Facebook promised poor countries free internet: People got charged anyway
business-standard.com
business-standard.com
Seems like a breach of contract.
I'd be interested in seeing a more in-depth analysis of the total impact of the initiave to confirm though.
I know that I certainly wouldn't like my view of the internet to be delivered solely through Facebook's lens...
It's not a curated news site, you can at least talk to friends for free and only join whatever groups or pages are relevant to you which is a pure improvement over not having any options.
I'd rather not take the candy.
I mean what about car financing that seems exploitative, credit cards, coke ads, iPhone ads I mean they are over priced
Building fiber infrastructure alone doesn’t help the impoverished. If anything, it just exacerbates inequality and integrates the local elite with the first world, who then turn their back on the local poor. Globalism and imperialism are different constructs with the same ends.
There are drove of case studies demonstrating real benefits to the poor int he global south from internet access [1]. Having access to weather info, commodity prices, and digital banking are revolutionizing small hold farming in a lot of African countries. If you know how much your crop sells for you no longer need to trust the word of the commodity trader who comes to your farm, you now have more power to negotiate.
It's frankly stupid and offensive to equate internet access with imperialism.
[1] https://www.un.org/africarenewal/web-features/africa-leapfro...
We gave (some of) them internet, but denied them the rights to produce a vaccine in the middle of a global pandemic!!! What could possibly be more offensive than that? Not just offensive to them, or some of them, but to the entire human race. Capitalism is an absolute scourge.
> but denied them the *rights a vaccine in the middle of a global pandemic!!!
What does this have to do with internet access?
> What could possibly be more offensive than that
You're just changing the subject.
> Capitalism is an absolute scourge.
People love to say this, but extreme global poverty has decreased from 36% globally in 1990 to 9.9% in 2015 even with population increasing. Extreme poverty is defined as living on less than 1.90 international dollars per day. Here's a nice graph starting in 1900[2], fewer people live in crushing deprivation today than in 1900 and they are 7x more people today. Capitalism may not be the ultimate way to discover process and organize economically but it has nearly eradicated extreme poverty. Bringing the internet to new places will only help lift more people out of poverty. The assertion that it will only entrench the elite is completely without evidence.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00631-0 [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extre...
You literally said that building fiber exacerbates inequality and I am pointing out that evidence points in the opposite direction. I get it, we all hate facebook, but that doesn't mean that any evidence backs up your claim.
> a huge amount is going to be due to 1+ billion Chinese people increasing their quality of life - but is that really due to capitalism?
Almost all of that happened after Deng's market reforms with the bulk of the decline after 1995[2], so yes. The top 10 provinces in GDP per capita are all SEZs where China liberalized markets and trade. There are plenty of critiques of capitalism that are interesting and valid, but it is great for creating wealth and surplus goods/services. And that's exactly how you lift people out of extreme poverty. The Baumol effect, access to markets, and access to capital investment all break people out of subsistence.
[1] https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/11....
Facebook tried this in India and backed off after vocal opposition from internet freedom groups.
Many argued that these groups are being elitist in denying some semblance of internet access and connectivity to those who cannot afford it otherwise. The supporters of government initiatives went so far as to label the critics antinationals or paid by out of state actors to keep India backward.
But the whole way FB planned it was that the users will have a curated and controlled view of internet based on FBs controls.
In essence they wanted a large population to grow up believing Facebook is internet. Also would have given FB the power to charge various sites for the privilege of being allowed on their free plan.
This is very dangerous for a democracy. Even if it is slower to reach everyone a free internet -- as in sans middlemen controlling what you can access -- is the way to go.
At the time of this episode FB enjoyed a much better brand trust. Afterwards the whole 2016 election in US and FB's active and passive role in shaping public opinions has come to light and the enthusiasm for FB sponsored stuff at national scale has been tempered.
In the Philippines, you get prepaid promos. Nobody calls them "plans" here. Some of the promos are slim, like you might get 100MB or less of data along with texting.
Getting "charged" also sounds strange, because you don't get charges. You just use up your data and then you can no longer browse. But that's not quite true. If your data is gone, then you can still use Free Facebook. I always assumed that was the point of using Free Facebook. You don't use it when you have data, you only use it when your data is gone. But I guess there are people who are super conserving their data.
Free Facebook sucks, because you can't see images. I guess it sucks worse when Facebook is unexpectedly using up your data. I LOVE it because it's far less distracting.
Facebook isn't the only quirky service here. Many of the promos also give you a certain amount of data for YouTube. I found that the service I use just allows all Google data through. With YouTube data, I can still use Google and check Gmail. So, when I'm feeling cheap, I just proxy my connection through an instance on Google Compute, which I had already been using for other purposes.
