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Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

How is a poor Indian citizen supposed to make a judgment on if having a locked down Internet where they can only use Facebook is better than this Internet they might not have even heard of with millions of websites? They only see one side of this argument if any at all. From their perspective they do not know alternatives even exist.

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It's not that they don't see other alternatives. This is true, but the reality is that other realistic alternatives don't even exist.

Their realistic option set is: (a) free access to an incredibly valuable set of resources, or (b) nothing.

I would take (a) over (b) any day. I would hope that broader alternatives would eventually come along (and history tells us it will), but the crowd that wants the Indian poor to have nothing until that day comes is, in my opinion, despicable. Heck, I might not even mind some gated internet in the US if I was free to opt-in/out of it and it reduced my internet costs.

>Heck, I might not even mind some gated internet in the US if I was free to opt-in/out of it and it reduced my internet costs.

The key difference is you would still have choice in the US and people in India would not.

I want people in India to have a choice. They can choose to accept Zuckerburg's free internet or they can wait for something else to come along.

It's Zuckerburg's critics that want to deny Indians their right to choose by taking away their free service and leaving them without internet in the present. As was noted earlier, the most vocal critics in this situation are not the poor people in India that are most directly impacted by this situation.

This issue is not about having a particular choice or not having anything. Accepting this paves the way for facebook to control the internet that a majority of people are seeing for the first time. Also, it is not really a land-grab as the title says, it is grabbing an untapped market with millions of new users. Facebook most likely wants to mine data from a new potential market.

It sounds like Indians are being forced to choose between two sides of a false dichotomy. Aren't cellular data networks realistic?

It's not an either/or. You're drawing a false dichotomy and then choosing the lesser of two evils. There is a third possibility as others have pointed out which is to actually lobby for improving all the basic infrastructure so that the real internet and not some hobbled version of it is available and accessible to everyone.

Lobbying is not a legitimate option as it comes with an open ended timeframe for success.

I'm talking about right at this immediate moment. You're correct they can lobby, but while they take the time to engage in that process, they will either have Zuckerburg's free internet or they will have nothing. The dichotomy is very real in the present.

It's not a false dichotomy. No one is offering to improve the basic infrastructure, nor lobby for it. The actual choices are the ones he outlined above.

Do you ascribe to the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics? http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethi...

Yes, but false dichotomy does not mean you can't make up a valid third option. I don't know about the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics.

"How is a poor American citizen supposed to make a judgment on if having a locked down Internet where they can only use AOL is better than this Internet they might not have even heard of with millions of websites? They only see one side of this argument if any at all. From their perspective they do not know alternatives even exist."

1999 called and wants it's keywords back...

"Internet they might not have even heard of with millions of websites?"

If they haven't even heard of it then it doesn't sound like its a viable alternative does it?

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