It's official: India bans Facebook's Free Basics

The Indian Telecoms Regulatory Authority (TRAI) has permanently banned Facebook's Free Basics project on "net neutrality" grounds. TRAI today ruled (PDF) that: "No service provider shall offer or charge discriminatory tariffs for data services on the basis of content." The ruling, a regulation, essentially prohibited all zero …

[Mage]

Free Basics is NOT Charity

Obviously the Indians are smart and know this is purely Advertising funded Facebook walled garden with Facebook deciding who else gets in. As such it would reduce the performance of paid access to rest of the Internet.

It's a far more insidious evil thing than breaching net neutrality.

[Anonymous Coward]

I laughed

Until I stopped.

[Ashley Ward]

I don't see the problem

I had a look at the terms for the Free Basics programme. It seemed the only conditions were understandable technical ones (i.e. size of images, etc.). There didn't seem to be any political stance to it - if your site met the technical constraints then it would be included.

So surely people who care about getting content available to poorer people who maybe can't otherwise afford an internet connection should be embracing it and updating existing, or creating new, services which meet those technical criteria and getting them into the program rather than just throwing their toys out the pram because it doesn't fit into some net-neutrality utopia.

It might be that the content available already is biased towards Facebook's goals (they are funding it after all), but the solution to that is surely to get more content onto it rather than just getting it banned. It's not perfect but surely it's better than banning it outright?

Of course I may have just got the wrong end of the stick...

[Tom Chiverton 1]

Re: I don't see the problem

"if your site met the technical constraints then it would be included"

And who draws them up ? And can change them anytime they like ? And who do you complain to if you think it's met and they don't ?

It's a walled garden. Which is bad.

[SImon Hobson]

Re: I don't see the problem

Yes, you've got the wrong end of the stick.

This is absolutely not about getting India online. This is about getting a "free" service in there that will inevitably be popular with people who are too poor for regular paid internet and/or don't see the problem with "internet == FarceBork". But for those who do want "proper" internet, and the ISPs providing it, it means those providers have to compete with 'free".

To see what that means, just take a little look back in history. Once upon a time Microsoft made a mediocre browser called Internet Explorer, and in their usual way tried to make "the web" into "the Microsoft web". There was a competitor called Netscape Navigator. Both were originally paid for products.

Microsoft didn't like this competitor - not least because it threatened their attempt to proprietise the web. They started giving away Explorer - free, "no strings attached". Of course, Netscape didn't have a cash cow of Windows to pay for things, and eventually Navigator all but disappeared. After that, with no competition, Explorer festered. Microsoft could get away with plying a pile of steaming poo because no-one else could compete with free.

It was only later (IIRC) some years that other alternatives popped up - and eventually people started realises just what a pile of poo Explorer was.

The analogy here is that FarceBork want to do for internet access what Microsoft tried to do for "the web". A big difference is that running an ISP takes real money - other than niche community projects, you don't run one of those as a no-cash open source development !

Of course, as we all know, the EU eventually (about a decade too late when the damage was well and truly done) found Microsoft guilty and imposed a penalty that was barely a slap on the wrists while simultaneously annoying users ! With this judgement, it's clear that the Indian authorities have realised that it's better to prevent the market abuse in the first place than to try and repair the damage afterwards.

[Sirius Lee]

Stop with the bullshit analogies

@Simon Hobson Your sleight against Microsoft is not really well founded though it is a popular view. Back in the late nineties the development of standards for browsers was woefully slow and businesses, like Microsoft, needed to do things to make the browser a usable tool. Navigator was not usable meanwhile Microsoft wanted to baked the browser into the Windows operating system where it still is today. The notion that IE did somehow languished is risible except and until the DoJ got involved.

In IE 5.5, released on 2000, Microsoft introduced the collections of tools we now called AJAX. It did so because it needed this type of functionality to create Outlook Web Access, the web version of Outlook, Microsoft's mail client. This was adopted by all the main browsers of the day and we've not really looked back. Where would web services be without AJAX? But of course no self respecting Microsoft basher can accept that so later it was repackaged as AJAX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)).

In the meantime, at the behest of Netscape the DoJ got involved, Microsoft was forced to back off. Then IE languished not because Microsoft wanted that but because the courts said it must. As a result of that, we went back to the standard stalemate and we had to wait for over decade for HTML5.

The reason your comments are bullshit for me is that your reasoning is that any private enterprise is inherently evil. Sure, they are going to do things in their own interest. But not doing things is often in someone's interest as well. In this case, the established telecoms and digital service providers in India.

The losers are poor people who have no access to information because people, like you, with a specific view of 'fairness' are complicit in preventing their access.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I don't see the problem

From my recollection and judgement, not quite how the original browser-wars occurred.

Yes, Microsoft unfairly leveraged their monopoly to force their own software onto people, though some argue, especially with hindsight, that including an internet browser in an OS was, after all, pretty well justified. However, making IE such an integrated part of the OS that it could not be properly uninstalled was aggressive and underhand (nb. try uninstalling Safari from OSX).

