Punoxysm comments on A website standard that is affordable to the poorest demographics in developing countries? - Less Wrong Discussion
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People are way ahead of you on this. For instance, Facebook Zero is Facebook's Potatophone-friendly site. It's text only and conserves data.
People are also trying to improve phone service and models in the developing world, and this has been pretty successful.
It's also structured in a way that facebook pays the mobile carries for the bandwidth.
How does that work?
I'm glad to hear that. But it'd be nice if the efforts were more widespread. (Weird that I can't use access it from my PC though).
Can you point to other concrete projects?
There's also Wikipedia Zero
Wait, what?
Oh. Interesting.
The zero-rating mentioned is where the carriers don't charge customers for the data access to those services. This is commonly advertised in these countries along with the cell phone service ("Free Facebook!" pops up a lot in the Philippines, where people often sell sim cards on the street and many small general stores recharge cell phone plans -- adding some marginal pesos to your cell phone is often a pain). Pretty transparently not net neutrality, although if you are moving them from can't-afford-any-sites to can-only-afford-facebook, it's hard to see that as a bad thing, at least when you isolate it from the game theory / market capture elements, which are potent.