It may be spiritual but it's also pretty fucked up in many ways not unrelated to the spirituality like bride burning, killing people who marry into the wrong cast, leading the world in modern slavery (14 million in the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_slavery) and in malutrition (nearly double that of Sub Saharan Africa, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition_in_India). I think banning those people from a free if a bit crappy internet service because the well off are offended by the idea of it being provided by Facebook is dubious.
Get one thing straight. Free Basics is not about "bringing up" the poor. And among the "well off" are those who were poor once and have used knowledge from the internet to be wise enough to realize what is going on. Free Basics, if allowed to remain, will become a gatekeeper to the internet and will essentially become a barrier to entry to other services
Minus: might become a barrier to entry to other services
Plus: provides "some" internet for a billion people ... including wikipedia and various info apps. Includes photo sharing, chat, ...
Which of these is more important ? That's the big question being discussed here. And of course the people discussing how this might stand in the way of their future profits feel absolutely no need to provide an alternative ...
>Plus: provides "some" internet for a billion people ... including wikipedia and various info apps. Includes photo sharing, chat, ...
Chat, fb, etc is free for now, because Facebook "allows" it to be free. Once everyone is on free basics, they can do a U-turn and say only Facebook messenger, Facebook website, Facebook * is free. What are you going to do then?
What prevents them from doing this?
Letting FB or any company be a gatekeeper to net is wrong on so many levels. There are so many devious things they can do and we as people or other companies will be totally helpless.
Point 1: FB can't U-turn. Only the local telcos can do that. Judging by history they will in fact do that.
Point 2: FB is not a gatekeeper in free basics. FB simply provides a convenient door for the local telcos to open.
Point 3: The telcos, better known as the Indian government's corrupt cronies (meaning the Indian government gave ownership away to specific individuals), were, are, and will be the gatekeepers.
Making it slightly more difficult for some multinationals (other social networks, MS, linkedin, ...) to make profits in the future does not justify taking this away. If you feel this is unfair, then either convince the Indian government to provide your brand of free internet. I'm sure the amount of money that requires is a factor 10 less of what you'd think it is, which of course still makes it half a billion dollars or so.
In case you've missed it somehow. The internet is centralizing. That's the whole point of the cloud. That is what's being defended here. You're just defending one company centralizing against another. Amazon (including ec2), Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Oracle, ... all are centralized computing platforms that give you zero say in how your software runs, how your data is kept, and you can bet your ass all of these will lock you out. That is the thing they all agree on.
You seem to think this hasn't happened yet, but think about it. This has happened, it's too late.
Give them access to the full internet. Anything less is disengenuous. They're going to end up using Facebook anyway, unless someone ends up making the Indian VK. Can't let the possibility of innovation conflict with profit forecasts...
I don't understand why all or nothing is a reasonable demand. If that's your demand, then pay up or otherwise convince the telcos like fb has. What's wrong with that?
I do understand why telcos won't give all internet for free. In fact I'm amazed fb got them to allow any chat app at all, given that it'll kill SMS.
What I'm asking is why is potentially raising entry costs in the Indian market worth, morally speaking, denying internet to millions of people?
