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by Manishearth 3778 days ago
> but tomorrow the poor will still have no Internet access

That would still be the case if the verdict was the other way around. There's no evidence that Free Basics actually brought a significant number of new people on the internet (the rate of people cited as joining Free Basics is comparable to the rate of people joining the internet in general, so it didn't change anything)

Note that data plans are pretty cheap in India. The cost of a smartphone that can handle modern websites (especially Facebook, which breaks on old/slow phones and browsers) is more than the cost of a few year's worth of data.
2 comments
tzs 3777 days ago
> Note that data plans are pretty cheap in India.

Cheap enough for the 60% of rural Indians who live on less than 35 Rs/day [1]?

> The cost of a smartphone that can handle modern websites (especially Facebook, which breaks on old/slow phones and browsers) is more than the cost of a few year's worth of data.

The vast majority of mobile phones in India are feature phones which are considerably cheaper than smartphones [2]. To be included in Free Basics, sites have to work reasonably on feature phones. Free Basics sites are accessed through a proxy which modifies requests so that the sites can tell that they are being viewed by a Free Basics user, and so the site can present a version that works without requiring "modern" features like JavaScript, SVG images and WOFF font types, iframes, video and large images, or Flash and Java applets.

[1] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-05-04/news...

[2] http://www.igadgetsworld.com/india-smartphone-and-feature-ph...

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Manishearth 3777 days ago
> Cheap enough for the 60% of rural Indians who live on less than 35 Rs/day [1]?

Perhaps not; but I was including only people who can afford the phone.

> The vast majority of mobile phones in India are feature phones which are considerably cheaper than smartphones

They're still ~Rs 1k (you can get cheaper ones, but I don't think even proxied sites will work well on these). Monthly data plans are less than a tenth of this.

IIRC Free Basics' Facebook still needed a good phone (higher end feature phone or a smartphone), but I can't verify that right now.

And that really brings us back to the question; how is this bringing people to the Internet? Even if Facebook worked well on a Rs 400 phone, only the Free Basics sites would work well there. This just underlines that Facebook is trying to give people Free Facebook, nothing more. People who cannot afford these phones would not become "Digital Indians" by using Free Basics, they would use Facebook and only Facebook.

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icebraining 3778 days ago
That would still be the case if the verdict was the other way around.

That's my point: there's nothing to celebrate here, as nothing as changed. People without full Internet access still don't have it. And so, for what is the post thanking a lot of people?

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Manishearth 3777 days ago
> as nothing as changed.

It didn't get worse.

> People without full Internet access still don't have it. And so, for what is the post thanking a lot of people?

You can say that about anything. That's not what they're happy about; that wasn't the only issue on the table.

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