
Internet.org will finish internet the way we know it, hurt India’s growth - akbarnama
http://www.sunday-guardian.com/investigation/internetorg-will-finish-internet-the-way-we-know-it-hurt-indias-growth-potential
======
hardcandy
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.

~~~
amirmc
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).

------
gojomo
Death of the net predicted!

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
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.

~~~
nindalf
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.

~~~
kamaal
>>how much bad press would be generated about "job-killing License Raj" etc.

I'm amazed many Indians still fall for this. The current day
telecommunications companies came into being like knights in shining armor, to
fight the decades of rot and stagnation in the ecosystem due to BSNL in the
early 2000's.

Now their whole business is being disrupted in the same way, they disrupted
BSNL's business. Price innovation, innovation in customer service and making
services accessible to every one at affordable prices. Now when they are being
given a dose of their own medicine, they want the government to come in and
have regulations to save them.

Funny how capitalism works when you are at the receiving end.

If these people aren't stopped now they will let things stagnate and rot for
the next half century. We all know how well that worked out.

------
captn3m0
Also relevant:

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](http://i.imgur.com/2x1vWZr.png)

~~~
jotm
It's available from outside India, but not on a paid connection from within?
Ridiculous, indeed...

------
eklavya
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.

~~~
thawkins
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.

~~~
eklavya
It's not like people will stop getting an internet connection. They will still
have it. They will open other websites as well. The traffic from a particular
website is not significant anyway so I don't think they will go to/prefer
websites with free access only. Facebook right now has no competition, they
would have used it anyway and it something better comes along people won't
care about the few MBs/month it costs them.

ISPs have already been giving free WhatsApp plans and all, nothing changed for
telegram et al I suppose.

~~~
svarog
Just google "Net Nutrality" and see what's so wrong about this initiative.
People smarter than me have talked about the matter, so better read what they
have to say, but I'll just say that the reason the Internet is so successful
in bringing all sorts of ideas to fruition is that it doesn't discriminate
ideas, and lets all information flow equally. If there are companies whose
ideas are worth more than others, or are cheaper to reach - you no longer have
a free(as in free speach) internet.

~~~
eklavya
I know(I think) about "Net Neutrality". There is a difference between
discriminating between packets and charging more for particular traffic and
providing access to some sites for free. They are not charging more for a
particular kind of traffic and so I assume they are Net Neutral.

Did I miss something?

~~~
DanBC
They are charging more for particular types of traffic! Anything other than a
select few sites is being charged.

~~~
eklavya
No, you are bending it. They are charging the same they were before and there
is no change in that regard. They are still charging same regardless of what
the packet contains. Some sites are paying to be subsidised. They are paying
for a service, what's wrong? You want to compete? Get your site subsidise as
well. Someone has to pay either the customer or the provider, customer doesn't
have to pay more for particular traffic. Do you expect ISPs to provide all
data for free?

~~~
rakoo
> They are still charging same regardless of what the packet contains.

The issue here is that this is not internet. Facebook has partnered with a
local ISP that decided that some packets (say, those from Wikipedia) can pass
for free but others (say, those from GMail) cannot. Wikipedia is not (AFAIK)
an AS; as such it doesn't have a deal with Reliance Communications at the
internet level. And yet, there is now some business for Reliance to transport
Wikipedia's packets. This is completely breaking the internet as it is
designed (and as it works best)

All the chatter we've seen with ISPs and content providers is because AS
interco is highly contentious. In this case we're not talking (only) about AS;
we're talking about websites having to bend to an ISP for it to behave as
expected. It's absolutely not ok.

> customer doesn't have to pay more for particular traffic

Of course he doesn't have to, because _he doesn 't even have access to it_,
whether there is a route from website to ISP or not. That's the horrible part
of it: now peering with an AS is not enough, you need some other arrangement.

> Do you expect ISPs to provide all data for free?

I expect users to pay for laying cables, then everyone peers with everyone
else and traffic is free. But we're not there yet.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_%28Internet%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_%28Internet%29)

~~~
belorn
While looking at this from the point of view of AS is helpful to understand
the ISP industry, it does not help to understand why giving away things for
free is bad.