However, by v3 IE was pretty well-regarded and held its own against the increasingly bloated Netscape. By v5 it was a much more streamlined and efficient browser. I'm not saying OS integration wasn't the largest factor in destroying Netscape, but to say it did it entirely without merit is to belittle a large number of people who made the conscious decision to use IE because they found it a better experience.

Unfortunately, in removing the competition, the furious pace of development and innovation was purposely stagnated, with Microsoft pretty much declaring there was no need to continue browser development since they had the perfect browser. It was a mistake I think they have rued many times over since Firefox picked up the torch and began to code.

As for the analogy, I'd agree if you were comparing the time MS tried to get people to use MSN as a desktop executable rather than load a browser (in so much as they were trying to control the internet for their own agenda), but the development effort they then put into IE to compete with Netscape proves they quickly lost the walled-garden battle and had to console themselves by being the company to provide unfettered access to the web (if you don't count the now-standard homepage imposition!). So the point I would make is that even if the Indian government had accepted Facebook's Free Basics, I would expect the insatiable need for unrestricted access would have made the venture as much of a failure as MSN in the end anyhow (at least, I hope it would)

[Andrew Orlowski]

@Ashley

I suspect most people trying stop very poor people using Free Basics don't know what it is. Free Basics is like a crappy Compuserve channel with the weather forecast thrown in. You can't get the full internet. Nobody could mistake it for the full internet. But that's still useful if you earn $1 a day and the full internet is way beyond your budget.

The presumption of Western activists (who are invariably white and wealthy) is that Indians are too stupid to tell the difference between the crappy free walled garden and the full internet, and will stay with Zuck's crappy walled garden for all time. We therefore have to step in and save them from themselves.

Meet the new colonialism. It's got a modem!

[MyffyW]

Re: @Ashley

It reminded me of the early day's of AOL - and for some reason now I can't get the long-wave-radio-plus-boing-boing sound out of my head.

[Mark 85]

@MyffyW -- Re: @Ashley

It reminded me of the early day's of AOL -

So I take it that free AOL wouldn't fly in India either then? Not sure if that would be a curse or blessing.

[Mage]

Re: "Don't know what it is"

Free Basics is like a crappy Compuserve channel with the weather forecast thrown in.

No, it's not. Credit us with being at least as smart as the Indians.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: @Ashley

"The presumption of Western activists (who are invariably white and wealthy) is that Indians are too stupid to tell the difference between the crappy free walled garden and the full internet, and will stay with Zuck's crappy walled garden for all time."

Nasty cynical people like me suspect that the reasoning behind the Greeks bearing gifts in this case was to hope that most Indians would be gradually migrated onto paying versions for more capability until Mr. Sugarmountain owned the Indian public Internet. That was the original idea behind both AOL, and Microsoft's attempt to rubbish the WWW and substitute MSN. And that's how colonialism worked, whether it was a tea monopoly, an opium monopoly or a salt monopoly. When your own government takes charge of a public asset and says "No, we're not letting foreigners control it", that's the opposite of colonialism.

One thing we pay governments for is to decide when to sacrifice short term benefit for long term gain. It looks to me like the Indian government is doing this, unlike our own beloved government of short-termists.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: @Ashley

"One thing we pay governments for is to decide when to sacrifice short term benefit for long term gain"

Aye. But typically Big Business pays the members of government more than Joe Public can afford to pay, so typically Big Business gets what it wants, whether or not it helps Joe Public short medium or long term.

Nice to see a government trying to Think Different.

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

Kinda reminds me of Wal*Mart not being able to establish a foothold in Germany.

[Anonymous Coward]

government mandated hours of operation are assnine

When even Walmart can't be open on Sundays then what's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well done India!

++ White colonists like Zuck can fuck right off and head back home! I feel there's a tech war emerging here, and it feels good!

++ Maybe we won't have to wait 10 years for change and pushback against wholly self-interested UNREGULATED shitty corps like Facebag / Googhoul / Microsap...

++ Completely unregulated, because light-touch oversight by the Irish DPC etc is nothing, especially when Dave and Obama entertain these corps on a weekly basis.

++ Ireland will have future tribunals about this, and as always no penalties for anyone except whistle-blowers...

[sysconfig]

Re: Well done India!

Facebag / Googhoul / Microsap

Have an upvote for those creative names! Still laughing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Well done India!

++ Cheers!

(Pls forgive the typo, at the start it should have read 'colonialists')

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: it should have read 'colonialists'

And I thought you were talking shit...

: )

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Well done India!

+++ MANIPULATORY RODENT FAILURE +++ REDO FROM START +++

[Old Handle]

If FaceBook just offered actual free internet, albeit with a low speed, and/or data limit, and then made a low-fi version of their site available to go with it, nobody would complain. But evidently they didn't feel that would give their own platform a big enough advantage.

[Anonymous Coward]

++ Cheers!

(Pls forgive the typo, at the start it should have read 'colonialists')

[PAT MCCLUNG]

Thank God that reason and love of Liberty has prevailed among the people of India. Now, look to your own.