‘It’s digital colonialism’: how Facebook’s free internet service has failed its users

Free Basics, built for developing markets, focuses on ‘western corporate content’ and violates net neutrality principles, researchers say

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“Facebook is not introducing people to open internet where you can learn, create and build things,” said Ellery Biddle, advocacy director of Global Voices. “It’s building this little web that turns the user into a mostly passive consumer of mostly western corporate content. That’s digital colonialism.”

To deliver the service, which is now active in 65 countries, Facebook partners with local mobile operators. Mobile operators agree to “zero-rate” the data consumed by the app, making it free, while Facebook does the technical heavy lifting to ensure that they can do this as cheaply as possible. Each version is localized, offering a slightly different set of up to 150 sites and services. But many of the services with the most prominent placement – on the app’s homepage - are created by private US companies, regardless of the market. These include AccuWeather, Johnson & Johnson-owned BabyCenter, BBC News, ESPN and the search engine Bing. There are no other social networking sites apart from Facebook and no email provider.

Incidentally, “Free Basics” and its derivatives are some of the biggest drivers of new Facebook user activity. The walled garden of internet access forces people to choose between open internet rates they are too poor to afford and being guinea pigs in Mark Zuckerberg’s AI maze of misinformation and saturation advertisement. Zuck can go to investors and insist “Our growth in these emerging markets is enormous!” and then go to the national governments of these poor countries and say “If you don’t legislate favorably, we’re going to flood your populations’ media feeds with advertisements by the political opposition.”

Getting really nervous when my office computer sign-on keeps prompting me to enter my credit card information.

Andrew Yang also championed hiring a management consulting firm to identify areas of inefficiency in the federal workforce and cut 15–20% of current government workers, assigning KPIs and sunset clauses to all Congressional legislation, and assigning AI life coaches with Oprah’s voice to people in need of marriage counseling.

So, a very mixed bag of ideas. Few of them had a serious implementation behind them. Yang loved to noodle, but failed to explain where the novel technologies and extra-constitutional authorities would come from.

Unfortunately, the people pushing AI are the same ones selling recreational flamethrowers

It’s great for getting off the ground in a language you’re unfamiliar with. But a recipe for technical debt when used long term. You’re inviting spaghetti code with some real hair pulling bugs.

4 hour planning

I’ve seen projects where this was comically too high. But a lot more where it was horrifyingly agonizingly too low.

We still have forums and blogs. Search engines just don’t both including them in search results.

You need to know about these niche communities, which are increasingly in micro-spaces like Discord or Mastodon channels or unmonitored communities like Lemmy.

Which is more in line with Bad Old Web 1.0 than Good Old Web 1.5

At some point, the mistake was using Reddit to begin with.

I’m not saying we have state-mandated couples

The need to make this clarification should be grounds for divorce.

People that litter are atupid/lazy/poorly educated.

Littering is a function of the laziness of the individual combined with the inconvenience of normal waste disposal. If you live in a neighborhood where trash pick-up is infrequent or unreliable, you’re going to find a lot more littering as a matter of simple convenience compared to one where trash pickups are regular and routine.

The public expectation of efficient trash pickup also creates social pressure on individual neighbors not to dump illegally.

Hardly an issue of stupidity. We’ve got shops a short ride away that sell you disposables with the intent of bringing them into the park. And we’ve got a park that’s removed the bins used to cart the waste back out again.

The stupidity is in the policy. Either you have to prevent people from bringing this stuff in (incredibly difficult) or you have to manage the waste that exists by centralizing its collection and export (significantly easier and cheaper).

“Genius Bar” was always just a means of getting people back into the Apple Store to sell them another product. This is an iteration on a general theme.

I love how in a world where we banned straws

We didn’t. If anything, we are in a world where we banned banning straws, because even this trivial token concession was considered a Violation of Our Fundamental Freedoms. Media personalities screaming and nashing their teeth over straws was a PR stunt by petrochemical companies to backstop any kind of radical anti-plastic reforms.

Anybody who asks me about Windows 10’s EOL date will be introduced to the option of using Linux before i’ll help them select a replacement system.

Cheers to this.

The Internet will continue to function just fine, just as it has for 50 years.

Sounds of intercontinental data cables being sliced

Its a self-perpetuating cycle. Set aside the normally deplorable state of YouTube comments. Once you hit a critical mass of “Neat!” and “I liked it 💖🇺🇸🎆” and “Prussy en bi0” comments, why the hell would you bother reading much less participating? Then human interactions tank and its Oops! All Bots! in short order.

I am less annoyed by YouTube being shit and more annoyed by 3rd party websites clinging to YouTube for their video hosting needs because it is free. I’m also annoyed by the degree to which scrappers and other automation tools have made “Are You A Bot?” filters necessary to conserve the (relatively) limited resources of big retail web front-ends.

Like, fuck YouTube, sure. But they’re not putting these blocks up for the thrill of it. They’re trying to limit served content to actual humans rather than automated engines intended to juice view counts and harvest “free” data for AI training.

Anarchists recognize class as a social construct rather than a biological imperative or a free market condition. As a result, they will often make a point of transgressing or undermining the pageantry that class-centric organizations cling to.

Its not that they think “no classes” will be a result so much as they think “explicitly defying class” is a political act.

Real State of Exception Hours

he’ll change his mind if a girl he likes tells him he stinks…

Maybe. Or maybe he’ll get incredibly offended, go into a snit, and start posting incel-tier “Women are trying to steal our manly essenses” memes on 4chan for a few weeks.

I genuinely enjoyed the early game. It had a lot of promise, the build up of tension was engaging, the world they laid out was exactly the kind of FF7 techno-magical cyberpunk and sorcery mish mash Final Fantasy does well. I loved the characters as they were introduced and was curious to see whether the wanna-be boy band aesthetic would culminate in an FFX-2 style dance battle motif.

But its obvious they just ran out of gas after the first major arc. All that world building up front, but the game completely falls apart after you leave the main continent. By then of the game, you’re literally On Rails after giving you this rich open world to explore for a hundred hours upfront. Tons of buildup but very little payoff. Not what you want in an FF title. I was deeply disappointed in FF13’s Big Hallway style of storytelling, but at least the story paid out in the end.