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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

Better than their first attempt but still not the real thing. If you want to give internet for free to some people there are no alternatives than paying them a full blown data connection with no artificial limits.

I believe that my original comment of 2 weeks ago is still relevant:

"Dear Mark, this open-to-ISP initiative is one way to look at what you're doing. Another one is closed-to-most-of-the-Internet. Let's turn it into an open-to-all-Internet initiative (web sites, mail, etc - all protocols), with no other costs for service providers (web sites, etc) than the amount of money they're paying to get online right now. Then I'll believe you're really trying to help those poor people by giving them free access to the full Internet, not only to what you think they must be allowed to access. Forgive me if I'm skeptical about how unbiased you are about it. Thanks."

(Edit: typo)

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Facebook is a business. Don't be naive. They don't care for poor people, they care about getting money. They are even obligated to do so.

Don't expect business to solve all issues for humanity, because they won't.

A government is needed to take responsability we don't want to entrust business with and to do necessary things no business wants to do, and it needs to be strong to be able to do it even if business opposes.

Facebook doesn't care about poor people but Facebook is ultimately run by people making decisions and some people care about poor people.

The are not "obligated to do so". It's a myth that a business can't pursue anything but short-term gains. Executives have a lot of leeway in how they conduct their affairs and the only thing that can stop them is the board, which is often dominated by the founders, a few large investors or the CxOs anyway.

Remember "corporations are people, my friend?". If that idea can't be stopped, it should be coopted to imply that companies should behave morally above and beyond what the law requires. If we expect people to volunteer and donate, why not expect the same from corporations? That's not my idea, by the way. It's a trend called "corporate social responsibility".

There's also just too much ambiguity between "good business" and "morality" for any hard rules to apply. Is paying workers in poor countries a living wage a waste of money (and thus "illegal") or does it make business sense because it creates employee loyalty & good PR? Is Tim Cook wasting the shareholders' money when Apple spends a few million extra to power their data center with renewable energy or is that good PR, as well as future-proofing your investment?

In the case of Google & FB, their size creates a situation where any additional internet user creates so much value for them that it becomes economically viable to spend a significant amount of money to get that user online. In this case, the idea that "cooperations should only care about the bottom line" actually creates the insane situation that people like you argue that companies shouldn't do something simply because it _also_ happens to help people.

Business might benefit poor people, however, "people like me" say that we can't entrust business to care, nor can we expect them to.

I don't think business should care about money first, but life is not about what we wish to be true.

Not all obligations are legal. The market puts pressure on business to care about money.

And I was sat there thinking .org domains are reserved for non-profits.

Nope, that was the original intention, but it's not been restricted for a long time, if it ever was.

I was denied a .net in the mid-90s because I didn't even claim to operate internet infrastructure. Was too honest to add "and local infrastructure" to the usage statement and re-apply.

That's an old debate, are businesses more effective than governments at taking people out of poverty? I don't think people will ever agree on that, I believe businesses are more effective for the simple reason that they create things of value that people want to buy and work for, unlike governments.

It could also be said that although businesses primary motive is making money and not helping the poor, a politician's primary motive is getting elected and helping himself, his party, his cronies, his electors and than at the bottom of the list comes the poor. So don't be naive either in believing politicians have better motives and are more efficient at pulling the poor out of misery.

> businesses are more effective for the simple reason that they create things of value that people want to buy and work for, unlike governments.

Not sure about you, but I can think of a few minor things provided by government which some people might value:

1. Social order

2. A legal system

3. Safety and security services

4. Political representation at a national level

5. An education system

6. Public transportation network

7. Medical services

It is absurd to dismiss government as having no value to society. Without government you would barely have a society.

You're right, government does create value, sorry if what I said wasn't very clear. What I meant was the last part of the sentence, private enterprise creates things people want to buy, willingly so, government create things people are forced to buy by law, by the power of guns.

As for what you listed, many of these services could be provided by private enterprise and are in many country, successfully so, in fact more so than in the US.

I agree that (some) people will probably never agree on the government vs private enterprise debate, but I will point out that prior to the welfare state and world war 2 wealth inequality was either high or growing rapidly: these are the historical facts.

So from history we learn that private enterprise reduces relative poverty primarily by destroying the capital of the wealthiest, not by distributing or generating wealth in the poorest part of the population.

Also to claim that governments that produces such things as the law, education systems, and national defence have no valuable products is a bit odd.

I don't think inequality is a problem, when people are completely free to exploit their full potential to succeed in life, this means some people will do way better than others. I'm very bad at playing the piano, basketball, painting of creating huge corporations, some people are very good at those things and a free economy allows them to do so. Good for them.

As for inequalities being a problem, as long as the quality of life improves for all, I don't see where's the problem. The poorest in America live longer and are more educated than the richest men in the world less than a century ago. Not bad.

> Also to claim that governments that produces such things as the law, education systems, and national defence have no valuable products is a bit odd.

If it's so valuable then why force people to pay for it? Nobody was ever forced to buy an iphone or a volkswagen. Anyway, my point is that government is not synonymous with goodness and corporations evil, which was parent's point. Both are made up of people who usually are not evil.

Since they are a business and are not obligated to do anything for the poor is precisely the reason why internet.org will harm future Zuckerbergs. Internet.org will become a gatekeeper of sorts. This eventual appstorification of the internet should be opposed in my opinion.

They are not obligated to do so. They are obligated to do what the majority of the shares want to do, even giving all their money away in charity. If the CEO doesn't comply, the board elects a new CEO. Anyway the shareholders usually care about profit, even short term one, so companies as entities usually "care about getting money".

By the way, this is a quote from Facebook's IPO letter http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001193125120... (it was pretty debated at the time so it's easy to remember it)

"[...] we frequently make product decisions that may reduce our short-term revenue or profitability if we believe that the decisions are consistent with our mission and benefit the aggregate user experience and will thereby improve our financial performance over the long term. These decisions may not produce the long-term benefits that we expect, in which case our user growth and engagement, our relationships with developers and advertisers, and our business and results of operations could be harmed."

It was easy to write that at the time of the IPO but as shareholder become more institutional I believe that the pressure for short term gains increases. I wonder where Facebook is now.

It's certainly not net neutrality but it might be more accurate to think of this as a heavily firewalled LAN; given what I know in general about the ingenuity of people in the areas that they're aiming this service at, they should expect a huge amount of tunneling, in various forms, if they attempt to restrict access in any way.

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