Facebook commits to a transparent, fast, and preferably automated process of gaining their zero-rating.

[josh2600]

Just like how in the US we all use AOL, because of the free discs, right? I mean, who would ever want anything beyond AOL once they've had AOL, right?

[eggie]

This isn't like the free AOL discs, but as if AOL were free but never allowed people to access anything other than a free encyclopedia, medical information, and their own content and services.

A major reason Facebook is doing this is that they see an investment opportunity. In some countries the majority of people are using the internet, but can't distinguish the internet from Facebook. That is any techno-monopolist's wet dream, and it is exactly what they are going for across the entire developing world.

I know for a fact that some people working at Facebook think they are doing good and being charitable by supporting internet.org. It is extremely hard to convince anyone who stands to gain from internet.org that this could be a net negative for the people on the receiving end. I've been called arrogant and out of touch for arguing this. To me, it is disturbing that this is seen as a world-changing act of charity, but some people clearly feel that way. I'm relieved that regulators are standing up against Facebook, and I hope they stand strong, but I have doubts. We may be losing the free internet and weakly accepting the rule of a new emperor.

[gozur88]

>This isn't like the free AOL discs, but as if AOL were free but never allowed people to access anything other than a free encyclopedia, medical information, and their own content and services.

AOL tried that (except for the free part) and couldn't pull it off. In the early days of AOL there was no way to get on the internet.

I doubt Indians will be satisfied with a tiny walled garden, even if it means they have to pay a little to get out.

[pdkl95]

> techno-monopolist's wet dream

Digital imperialism is the next step up from techno-monopolist.