Facebook submits to the TRAI supporting differential pricing of data [pdf]
trai.gov.inIt's remarkable that a company that stands strongly in favour of net neutrality in the US is so strongly against it in India. Speak of double standards.
So strong against it, they've spent $44 million in ads to tell the public to oppose net neutrality and instead support something they're calling "digital equality", aka free Facebook (and friends) without data charges.
Source for $44 million figure: https://twitter.com/raju/status/686000321965985793
I fail to understand how its digital equality. I don't wanna give them control over Internet too. Hope trai shows them the door
The people who run the regulatory body, they will pass this with quite a strong majority
Probably an argument can be made that net-neutrality and zero-rating are different. For example, net-neutrality can include exemptions to free services which grant access to only certain websites. IMO, the bigger problem is differential-pricing, not free stuff. Once, I pay for internet access, I should get access to everything. But any company is allowed to give access to certain websites, free of cost.
The danger lies in that they can offer free access to their own search engine, video sharing site, email, social network, and so on. And then set a really high price for regular traffic, making watching video outside their own video sharing site unrealistic. If you have no other internet providers in your area (or if all two/three of them do this trick) then you effectively don't have a free and open internet anymore.
>stands strongly in favour of net neutrality in the US
Could you provide some sources?
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/08/google-fac...
http://mashable.com/2014/05/08/fcc-letter-net-neutrality/#as...
The FCC letter signed by facebook said
1. “The open architecture of the Internet creates an innovation-without-permission ecosystem. Consumers (and consumers alone) decide the winners and losers on the open Internet.”
2. The brief also describes the dangers of a “walled garden” with a “pre-selected lineup.”
3. “Such an outcome would undo much of the progress of the last two decades. Consumers would lose the ability to choose freely among competitive services and sources of information. It would also significantly decrease the rewards edge providers could realize from innovating, further decreasing consumer choice.”
4. It would also significantly decrease the rewards edge providers could realize from innovating, further decreasing consumer choice.”
Free Basics contradict all these .
None of that is against zero-rating. They specifically mention paid prioritization, which means the data is prioritized, while zero-rating is a billing practice.
The fundamental principle makes this clear: Is the ISP providing competitive advantage to some apps/services/websites, either through pricing or QoS? Zero-rating does violate this.
But that's not the fundamental principle they advocate for.
The letter mentions "to discriminate both technically and financially against Internet companies and to impose new tolls on them."
No technical limitations are placed on internet companies with free basics, they just cost more to the consumer. And as the company isn't charged more to be on free basics, there isn't financial discrimination against the company.
Strictly speaking, that doesn't prohibit zero rating.
I'd be more interested to see a response to the studies that Facebook quoted. Are they taken out of context? If not, they do seem to agree that free basics would help.
why would they do that? isnt this public and wouldnt it be against what they stand for?? are u sure about what u say??
OP is correct. This is precisely what Facebook is doing. They ran a huge print/outdoor/mobile/TV ad campaign demonizing net neutrality activists. They also ran an astroturfing campaign spamming the telecom regulator TRAI, which is now pissed at them for misleading advertising and abusing the consultation process.
Would Facebook exist today, if there were a gatekeeper (AOL, Google, Yahoo?) that needed to approve it as a "Basic service", that had exclusive access to a billion users?
This Anti-competitive practice is as notorious as the ones MSFT once engaged in at their peak, for which they still get a lot of negative press, decades later.
Facebook would only be a gatekeeper in India if no one else decides to offer a competing service. Google plans to.
If I am a startup, I should request Facebook and Google to consider my portal as a basic service and allow millions to use it for free and they know of all my traffic all the time.
That's not the internet I know and wouldn't serve anything but the self serving interests of these conglomerates.
nope. then both would be gatekeepers for their own. even if you disagree with this, the carriers are still playing gatekeeper by zero rating services they choose to zero rate.
And they are tricking their users into gathering support for their sinister plans:
"Facebook launched a print and digital media campaign [...] asking users to give a missed call, automatically sending a message to the regulator in support of Free Basics."
i.e. A lot of those who gave a missed call ended up sending a message to TRAI, likely without their knowledge.
Source : http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/start-up-...
did they do that? but how can they. didnt they say to FCC that such practices are against NN and how can they say this in INDIA. isnt it hypocrisy?
