> People first need to see the value in having any internet at all.
Wow, this is horridly ignorant of the level of awareness in countries where Internet.org is trying to operate.
Let's take India.
People: homeless people, poor people, people in villages; all know what the Internet is. To some level. Not everyone uses it (esp. older people); not everyone is sure what it is -- but it's used in almost every social bubble by some people so people are aware of it and know its value. A lot of low-income families use Whatsapp, for example.
Internet.org isn't targeted towards the people who don't use the Internet at all. It's targeted towards the people who do use the Internet, but not much. Free stuff is nice, so more and more people will move on to the free Internet.org. There's no altruism here. It's a plain and simple business tactic.
> Building out a cell network for the whole world isn't easy.
Nobody's saying they should. But for the same amount of investment they could provide services like free Internet with a data cap. Make a landing page with a prominent link to Facebook or something. Meh.
> The rampant use of VPNs in China is a good example.
No it's not. That has nothing to do with this whatsoever. That's censorship.
> But we need to crawl before we can walk. Once people are online a bit, they quickly want to see it all.
At any point do you see Facebook committing to bringing the whole Internet to these people? I wouldn't really mind if it said that internet.org would be replaced with a full internet in 5 years or so.
Wow, this is horridly ignorant of the level of awareness in countries where Internet.org is trying to operate.
Let's take India.
People: homeless people, poor people, people in villages; all know what the Internet is. To some level. Not everyone uses it (esp. older people); not everyone is sure what it is -- but it's used in almost every social bubble by some people so people are aware of it and know its value. A lot of low-income families use Whatsapp, for example.
Internet.org isn't targeted towards the people who don't use the Internet at all. It's targeted towards the people who do use the Internet, but not much. Free stuff is nice, so more and more people will move on to the free Internet.org. There's no altruism here. It's a plain and simple business tactic.
> Building out a cell network for the whole world isn't easy.
Nobody's saying they should. But for the same amount of investment they could provide services like free Internet with a data cap. Make a landing page with a prominent link to Facebook or something. Meh.
> The rampant use of VPNs in China is a good example.
No it's not. That has nothing to do with this whatsoever. That's censorship.
> But we need to crawl before we can walk. Once people are online a bit, they quickly want to see it all.
At any point do you see Facebook committing to bringing the whole Internet to these people? I wouldn't really mind if it said that internet.org would be replaced with a full internet in 5 years or so.