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Internet.org Completely Wrong Concept

Sagar Devkota

Internet.org by facebook is a completely wrong concept of  Zuckerberg. Internet is only certain set of websites. Approximately 80% of the world’s population lives in areas already covered by 2G or 3G networks. The coverage is mostly urban, with the basic infrastructure already constructed by mobile service providers. So in these locations, the main obstacle to Internet access is not being able to afford it. Internet.org Completely Wrong Concept

Internet.org initiative in 2013, with the goal of providing “free Internet access” for the two thirds of the world who do not have it. By partnering with local telecommunications providers and hardware makers in the developing world, people who cannot afford a data plan will have access to a certain number of applications (depending on the country).

 

Wrong Concept Why?

About free access telemedicine(A site), suppose they do now. Lets consider after few more months another tiny company launches their telemedicine product which is far better than previous ones.
Now lets consider about three things:
1. Telemedicine by NTC or NCELL is free to access but new telemedicine requires data plans to access. So new, better telemedicine is dead.
2. Even if the new telemedicine survived somehow but most people still have NTC or NCELL as their ISPs, imagine what NTC or NCELL (lets not forget they are profit oriented companies) would do to keep their older product alive. They even can create fake network congestion and make people believe new telemedicine is worse than previous one provided by NTC or NCELL. Trust me if no laws for net neutrality is implemented, ISPs have all rights to do this.
If today big companies like facebook provides some websites for free (please note its not whole internet thing, just some free websites), imagine what happens to new startups just rising to the world of internet. Products from new startups or lets say some another free websites are shadowed. Who knows these new ones maybe even better than the freely provided ones.

And some free websites are free for sure but it has consequences in near future. What happens if ISPs starts charging more than usual rate for access to some other websites(we’re not only talking about websites but whole content in the internet. To be general I’m using terms websites wink emoticon ). What this leads to is, users are compelled/forced to use services provided by such big giant companies and this clearly is monopoly. And we all know what monopoly does.

Okay lets consider if this is right thing they’re doing like providing free access to some free websites/web services, lets go back to 2004 when facebook was launched from Harvard Dorm. If at that time big companies like Microsoft, Apple had provided some free websites for social networking similar to facebook, would facebook, a penniless company then, still could compete with them? And would facebook still be billion dollars company as it is now? Ans is no, they would have been already dead. This is the reason whatever the internet holds it should be equally accessible by all without discrimination.

If they really cares about people to connect to the world, instead of providing some websites for free why don’t they provide free data plan(maybe few MBs of data everyday) where they can access everything in the web?

And yeah, they won’t do this because they have hidden agenda.

Reference: This Post on Facebook  Shashi Khanal 28 January at 14:45 · Kathmandu

We should not let Mark Zuckerberg own and control Internet. Internet.org Completely Wrong Concept