Lets look at the first thing that springs to mind about giving stuff away for
fee: humanitarian aid. If a larger food producer "dump" free food into a
region, this will decrease the incentives for local grown food, while driving
up prices of alternative source of nutrition. A "evil" organization could, I
guess, use humanitarian aid as a method to destroy local industry and cement
themselves as the only game in town. The question then becomes, is the concept
of humanitarian aid wrong and could there be safeguards that will prevent
misuse.

I would suggest that non-profit charity that gives out food, medicin and
knowledge is an acceptable line in the sand, while commercial monopolies and
for-profit price dumping is bad. This still enables the good aspects of
"free", while preventing bad actors from exploiting the side effects of giving
away things for free. In the context of Internet this would mean that
Wikipedia and similar non-profit information sharing sites would be
acceptable, but not for-profit companies like facebook and google.

------
mattxxx
This article is phrased very awkwardly.

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
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.

~~~
froo
There is no such thing as a free lunch. This is simply an example of this in
effect.

If people want full internet access.. pay for it. There is no story here.

~~~
detaro
I think the worry is about the other direction. Want to offer something to
people who only pay for this limited access? Then you better don't do anything
these sites don't like, because you have to use them to communicate with your
customers (unless you are already big and powerful enough to negotiate such
deals yourself)

------
dreamdu5t
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.

~~~
nitrogen
See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_%28pricing_policy%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_%28pricing_policy%29)
for one example of how giving something away for free can be net worse for the
economy/world than charging a fair price for it.

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.

~~~
gojomo
If you're swayed by that logic, should perhaps Google be forced to charge
users for web search, and Android, and their other "free" offerings that put
smaller competitors at a disadvantage?

~~~
adventured
You won't get a response to that, for the same reason you won't get a response
to: should all Linux vendors be forced to charge prices comparable to Windows,
because otherwise they're dumping?

And of course OpenOffice should be made illegal under that same logic.

~~~
pmontra
They also give you the source code. That makes the whole issue so different
that I won't use Linux and OO as an analogy for this Indian case.

------
fit2rule
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.

------
pranayairan
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.

~~~
captn3m0
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.

------
iwwr
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.

------
venomsnake
And that is why we need dumb pipes.

------
funkyy
I must say this is very interesting pont of view - eye opener.

When we will get a company that will actually shove all those nasty corpo
style companies under the rug and actually improve web?

------
amarjeet
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.

------
pskittle
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.

------
Sami_Lehtinen
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.

------
ishadua
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.

------
snyp
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.

------
jcoffland
This is the same as the net neutrality issue. Some of the animals are more
equal than the others.

------
chucksmart
An information oligarchy may be the single source of truth.

------
fiatjaf
People using this service will not consider it (or even call it) "internet",
so it will not hurt the internet.

------
anon4
HOF (HTTP over Facebook) when?

~~~
anon4
Thinking about it a bit more, if Facebook messages are themselves free, you
can set up a fake facebook account and run a desktop client which acts on
special messages, in effect achieving TCP over XMPP. This is probably no more
than a week of work for one motivated developer.

Or, given that wikipedia is free, you could use a private talk page to
transmit data too. That could be even faster for individual files. Post a
message to the talk page which a daemon polls frequently, then replaces the
talk page with a base-64 encoding of the content you requested.

Both of those require you to have a machine with unrestricted internet access,
but I imagine unrestricted home internet access to be much cheaper than mobile
internet.

~~~
rakoo
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946)

Unsurprisingly, the need was raised from the same "internet.org" bullshit.

------
woodman
This is such a horrible idea, I don't even know where to start. I'm not even
worried about the long term consequences of this service, it is going to fail
gloriously. How do I know this? Because it has has happened so many times
before. Anybody remember long distance? That is what this is - and it might be
the funniest thing I've seen all week. Thanks for the laugh Zuckerberg.

------
curiously
I don't get it, it is free, and worried about being charged to access it
beyond the free version?

~~~
detaro
More "worried about what happens to those sites that can't be accessed for
free". If a large number of your potential customers can only access a few
sites or have financial incentive to only access them, you are now forced to
conduct business through them (and good luck launching a competitor).

------
pen2l
Expected nothing less from our Zuckerberg. NSA at least makes the pretense of
seeming hands off when fucking over people, Zuck just doesn't give a shit.

Anyway - what can we actually do to stop this? Anything? Clearly this is the
beginning of something unthinkably bad, and we should do absolutely anything
to stop this.