The FCC doesn't have jurisdiction in India. Super simple. Facebook, or other foreign capitalistic entities, can do basically whatever they want.
This could change when:
- The country puts more regulations on Internet service providers like the FCC does here (maybe this is happening? maybe this isn't? I'm not familiar with India ISP regulation entities), or
- The people say "No" and choose not to use this service. But that would mean saying "No" to free Internet access. Your boss and your spouse are on Facebook, why wouldn't you want to be? Or
- The politicians say "No" to foreign capitalistic companies. We see something like this in the EU (see their privacy laws and recent government draft legislation about keeping personally identifiable data about Europeans on European servers), and we also saw something like this in China, where the government effectively gets control of who to blacklist via the firewall and censorship policies. And we all know how popular those are.
Looks like there aren't many good solutions here.
TRAI is India's telecom regulator and is currently running a consultation on whether differential pricing of data should be allowed. Facebook has run a $44 million ad campaign in the country asking the public to lobby TRAI about something they're calling "digital equality". TRAI isn't amused at all and has thrown out their submissions as invalid, because they didn't answer the questions the regulator had asked.
http://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/internet/trai-...
OP's post is Facebook's own submission to the regulator.
> We see something like this in the EU
The EU net neutrality legislation has specific exemptions for precisely what Facebook wants to implement in India i.e. internet.org [0]
[0] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/27/eu-net-neu...
What I'm curious is: how many Americans recognize this hypocrisy and take action (e.g. stop using Facebook or campaign against it?)
After all, we have the oversight of the FCC to prevent this from happening here (at least to some degree).
India is far away - why should I care what happens there?
Facetiousness aside, I suspect the statement above answers your question. As far as the average citizen is concerned it's "not my problem" (and honestly, they probably have more immediate problems with obvious impact).
Besides, net neutrality doesn't have the same emotional imagery or appeal as sweatshop labor or species extinction, though its long-term impact (deciding who gets to see what) has severe consequences for societal health.
How many Americans are going to read this posting on an Indian regulator's website?
Hypocrisy isn't illegal.
Where did Facebook tell the FCC that zero rating should be banned?
It's much easier to persuade people with Internet access that net neutrality is good than those without access for whom it's mostly meaningless. Indian Internet penetration ~20% with 1B offline. Reverse those figures and consider how easy the argument and powerful the voice for net neutrality. The long view: strategy, not tactics.
As for monopoly fears, well, remember MySpace and AOL? Internet monopolies have so far not been very durable. Technology changes rapidly and organizations frequently can't keep up (remember Bill Gates's infamous Internet letter?). I'd add that Facebook currently has ~1.5B users globally. Can they keep up structurally by adding another 1B? That's an open question.
I just don't get this. Maybe I haven't read deeply enough, but...
- what is preventing the companies signed on to the Free Basics platform from being accessible in India? is it technical? political?
- what does Free Basics actually provide if not financial support to end users or carriers for now letting people access these sites?
On its face, it looks as is Free Basics is some sort of strong arm technique to get carriers to allow access to particular sites (but are those site actually blocked?) so that Facebook can reap the karma of being the one to spearhead such a change.
free basics is a relaunched facebook service which was initially named internet.org
Sites which wants to be part of free basics will have to get facebooks approval, there by making facebook the gatekeeper.
Those sites which get approved can be accessed through free basics, and will have all the traffic go through facebook(lovely, isn't it?). Also the traffic is insecure.
It's illegal as per https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_India
just waiting for facebook stocks to crash
Wall Street certainly has their hopes up:
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/facebooks-fb-free-basics-drive...
http://www.thestreet.com/story/13419399/1/will-facebook-fb-s...
Both articles fail to consider that the mood around Facebook in India is extremely negative, with widespread sentiment of them being a bully that doesn't mind destroying net neutrality for their own selfish goals.
Does anyone know what's in it for Reliance when they offer Free Basics?
Reliance anyway would have had to pay for marketing, and Facebook provides them that.
So they divert their marketing budget to provide some free data to users as free basics.
It's effectively bartering marketing and data costs. Stakes for Facebook in it are high, so I wouldn't be surprised if they even paid for all of the data of the users.
If FreeBasics get through then reliance could package others like Youtube package, netflix package, full speed package etc.
Attracting non-data users, and hoping they will start paying if they like it.