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Comment by xevb3k | Hacker News Reader

The bridgwater team was based around the acquisition of a consultancy company 4 years ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/28/facebook-...

I can’t find the exact story, but wasn’t there some recent news that they were mostly abandoning Free Basics/Internet.org? From what I can tell Free Basics seems to have been mostly a failure.

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Maybe this? https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/02/facebook-free-basics-qui...

There is also this from 2016 - https://www.computerworld.com/article/3032646/internet/the-s...

So even if Free Basics "sites" were actual sites on the Internet (which they're not), it would be 0.00000005 percent of the web. The real Internet is at least 20 million times bigger than Facebook's fake Internet. It's like McDonald's giving a poor person a free sesame seed and claiming credit for giving them a free Big Mac. The other important difference for Facebook is that Free Basics offers a version of the "web" without any of Facebook's competitors.

It was overly obvious capitalist “altruism washing”. If they had just come out to say directly that they wanted to provide free internet so that they could monopolize emerging undeveloped markets it might have been better received.

*if they had just offered bags of cash to local politicians in exchange for access to their constituents (like the US), this would've been a raging success.

Don't underestimate how much PR is for persuading internal decision makers as much as the public. To outright admit the goal may make little difference to the public, but it might doom the project internally, with the board, or limit its ability to recruit talent cheaper.

There's a lot of interesting research surrounding corporate responsibility policies and how they aid recruiting and may affect productivity of workers.

Hmmm, I wonder if the golden handcuffs all fell off at 4 years, and everybody who was part of creating the project and technology has cashed out and left?

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