This will not end well for Facebook. Once you start competing like this, you quit competing with innovation and eventually end up losing to someone else.
FB (& Google) have reached a size where one of the ways to keep growing is to bring more people onto the Internet. If they can do that in a way that puts their product front-and-centre for those 'new' users, they can capture more of the market. I'm not saying I approve of this strategy, but I can see it as being a viable one for now (just as AOL was viable for its time).
But the Internet defeated walled gardens before, because people actively chose "the whole shebang" over AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etcetera.
And, continuing improvements in networking keep making it easier, at the margin, to just offer everything.
Any fixed-menu-of-N-services, even if regularly updated, will be blatantly missing some emerging content or app that friends are talking about. That will drive people to upgrade to (or creatively tunnel!) to the real, full Internet as soon as they're technically or financially able. And that ability arrives fast, given whetted appetites, social pressures, and the rapid progress in networking tech.
Don't panic. Build. Any net barrier that's just a matter of puny business models will be temporary, and melt away from competition & Moore's Law.
Watch out, instead, for the net barriers enforced by ideologues with badges & guns. Those blockades can hold out against technological and economic forces much longer.
I'm Indian and I'm deeply frustrated and disappointed with this. My fear is that other mobile networks like Airtel will pick up dumb ass half-baked ideas like this and start charging for data from other non approved sources and for high cost paid wireless Internet to become the norm. I know Reliance is way too greedy, but this really is a new low. While wireless data costs in other countries are coming down, here we see the opposite trend. Fucking disgusting.
As a fellow Indian, I'd find that frustrating too.
Think of the alternative - suppose the government or judiciary finds this practice illegal and outlaws it. Imagine how unlikely this is and even if it does happen, how much bad press would be generated about "job-killing License Raj" etc.
I don't know what internet.org is for. But it's such a braindead move for them. I won't (and I bet a lot many Indians) switch to the shittiest network in India just for some website. I will find alternatives to the website.
Maybe I misunderstood. But I think the alarm bells are pre-mature. You HAVE to pay for internet access, what this announcements says is that if you visit some websites you will not be charged.
How is it any bad? The websites are paying the telecom company to bear the cost of the traffic. The customer, like always, is bearing the cost of traffic to internet.
If you are a startup trying to compete with any of those 38 sites, thrn you start with a massive disadvantage. Zuckerberg is essentialy creating a massive walled garden where the walls are held in place by economic pressure.
It reads like giving away free access to certain sites, is the same as making premium internet access. Am I missing something? Facebook hate aside, this is a change meant to give something away. Right?
Yes, it gives away free access of 38 sites. But by doing so, they also encourage more people to forgo purchasing complete internet plans and hence accessing all of the other millions of websites out there. This indirectly drives traffic to this 38 sites that they’ve picked through a very skewed and opaque process, and undermines the concept of net neutrality.
Funneling people to a restricted number of websites by making them easier to access (and money matters for a large number of Indians, spending ~2.5 USD a month for 500MB 3G internet is considered a luxury) and then profiting off advertising on those websites definitely feels like it skews the balance in favour of these who run said 'approved' websites.
What's wrong with this? They're not preventing you from paying for Internet access, they're offering some access for free. People in India are free to start competing ISPs.
You're couching your defence of this in free market terms, but the truth is that for customers of this ISP these web sites no longer exist in a free market for Internet services. They have managed to skew the market in their favour by artificially lowering the overall cost of using their services and artificially raising the cost of connecting to competing services. You can't have your free market cake on one end of the argument and eat it on the other. Either you're in favour of free markets at both ends, or you aren't.
Yes there is a market for ISP access and consumers are free to chose another. That's fair. Nobody is arguing this is illegal, it not even necessarily immoral for the people that made the deal. It's just business and companies give away freebies all the time for all sorts of reasons. The problem comes if this becomes standard practice, because at that point you don't have an open market anymore, you have an industry cartel that has stitched up the market to divide it up between themselves. See Adam Smith for why this is bad and why, in order to operate equitably and in the public interest, markets need to be regulated in order to remain free.
Another issue is what is given for free. If free access is given to something that is 80% of what they need, people will have reduced incentive to buy 100%, shrinking the market for the 100% solution, raising its price, and keeping it out of reach of most people. As an analogy, giving people free low quality food could discourage them from high quality food, and the lack of market for good food could drive up its price further.
Basic telecommunications infrastructure in India is heavily regulated by a government that once actually proposed banning all VoIP services apart from the ones they offer at premium prices. Thanks to a high degree of corruption and bureaucracy, it is near impossible to enter the ISP game unless you have serious monetary or political clout. Simply starting a competing ISP is not really feasible.
Seems like we need a return of the BBS ethos, where anyone can put up some bandwidth and invite folks to join in the party for free.
Perhaps internet.org is only going to create a new market for Internet provision that will be 'easy' to enter. Let them get their chained masses, then roll out a normal ISP with wide open doors.
(Of course, this would depend on the ability to actually get Internet in the area .. and assumes they don't have peer licensing all wrapped up somehow.)
And then there is this age-old fact, which hasn't really gone away in spite of Zucks' efforts: The Internet perceives toll-booths as damage, and routes around them. Here's hoping there will be "peers on the ground" who will fight this battle from there, too.
this will create a rat race, there will be big companies like flipkart paytm willing to offer money to Reliance to offer there sites for free. Internet.org is on a path to destroy net neutrality. Reliance has just found 1 way to earn more money without any ethics.
