...yet
You're assuming that that won't change? Countries won't gain capital influence? You don't think that might affect spending habits & advertisers won't adjust? You really want to make that bet?
> If people don’t have disposable income
Oh, hold on there Bob, you've jumped from one assertion to another. What makes you think that people in third-world countries don't have disposable income?
You didn't answer the question.
Oftentimes, other languages or undeveloped areas are MORE profitable because there's less competition.
Also, I laid out out how it might actually CHANGE - which was a direct response to your question "why would it change?" Now you're asserting it very well might change?
I don't understand your argument.
The ammount of money that can be made in the thirld world is staggering. Another case of shlep blindness?
This is probably related to the fact that they don't have quite a few of the items that those in other parts of the world take for granted.
Mobile phones, refrigerators, television sets, household items of all shapes & sizes as well as vehicles are very high on the list of desirables and any substantial income tends to be converted into stuff.
In countries where infrastructure is weak a mobile phone is a lot of things at once and so it tends to be very high on the list of things to acquire, a refrigerator (provided you have power regularly) is a way to save money and all the other things in that list signal 'status', something humans all over the world are sensitive to, the third world is definitely no exception in this respect.
Even in non developing countries plenty of people spend money on stuff they can barely afford rather than on their health or the quality of their food.
That is what credit cards are for..To buy things you don't really need, with money you don't really have...
The analogy would be closer to the Rockefeller relationship with Oil. They controlled the entire system (and was eventually found to be a monopoly and broken up).
The above comment wasn't meant to say that Facebook is going to do harm (intentional), but that it's "harmful" (for the overall internet ecosystem) for Facebook to control internet access (for close to 2B people) like this.
[1] please don't take this comment down a "series of tubes."
On the other hand, I agree that we are going to see some awful things as a result of internet.org activities.
From my personal view as an employee of one corp, it all comes down how people are rewarded/motivated to get things done. If short term profit is the king, morals are not so much part of the equation, resulting in all kinds of mess. Exceptions do happen, but they are what they are - exceptions...
Even if an employee is in charge of the big decisions, still no dice. No one of them can decide "Choice A makes more money, but choice B is the moral one" and make choice B without repercussion. Said repercussion usually being firing, demotion or career derailing. Then you get somebody in their position who WILL make the profit decision.
Everyone in a company is responsible to the board, who are responsible to the stockholders, who are individually interested in profit only (by definition).
Money is not just money, it equals to power as well, so those with the majority will rule.
Money is in that sense not directly harmful, but misunderstanding that companies have their own agendas is rather harmful.
My guess is they are optimizing for long term revenue, ie avoiding an indian vkontakte.
You know that many practices, like price dumping (having preditorially low prices of things) is illegal for the obvious reasons? In a price-dumping kind of way, do you see how what Facebook is doing could be very bad?
You seem to have skipped a lot of specifics.