Re: Why is Mark Zuckerberg angry at critics in India?

It's doubtful that the market (free or otherwise) will be able to do 
anything other than to accept what bread crumbs it has been offered. One 
possibility would be to organize a boycott, perhaps directed at Facebook 
- but I don't see this concept as ever being able to gain traction.

One possible answer is to address this issue head on by uniting all of 
the businesses who will be excluded from this service by explaining to 
them that it would be worth their while to finance the building of an 
open network. This could be done by including a small tax on each 
purchase, paid advertising, government subsidy or possibly a combination 
of the three.

Given that the cost to build out this type of local network is 
incredibly cheap, the idea might gain traction but even if it did, it 
neglects the provisioning of worldwide internet access. To address this 
aspect, one can assume that many international companies understand (as 
Facebook does) that having access to the Indian market is valuable and 
that the way to gain access is to provide this service as part of the 
deal. This also could be structured in the form of advertising, even 
though unless this was carefully regulated, we might end up providing a 
service that was all advertising, all the time and Internet because a 
false promise.

I suspect that the main roadblocks might be the Indian government itself 
followed by corruption on all kinds of levels. And if the corruption 
cannot be addresses, nothing of any value is going to get done 
regardless of what strategy we arrive at.

Happy New Year all,

Ken DiPietro
Cumberland MD


On 01/01/2016 01:04 AM, Arun Mehta wrote:
> A key question that needs answering in this controversy, is what 
> powers the government even has, to stop something like Free Basics? 
> TRAI only has powers over tariffs. Unless you go back to the draconian 
> Indian Telegraph Act -- what a country, that uses 19th century 
> legislation to stop 21st century services...
>
> My attitude towards Free Basics is no different to any challenges to 
> net neutrality. Looking at a packet to decide what to do with it, is 
> highly counter-productive in an age of optical routing and fiber 
> optics. It is cheaper to offer the full Internet, than to restrict it.
>
> Then again, hackers will find workarounds. Back in the days when you 
> had email-only access, one way to gain some degree of web access was 
> to mail the url to a particular address, which fetched the page and 
> mailed it back to you.
>
> It's a bad idea, not the first in the Indian telecom space. I believe 
> we should let the market deal with it, rather than setting a bad 
> precedent.
>
> Arun Mehta
>
> On Thu, Dec 31, 2015 at 3:29 AM, Ratnendra Pandey <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
>
>     But, it saddens me to note that business owners have to lie and
>     spend money on lobbying with legislators and bribe government
>     bureacrats just to be able to do honest business. Note the irony.
>     You have to be dishonest to do business honestly.
>
>
>
>
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