Yeah, flipkart came to my mind instantly as well. If internet.org really wants to help improve the state of internet, just subsidize internet as a utility.
Doesn't the culture of free web services actually create some of the perverse incentives at play in Google, Facebook and others today? The paying customers become advertisers and data miners and users are relegated to giving up their information (and potentially: future freedom). If people paid for these services, internet companies would see them as customers to serve rather than personal data to sell and exploit.
My interpretation is that the data count for the proposed sites would not be included in the internet plan that a consumer might have taken. It might have some impact on internet pack pricing, but competition should be able to correct it. I don't see any hit on the net neutrality; as of now, it simply appears like a freemium model.
It's understandable that Facebook needs partners to execute their vision of connecting people. I'm rooting that they end up succeeding, but if its through restricting people with low incomes to services which the connected masses don't normally use (Bing) it sux.
I think this is good. Actually if I don't remember wrong this kind of 0 plan is already available if Finland for Facebook on at least one operator. As far as I can see there are no downsides. Access to listed sites can save lives.
i think the alarm bells are a little unfounded. The internet.org initiative is to connect people who are not in the internet grid. Take a moment and think about who those people are. Do they use Saas, would they care to read a critically analyzed piece written by a journalist?
The ones taking Saas subscriptions, writing/reading blogs are already connected and in the internet ambit.
I cant clearly see the relation between Reliance Jio and India's growth. And moreover, the idea of giving free internet will not be sustaiable.
Hope it makes sense.
i think its great for people who don't have access to the internet especially poorer sections but they should've included better sites for learning expanding their knowlege etc.
[+] [-] hardcandy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amirmc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gojomo|11 years ago|reply
But the Internet defeated walled gardens before, because people actively chose "the whole shebang" over AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etcetera.
And, continuing improvements in networking keep making it easier, at the margin, to just offer everything.
Any fixed-menu-of-N-services, even if regularly updated, will be blatantly missing some emerging content or app that friends are talking about. That will drive people to upgrade to (or creatively tunnel!) to the real, full Internet as soon as they're technically or financially able. And that ability arrives fast, given whetted appetites, social pressures, and the rapid progress in networking tech.
Don't panic. Build. Any net barrier that's just a matter of puny business models will be temporary, and melt away from competition & Moore's Law.
Watch out, instead, for the net barriers enforced by ideologues with badges & guns. Those blockades can hold out against technological and economic forces much longer.
[+] [-] random_coder|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _jgdh|11 years ago|reply
Think of the alternative - suppose the government or judiciary finds this practice illegal and outlaws it. Imagine how unlikely this is and even if it does happen, how much bad press would be generated about "job-killing License Raj" etc.
[+] [-] junktest|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belorn|11 years ago|reply
Are ISP government supported and thus free of charge to any citizen?
[+] [-] captn3m0|11 years ago|reply
internet.org (within India) redirects to 0.internet.org, which takes me to 0.internet.org/unavailable with the following message:
>You must be on the Reliance network to use Internet.org. If you'd like to access these websites for free, use a SIM card from Reliance.
This is really getting out of hand.
Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/2x1vWZr.png
[+] [-] jotm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eklavya|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eklavya|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thawkins|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattxxx|11 years ago|reply
It reads like giving away free access to certain sites, is the same as making premium internet access. Am I missing something? Facebook hate aside, this is a change meant to give something away. Right?
[+] [-] Tinyyy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cookiecide|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Harimwakairi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dreamdu5t|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonh|11 years ago|reply
Yes there is a market for ISP access and consumers are free to chose another. That's fair. Nobody is arguing this is illegal, it not even necessarily immoral for the people that made the deal. It's just business and companies give away freebies all the time for all sorts of reasons. The problem comes if this becomes standard practice, because at that point you don't have an open market anymore, you have an industry cartel that has stitched up the market to divide it up between themselves. See Adam Smith for why this is bad and why, in order to operate equitably and in the public interest, markets need to be regulated in order to remain free.
[+] [-] nitrogen|11 years ago|reply
Another issue is what is given for free. If free access is given to something that is 80% of what they need, people will have reduced incentive to buy 100%, shrinking the market for the 100% solution, raising its price, and keeping it out of reach of most people. As an analogy, giving people free low quality food could discourage them from high quality food, and the lack of market for good food could drive up its price further.
[+] [-] cookiecide|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sumitviii|11 years ago|reply
But a HN post showed a way to tunnel normal traffic through FB chat[].
:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946
[+] [-] fit2rule|11 years ago|reply
Perhaps internet.org is only going to create a new market for Internet provision that will be 'easy' to enter. Let them get their chained masses, then roll out a normal ISP with wide open doors.
(Of course, this would depend on the ability to actually get Internet in the area .. and assumes they don't have peer licensing all wrapped up somehow.)
And then there is this age-old fact, which hasn't really gone away in spite of Zucks' efforts: The Internet perceives toll-booths as damage, and routes around them. Here's hoping there will be "peers on the ground" who will fight this battle from there, too.
[+] [-] pranayairan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] captn3m0|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iwwr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] venomsnake|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] funkyy|11 years ago|reply
When we will get a company that will actually shove all those nasty corpo style companies under the rug and actually improve web?
[+] [-] amarjeet|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pskittle|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sami_Lehtinen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ishadua|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snyp|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcoffland|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chucksmart|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fiatjaf|11 years ago|reply