[r3bl]

I'm really, really proud to see my former colleague reaching the front page of HN.

I know the pain and struggle investigative journalism organizations face (especially in infosec). Going through all of this and reaching less people because some dickhead in the United States decided to add these countries randomly really pisses me off.

Even worse are the other countries chosen like Cambodia and Venezuela, which both have Free Basics. Bloggers, pizza shops, investigative journalism organizations... they're all screwed because of one group of dickheads in Silicon Valley.

[oconnor663]

Do you think they'd be better off without Free Basics at all, or more that they'd be better off if it worked differently?

[r3bl]

I do think that consumers would be better off with something like 100 MB of free data per month than an unlimited access to Facebook.

And I do think that Facebook wouldn't lose a lot compared to the current system. 98.41%[0] of the total social media traffic would still go to Facebook.

[0] I chose that percentage because that's the percentage for my country, with YouTube at the second place with .53%: http://gs.statcounter.com/social-media-stats/all/bosnia-and-...

[cguess]

I'm not even sure that Serbia has "free basics". It's a fairly well developed country with a 110% mobile penetration rate (last I checked, probably higher now), 4G and the prices are dirt cheap and affordable for the vast majority of the population.

[r3bl]

Serbia doesn't. Other countries in this experiment (like Cambodia and Venezuela) do.

[cguess]

Cambodia, where the last independent newspaper was just shut down: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-devastating-shu...