These free plans don't have any data limits, they have site limits. You're only allowed to use certain sites otherwise you get charged. However, the phones themselves are supposed to identify this and keep you off those sites so you don't get a surprise bill. For some reason the free facebook app is leaking data from other IP address/Domains that aren't included in the free data plan. The ISPs are picking this up as non-free data usage and are charging customers.
Facebook needs to fix their crappy free version to stop this "leakage".
Source: I live in the country and use free Facebook all the time because I'm always forgetful and run out of load. The main reason for using Facebook is to keep in touch with people while I'm on the run. The service is still very popular in the Philippines.
EDIT: To clarify, there are no prepaid plans. They call them promos. The terms "plan" and "charges" seem to fit better with a postpaid setup. I believe the reason they would have "promos" is because at one time you could just buy load and it would "just work" without buying any sort of promo. The cost was relatively expensive, and about the same as you would pay for an internet cafe. It was a bit of a pain, because sometimes you would buy load and instantly lose part of that as soon as your phone connected to the internet. You could shut that off though. I don't know if they still have an option for doing that.
im not sure how free facebook thinks of it, but something like:
https://github.com/TheZoraiz/ascii-image-converter
, might help to share images in a text only situation.
There once was a person who worked to place land mines as part of their job for the khmer rouge, they spent their life trying to remove them. It didn't fix the initial destruction but it helped to set right some of the damage.
I can talk with Philippines from direct experience, but the two big players, Smart/Globe telecoms do try to grab "load" for the free experience even though you're on the right plan for Facebook Lite.
There has been much conversation about this too, on local media in the Philippines.
While I'm not a fan of FB/Meta, I can see how this is 100% the carriers telecom fault since FB runs similar campaigns throughout all of SouthEast Asia.
That's such a weird way to see things.
Facebook is spending billions of dollars building broadband in developing countries, which isn't costing these countries anything except being able to use Facebook, and they should... apologize by spending more billions of dollars building broadband free of charge?
"Building infrastructure so you can have a dominant position in an emerging market" isn't remotely similar to "placing landmines".
Dumped everything single FB app and life has been way better!
That is all
Mirror: https://archive.fo/mWd88
Because of FBs incompetence, users got poorer and carriers got richer.
I remember seeing huge branding spend via ads and hoarding all across India. With a billion population and 500+ million potential market, India is an important market for FB.
Also while TRAI, the regulating authority in India is phenomenol, the concept of compensation to users is non existent.
TRAI takes preventative and corrective actions policy wise, but does not take any actions that can compensate users.
For years DoT (Dept of Telecommunications) has stifled innovation in VoIP and cloud telephony, mandated surveillance of calls and SMS, invited regulatory capture strangling any chance of ISP / MVNO upstarts, called for ending encrypted communication... but sure: In this one case, they care about the consumer, so everything's fine and dandy.
It's also obvious that the push for low prices in India wasn't out of good will, it was for gathering massive amounts of data on new internet users and selling them on products and locking them into the "Jio ecosystem".
This article doesn't mention India at all, because there is no Facebook internet in India.
I remember seeing ads all over the place where I live here for 'WHATSAPP GRATIS!!!' 'FACEBOOK GRATIS!!!' everywhere from cellphone providers like movistar and claro... haha yeah great thanks for that like 5 years ago now what do we have? Oh some kind of dystopian schizophrenic nightmare? Thanks mark! FUCKING GRINGO
The amount of damage it's done to our society is immesurable. Ineffably bad. Unspeakable in the enormity of how horribly awful the consequences have been and continue to be when we all know our conversations are being monetized.
Overall I find it actually suprisingly usable, which is a habit that I more or less carried until the "modern" times where I browse Facebook on my Android Firefox instead using the bloated app and Messenger.
“anything that Facebook does is bad even if it helps people” and “poorer people are better off in the dark than using anything Facebook made”
Having some form of internet is clearly better than none at all and criticizing efforts to expand internet access should at least come with some viable alternative.
Applying first world values like data security and privacy to third world farmers just shows a total lack of empathy.
To "throw the baby out with the bathwater" is a common idiom in America, meaning roughly to discard something valuable along with other things that are inessential or undesirable.
I can't figure out any interpretation of the statement which is offensive, so I'm guessing there's something getting "lost in translation" between countries or cultures here that I'm hoping you can help me understand.
You can read that sentence as "you are trying to remove colonialism remains but you are kicking out us; we are just capitalists, not colonizers!" while they probably indeed are, or are seen as, colonizers as well.
Not that it really much, though. Both figures are nothing to Meta and arguably less than they could get of customers that trust them over the long term.