Maybe this is just a detail of Vice's way to sell their articles, but how is providing free services to people who could otherwise not afford them 'colonialism'?
While Wikipedia may be attempting to colonize Angola with some of its community conduct values, the population there has another view of Wikipedia's purpose which might be equally valid.
Forced, to the extent that they cannot afford to use other services that are not zero rated. The article mentions $2.5 for 50 Mb which is quite expensive by any measure.
It comes down to money, really. Do we put a "you must be this rich to use the internet" sign up on the planet's communications, or do we allow people to bring their culture and ideas to the party despite their poverty?
This whole thing reminds me of UseNet in the early days. It was supposed to be about news and conversations. It ended up being about sharing copyrighted content, because it was one of the only ways we could do it.
So we (Westerners) misused our internet services to share copyrighted content in the early days of our internet experience, why are we even surprised, let alone objecting, that others are doing the same?
If we give free drugs for certain diseases to a poor country, would that mean that we enforce our "Western view on health" on them, and that they are actually entitled to get all drugs for free, otherwise it is a form of colonialism?
Folks in poor countries aren't stupid, and know Facebook isn't just being nice. Zero-rating strangles local startups who have to compete with the free walled garden; it is a spigot for western culture, which many object to[2]; and it smacks of a particularly Valley-flavored mix of paternalism, greed, and the sort of tote-bagger do-gooderism that led to some major travesties of charity. (You could go look up how Jello Biafra picked his stage name on Wikipedia, over a zero-rated link, if you like.)
Suffice to say, there are good reasons why many people in poor countries are extremely wary of westerners bearing gifts.
This bit isn't directed at the parent, and is something I wanted to say in a different thread about poverty, but here's a rule of thumb that may help: If you observe something that doesn't make sense to you, it is likely that you don't have the whole picture. This rule applies to the behavior of people with less money than you, as well.
[1] If you're really interested, reading some history of colonialism would be good. I don't know your background, but if it involved typical high school U.S. history, you likely learned that colonialism was a sort of adventure-phase where westerners explored and planted flags and whatnot, mostly ignoring the commercial interests driving it. And a lot of the horror.
[2] Not even going to get in to that one, aside from saying that if leading contenders in the Republican primary can hate on U.S. culture, so can folks who actually got the pointy end of the stick.
On piracy, of course you're absolutely right - given the existence of a storage mechanism, someone will put stuff in it. See also: hacks that use dynamic DNS updates to store and share information.
I'm in the UK. Free mobile broadband at something like 256Kbits with cheap USB dongles would allow access for all children & low income adults who could find a suitable client device (recycled laptop/cheap smartish phone whatever). Sort of basic income argument applied to Internet connectivity.
Am I being colonialist? Remember I live in the country that more or less invented colonialism!
My proposition is 'basic income Internet' provided at low cost in each country by $Government and $PreferredSupplier. Lowish bandwidth, possibly with fair use style bandwidth cap.
All currently existing legal frameworks remain in place in $Country.
It isn't really classic colonialism of course (we're not talking about enslaving a nation and stealing their goods). But if the basic income internet were not in fact provided by $Government, but instead by $corporation or $otherGovernment, and carried with it strings - "abide by $otherGovernment's laws while using the internet here in this country", then you could argue that's a colonialist approach. It's especially problematic when governments are subverted to transmit corporatist legal frameworks.
In your example in the most basic sense, it's not colonialist - it's just good sense, a government providing a basic level of access to the internet to all.
On the other hand to all of this, I feel like sometimes we're missing the mountain while staring at molehills. Yes, facebook's free basics seem like a naked grab for users and an attempt to stifle homegrown innovation in countries that don't have a lot of network infrastructure. On the other hand, we're still very much dealing with actual colonialism in our global economy. The fact that it's cheaper to ship cotton to Bangladesh to make t-shirts that in turn get shipped back to the US for me to wear (than, say, making the shirt in the US where the cotton is grown) says a lot about the influence of north/western economies on the rest of the world. We (meaning northern and western nations for the most part) still extract tremendous value from the countries we used to explicitly call "colonies". This is probably a much bigger problem (both ethically and in terms of long-term sustainability of our markets)
But I wouldn't fund only access to just my website, I'd fund access to the whole thing.
Which is my objection to zero-rating.
And yes, I'd see this as an absolutely worthwhile use of philanthropic donations if/when I ever make enough to do that.
They are not forced to use Wikipedia. They just happen to live in Africa, where most people live in 19th century by Western/Northern standards and they are hacking their way to 21st century. What would you do if you had to pay 80% of your salary for 1Gb of internet?
The hacker culture is about "creatively circumventing limitations of systems to achieve novel and clever outcomes". I can't find a better example of it.
Let the others call them pirates, but here I think we should celebrate what they did and call them by what they really are, true hackers.
I was just questioning the sense of entitlement that is apparently hidden in the "colonialism" criticism, but this seems to be so ideological that it's hard to get to a basic agreement. Different views on the world, I guess.
That said, I can also understand the sentiment of feeling "colonialized" when people are only allowed to use something under conditions/mores imposed by a "foreign party".
Different world views then? I think it's more like two sides of the same coin...
