[haltingproblem]

Twice Mukesh Ambani has built telecom services that have lowered prices by an order of magnitude and greatly expanded coverage. Reliance Communications which Anil ran into the ground was built by Mukesh and changed the competitive landscape the first time around. Jio did it again and now India has the cheapest data in the world.

I am struggling to understand what exactly is the problem and why is Jio a danger? Because in the future they might become some unknown danger to morals and economic well being of Indians/humanity. Crush freedom in some inexplicable way that you cannot imagine but are sure they will. I am genuinely curious.

[just42]

I am not sure why I am biting this, but here goes: If you are the only Internet people know and can afford, it doesn't matter if you are a private entity or the Govt.

I can't satisfy your curiosity because I too also sincerely don't know what flavor of undesirable behavior a monopoly creates but that they create bad behavior is as intuitive to me as is breathing to anyone else.

A first person anecodote which doesn't necessarily further my point but still - I had Jio fiber installed for a relative, I was visiting in a small north Indian town - unbelievable price, offering, everything great. But it took me 3 days of multiple hours on the phone, and I still couldn't access Hackernews, or reddit or even New York Times. Pages for these and quite a few other sites just wouldn't load. The first canned response - 'Reliance only blocks what the Govt. has told it to block' (paraphrasing). I didn't anymore have the energy to analyze if it was a technical problem, casual censorship or just customer service issues because of fast scaling.

[enitihas]

> If you are the only Internet people know and can afford, it doesn't matter if you are a private entity or the Govt.

The only thing worse than a monopoly is the non existence of the particular service.

Before Jio, reasonable speed Internet was non existent in rural India. The plans were priced so high that using Opera Mini with cloud compression was a reasonable decision, to save on data cost. I used to switch off 3G to ensure data doesn't get all consumed.

> But it took me 3 days of multiple hours on the phone, and I still couldn't access Hackernews, or reddit or even New York Times.

What do you mean by "not load"? Are you sure this was not something unrelated to Jio?

[just42]

"not load" - nothing happens and eventually connection timed out (unfortunately I don't have exact recollection if there was a message or just nothing happened). But I did research it and closest evidence I found that this was not a technical issue but deliberate blocking was from some discussion on Center for Internet Security: https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/reliance-jio-...

[haltingproblem]

Lets assume it was them. So they are a danger to society because they have a bad offering. Switch to another provider.

You seem to be saying there is none so they are a defacto monopoly. And they have a substandard offering so they should not be allowed to offer one.