Is A Free, Ad-Laden, No-Privacy, Walled-Off Version Of The Internet Better Than No Internet At All?
from the welcome-to-the-not-quite-Internet dept
Overseas there has been a growing push to draw in more Facebook and Google users by making it so select Facebook or Google content doesn't count against your mobile data plan. From the Philippines to Kenya, you can see these efforts exemplified by services like Facebook Zero and Google Free Zone. Facebook Zero, for example, allows you to browse Facebook almost as normal, though you'll be charged normal data rates if you try to download something like photos and video, or in some cases if you travel to any other website.Now, news has emerged that Facebook is spending $60 million to acquire drone-manufacturer Titan Aerospace. The idea is that Facebook could use these drones to provide fly-over connectivity for lower income nations. While it makes for good headlines whether that ever actually happens is pretty dubious, given there's a long history of mixed results when it comes to providing broadband by aircraft, whether that's via hot air balloon, Santa sleigh or drone. Really, when it's all said and done, it's an effort to grab a larger chunk of potential ad eyeballs under the pageantry of purported altruism.
Here in the States, we haven't experimented with the idea of free gateway access yet much, though companies like T-Mobile prepaid brand GoSmart have hinted at the idea. Speaking at the Mobile World Congress trade show this week in Barcelona, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that he'd really like to see his expanded free ambitions take off further in additional countries:
"Zuckerberg said that Internet.org, which Facebook and other partners announced last year, is designed to create a reliable program to help "on-ramp" those customers to the Internet by offering a free tier of service, much like 911 on the wired telephone network. "We want to create a similar kind of dial tone to the Internet," Zuckerberg said...Facebook's work with wireless carrier Globe in the Philippines has doubled the number of people there accessing the Internet. He said in that program Globe is making access to Facebook free and then charging for access to other sites. In a separate effort in Paraguay, where Facebook is working with operator Tigo, the number of people using data has jumped 50 percent, and the number of people using it daily jumped 70 percent, by offering free access to Facebook."Usually, these statements are followed by citing a lot of studies about how improved Internet penetration helps developing nations (studies focused on actual Internet access, not Zuckerberg's definition of it). Critics contest these users aren't really being connected to the actual Internet and all that entails. They're being connected to bizarre new walled-garden universes where privacy doesn't exist, connectivity is fractured, and they themselves are the product. Is this helpful if you step back and take a longer view? Folks like Susan Crawford don't seem to think so:
"For poorer people, Internet access will equal Facebook. That's not the Internet—that’s being fodder for someone else’s ad-targeting business," she says. "That’s entrenching and amplifying existing inequalities and contributing to poverty of imagination—a crucial limitation on human life."I honestly find myself quite torn between thinking that any connectivity is better than none (it depends entirely on the implementation of the effort), and the idea that we're establishing a painfully-low baseline of expectation in developing countries in terms of what the Internet is supposed to be. How different is what Facebook is doing from AT&T's sponsored data idea when you strip away a few layers, and if people are introduced to the Internet as a fractured, distorted walled garden at their first encounter with it, what does it evolve into for them down the road?
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Filed Under: advertising, drone, internet
Companies: facebook, titan aerospace
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Awesome
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Yipee
On-ramp, Adjective. Also means to ass-rape.
The by-product of this is we'll also get to be "on-ramped". Whee!
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The Answer Is “No”
Any new walled garden is doomed to the same fate of extinction. No company, or cartel of companies, can match the billions of dollars of investment in connectivity represented by the entire Internet.
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Site bug!
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Just imagine for a second if your "internet" was exclusive to your hardware device: Apple had its own (proprietary) "internet" and Hewlett Packard had it's own, etc., and a website like Google had to pay rent to Apple to connect to Apple's "internet" exclusively, while Facebook paid its licensing fees to Hewlett Packard to connect to HP's "internet" -- and neither one was accessible from the other network unless the user paid an ATM-like usage fee.
The Internet might very well have worked out that way -- and I'm actually surprised that it didn't.
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Wrong.
Corporate would not have created anything like the present internet, walled or not. They are not that creative nor forward thinkging. In addition, they are scared shitless of the public being in possession of a mass communication device as their business plans rely upon misinformation, deception, outright lies and manipulation.
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And unlike computers today, cellular telephone networks are still mostly proprietary -- you can't (in most cases) switch phone service providers without replacing your hardware.
But getting back to my original point, I could certainly envision an alternate universe in which the old systems of the mini-computers' proprietary systems and walled-gardens had evolved outward, resulting in several competing (but incompatible) "Internets" -- instead of a single, unified collection of open standards that we collectively know today as "the Internet."
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You should be saying "In US ...". In "rest of the world" (please check your map where is it) we can switch SIM card and go to another provider; no hardware replace needed.
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Though saying "the rest of the world" would not be totally accurate either. The US military occupation authorities pushed for CDMA (rather than GSM) in Iraq and Afghanistan.
While on the subject of Cellular telephones, I can point out another result of the US government's hands-off policy: there have been hundreds of different batteries, chargers and *proprietary* plug-in connections, ostensibly designed to maximize profit by eliminating competition. It's even worse than printer ink. Someone who bought a cheap prepaid CT (which included a battery and charger) would be required to spend several times that price just to replace either the battery or the charger.
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you young whippersnappers
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Re: you young whippersnappers
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No
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Sounds like a description of Internet2 to me.
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Yeah, that makes a WHOLE lot of sense...
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In related news...
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/sarcasm
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Also that rational is somewhat lacking in persuasiveness.
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