| Here's the full reply from India's SaveTheInternet.in coalition exposing Facebook's chicanery --> http://www.hindustantimes.com/technology-topstories/mr-zucke... This piece can be instructive and useful to others in US/Europe & any country where such deceptive zerorated plans are trying to make their way in. Be it of FB or anyone else. Zuck wants a walled-garden version of internet (with FB as gatekeeper) to be made free for the poor. We're saying poor Indians should have access to the same full open globally-connected internet as we all take for granted. And that free & fair competition will & should take care of things like access on the cheap, sachet-mktg etc. As of today on my Vodafone India plan I can get a 2G plan starting for 22¢. Poor Indians that Zuck wants to target with his zerorated internet dot org spend $0.5 on ringtones. This twitter thread from Andresseen & Horowitz Parner, Benedict Evans has a good discussion about pricing & cheap access --> https://twitter.com/BenedictEvans/status/588511768244162561 I will encourage anyone who is following NetNeutrality debate globally to keep an eye on India. (China is out of bounds). That's where all the action is. And if you can help us punch above our weight at global level - please connect with us. |
To be honest you are not offering an alternative to Zuck's expanding coverage, you are offering the status quo which for a person without any internet sucks. You can claim Zuck's plan is corrupting and should be stopped for that reason alone but I doubt you'd find agreement from the people who don't have any access under your system but would get limited access under Zuck's system.
The idea of net neutrality grew out of common carrier ideas, most similarly to the telcos. You could pick up your phone you can call basically anyone, it costs the same as anyone else you called in the same location... except some companies could set up toll free numbers to make it a little bit easier to call them. That analogy seems to work strongly for what FB is doing here.
The fact that FB and Bing are paying for "toll free numbers" would make a lot of other businesses like Google do the same. The competition would tend to lower prices as if 90% of the traffic on the telco lines are subsidized by BigCo's they only need to charge 10% for the remainder. In this instance it all seems like a net good from the expanding access angle.
edit: nileshtrivedi's comment below[1] has a much stronger argument against Zuck's plan:
The spectrum belongs to the public and the license was given with conditions and expectations of good faith (such as neutrality).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9393040
So that seems fairly cut and dried, if those are the conditions for the spectrum license and it seems reasonable that they are. Still we could consider whether the greater good of expanded access might outweigh the benefits of strict net neutrality and the answer to that might not be the same everywhere. It might be interesting to see how full internet access develops in two similar neighboring areas with completely different regulatory regimes here.