But it seems like Wikipedia are conscious of that, so they've taken a hands-off approach to this.
File sharing is a big resource hog. It's a totally different story.
So if I roll in and say "Here have this access to this thing everyone in the world claims is an economic and social miracle. Free!" and then later once you start using it I roll back around and say "oh yeah, by the way you have to follow the laws of the United States, the laws of a country you are entirely unrepresented by, if you want to use this thing that you're already using. This thing which every one swears is an absolute game changer, this thing that people claim will jump you into the 21st century* , this thing that everyone around the world swears you need."
Okay it's not a gun to their head but it certainly feels more than a hair coercive.
*people being varying levels of racist/ignorant in believing that "the 21st century" is not a date on a calendar but instead a particular sort of culture.
It's very damaging to trade with the developing world if we start accusing companies of "attempting to colonize" because they have the temerity to expect people granted subsidised access to their website to actually play by the same rules as everyone else. I mean, if we start assuming that Angolans can't or shouldn't abide by the same rules as everyone else, it's very easy to just ensure services aren't affordable to the average Angolan again.
Angolans might have more reason to avoid paying for content than the rest of the world and they might have more reason to use Wikipedia or Facebook as a vector for delivering pirated content than the rest of the world, but the people pirating the content in this manner are at least as aware and deliberate in their circumvention of rules as crackers in other countries, and they should be respected for their clever hacks and blocked from uploading just like crackers elsewhere, and not patronised as people who couldn't possibly be expected to understand or accept Western mores.
Are you seriously arguing the Wikimedia Foundation's intentions can't possibly be benevolent because they won't let Angolans turn their server space into a repository of pirated content?
Actually, your "everyone else" who play by the Western rules, is probably less than half of the world population.
If the only internet I had was that, and I had no way to start my own internet sites either, I'm sure I'd be trying to find ways to use them for what I wanted regardless of their rules too. As it is, I've got the whole internet and have no reason to try and abuse facebook or wikipedia that way.
Well, I do have a wiki farm now, so I feel compelled to reply. Yes, I would have the same relativistic sentiments. I would just impose the banhammer nonetheless.
That's kind of the thing about the DMCA -- it turns us all into enforcement agents. It doesn't really matter how I feel about the rules, because if I don't follow them I get shut down.
How I feel about the core of the issue is that copyrights and patents are imperialism. Imperialism in every culture. The poor and middle class can't afford to enforce their own copyrights, and the are subject to the whim of the the rich. They've created a place where the only culture of the past available is the one they want to sell. Only a few organizations like the EFF stand in the way of this madness, but the IP system is madness anyway.
I have an uncle who served as US Border Patrol for 20 years. He never believed that all of the illegals need to go back, but it's a job. Someone needs to watch the border and deal with problems or it would be complete anarchy. You can have valid reasons for enforcing rules you don't entirely believe in.
So I'll follow the DMCA because I'm the little guy. And I'll do nothing about the IP laywer who I believe has infringed about a hundred of my own copyrights and has acknowledged and then took no action a DMCA takedown notice from me. Because I cannot afford to go against him in a rigged system. And I understand why Angolans want to work against a system that's rigged against the them.
If that's your approach then you don't understand the main value proposition of the web.
These programs are silly and ineffective. Facebook and Wikipedia should just channel their funds to a join effort at making all of the Internet accessible.
We've been down this road before, it didn't work for AOL, why keep trying it?
HOWEVER, you can survive if you can't pirate and edit wikipedia at the same time.
You can use wikipedia for free, and express yourself better, within wikipedia rules. Same for all of us. That's a pure bonus (that some poor people I know here would like to have for education btw).
How does that prevent you from having a better internet ? Because you're too poor as a country ? Well preventing to have Free wikipedia will not solve that. having a free wikipedia will 1) show you the greatness of internet even if limited, 2) make you more educated so potentially richer so potentially with more disposable income to afford full internet. Then you can't say well, it discourages you from getting anything other than wikipedia because it's good enough AND you're missing an important part of internet which is pirating US movies (which are much more invasive worldwide).
I don't see many differences between this situation and the one in the west ~10/15 years ago without torrents sites, and barely a few sites available for free if you used the free AOL 50hour CDs, trying to pirate photoshop with disks.
We managed to survive and grow internet also.
Of course, Facebook offering is entirely different.
Offering free internet for the whole earth would be nice. It's not a requirement however.
Is the thrust of your argument that Angolans should be deprived of knowledge and data because they didn't ask for it, or that Wikipedia admins should only be allowed to block and unblock people from the same culture as them?
I mean, Angola has had copyright laws for a while now: the idea that the people behind these hacks are noble savages whose fragile culture is imperilled by Wikipedia admins is really insulting and patronising.
The British sold cloth in India at lower prices, undoubtedly providing many people with cloth they could not otherwise afford, and destroying India's textile industry making India dependent on buying British cloth.
Oh, they also insisted upon opium (that China could not otherwise afford?) being legal in China, when China wanted to prohibit it, and fought a war over it, because they wanted to sell opium in China.
IMO the real losers are facebook competitors.
But this is surely not what the article meant by "digital colonialism", so your question remains unanswered.