Maybe I missed the part of the article where it said that people in Angola are being forced to use Wikipedia.
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 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.
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.