How India Pierced Facebook’s Free Basics Program | Hacker News Reader

How India Pierced Facebook’s Free Basics Program

medium.com

35 pointsenigami10 comments

The domain in parens next to the title says "medium.com", but the link is actually on "https://backchannel.com/how-india-pierced-facebook-s-free-in....

Curious how that happened.

https://backchannel.com/about

Run: curl -IL https://medium.com/backchannel/how-india-pierced-facebook-s-...

It is because of a "301 Moved Permanently" response code. The URL shows as "medium.com", because thats the URL saved in the HN database. However when you open it, your browser follows the redirect.

Calling this free Internet is really giving Facebook too much credit. It was free access to a select few websites.

The cynic in me (which is all of me) doesn't think it's an accident that it keeps getting portrayed this way. Same with a Bloomberg article the other day.

Ok, we changed "Free Internet" to "Free Basics" in the title above to avoid ambiguity.

When this first launched in India a couple months ago, the realization of what was going on really hit me. I was already opposed to it for net neutrality reasons, but in practice the program just rolled out Facebook and a few apps without data charges to everyone, not just the unconnected, which was extra flagrant. I wrote this: https://medium.com/@firasd/facebook-s-internet-org-free-basi...

Also see this: A data-driven argument on why Marc Andreessen is wrong about Free Basics https://medium.com/@sumanthr/a-data-driven-argument-on-why-m...

The reporter in the main linked article couldn't find one person using Free Basics who hadn't been on the internet before.

Can somebody translate the above post into English? I can't understand a single sentence.

Okay…

1) When Free Basics launched India, the problems with it turned out to be even worse than I expected. I wrote about how the local marketing (‘Free Facebook’) and Zuck’s post (‘farmers getting weather information’) had completely different messaging.

2) I pointed to another article that dove into these issues about who actually uses Free Basics.

3) The reporter who wrote the article this HN thread is about (“How India Pierced…”) couldn’t find a single person who was introduced to the internet through Free Basics.

Does that help?

How much cabling and how many APs could FB have deployed with the resources spent trying to propagate this program?

If someone gave me free Internet, I'd probably check out their page.

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