Facebook Meets Skepticism in Bid to Expand Internet in India

If I lived in one of these countries I would sue them for false advertising, a few canned crippled websites is not the internet so you can't call it Internet.org. What really pisses me off though is Zuckerberg trying to pass this smarmy scheme as some kind of altruism. Asshole.

Article titled "Facebook meets skepticism..." is actually about Reliance's network issues not helping Internet.org. SaveTheInternet is portrayed as a hurdle for everyone getting free internet access.

Facebook's meets "skepticism" because it is offering walled internet in South East Asian countries like India, Indonesia, etc. Facebook + a few services that people didn't ask for. Clicking external links on Facebook will lead to a page warning that you will be charged if you visit a service that's not part of internet.org. Google has also been offering such a service called "Google Free Zone" in certain countries.

If Facebook or Google feel so charitable, why not help telecom providers write-off data costs and offer say 250mb/month free per person?

> Facebook’s rocky experience since it brought Internet.org to India in February shows that good intentions and technological savvy are not enough to achieve a noble goal like universal Internet access.

Why the assumption that Facebook has good intentions? This is a predatorial move to lock customers into Facebook's ecosystem. And FB is not promising 'universal' Internet access.

This is a PR piece.

> Facebook’s rocky experience since it brought Internet.org to India in February shows that good intentions and technological savvy are not enough to achieve a noble goal like universal Internet access.

Such lofty ideals. This could've applied to the EFF or the Internet Archive, but Facebook is a far cry.

It's silly. Look I think it's fine for FB to do this, it's better than nothing although the resources could be better spent. But at the end of the day, it's not internet access at all. It's wireless access to a select amount of intranets, basically, including FB and a few partner networks. That's fine, just don't run a campaign about the internet and use a domain like internet.org.

Either way, it doesn't really seem to matter. Looks like it's not gaining traction because users want internet, not what is offered. So either they steer the ship towards the goal of providing that, or it dies. I'm sure they're learning tons right now and I'm sure in a few years it'll have improved substantially, so I'm still optimistic.

Last I heard, Internet.org is not the "Internet". It was only a program to grant access to a limited set of sites like Facebook for free. It has since been re branded to 'Free Basics' but IMO that is still misleading.

Does Facebook collect personal data from the users of the Basics program (beyond what they already collect as Facebook)? This seems like a opportunity to exploit/sell information about a group of people who are even less likely that first-world Internet users to understand the implications of such a trade.

Personally I think that making even a fraction of services accessible to a small fraction of users which have never used Internet before is a good cause. The simple act of getting them online, even if providing them limited services, can be a gateway to the "Internet" as a whole.

Facebook is a company which exists in the end to increase the value for its shareholders so I think it is expected they obviously will try to further their cause i.e. getting everyone on the Facebook platform. Maybe they overplayed the altruistic card and should have been more forthright about their intentions.

"We", people who take for granted the connectivity that Internet offers, in my humble opinion maybe overly skeptic of Facebook's intentions. But to someone who has not accessed internet ever, even a fraction of it can be very empowering.