Hacker News Reader

Comment by phantom_oracle | Hacker News Reader

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the real issue here is that in 2017 (and beyond), the only way/place that you will be able to reach an audience is via these walled-gardens known as Facebook/Twitter/etc.

This is the same company that fought against US legislature (SOPA or whatever it was called) but created its own non-neutral internet.org for the third-world.

The only race that these giant advertising media/companies are in is the race for: total-observation

and unlike the evil government from 1984 , these leech-like data-harvesting entities are celebrated by their peers for re-inventing MySpace and IRC over and over again.

View on HN

Hasn't it always been like this though apart from a brief window in maybe the 00's? Prior to blogging taking off you needed money and real world marketing to reach an audience through books/magazines/newspapers/music/film. The owner of the garden has just changed (and it's less restrictive than Wallmart ever was.

'Messages' are ultimately at the mercy of the medium. Having the medium owned by one corporation, even if it's not abused right now, strikes me as worse than having a sizable of 'elite' companies, each with their own (often explicit) biases, competing for attention.

Whether the latter is worse than a gaggle of bloggers trampling all over the plants, I'm not so sure anymore. But either option still seems better than a handful of corporations owning the garden.

I guess looking to the future there could be issues but as FB/Twitter/Tumblr rely on lots of people posting I don't see it as a likely eventuality as it's not in their best interests to severely restrict content. So for now I would argue it's still much better than in the past but I agree that might not always be the case.

>This is the same company that fought against US legislature (SOPA or whatever it was called) but created its own non-neutral internet.org for the third-world.

They choose to provide some websites for free to the third world while leaving open the option to buy the full web if they choose too. How is that evil?

An ISP chooses to provide you with access to some websites but if you want to pay more to get the full access you can.

How is that evil?

Your counter example is missing the word free

An ISP chooses to provide you with FREE access to some websites but if you want to pay more to get the full access you can.

Facebook is doing this for free for the poor and privileged people in the West are complaining because it threatens their ideologues about free internet all the time no matter what.

A constrained internet doesn't threaten my ideologies.

It threatens its users ability to understand and interact with the rest of the world.

Facebook isn't doing internet.org for "the poor". It's doing it for itself, to get them to click on ads, and model their behavior, in a higher-walled garden than almost any we've ever seen (except maybe the Great Firewall, itself) and which they control.

So, sure. I personally repudiate the notion of "evil" as just so much post-modernist, perspective-based narrative bullshit; I completely agree with you that internet.org isn't that. But it's certainly not a philanthropic venture, by any stretch of the imagination. It serves Facebook's ends first, and its users distantly second.

>Facebook isn't doing internet.org for "the poor". It's doing it for itself, to get them to click on ads,

I highly doubt that there is much marketing dollars to be spent selling to the poorest third of the world population.

The walled garden includes facebook because naturally its founder considers it an essential service. It also provides job search and informational resources. This is not a bad thing and it does not preclude these people paying for full internet if they choose to. But, while they don't have the funds and resources to do that, thank goodness Zuckerberg is making some essential websites available.

The poorest population is relatively shrinking in the developing world they are the customers of the future.

Having an entire generation growing up under the brand of a corporation is effectively priceless.

Free is irrelevant because you can argue that a service provider sets the fees and the service.

Nothing says that internet service providers have to offers you unrestricted, unlimited and fair access to the internet; if you read carefully not even your contract.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com