"Poor internet for poor people"

"Poor internet for poor people"

Mahesh Murthy:

Here is how the scheme works. Facebook approaches a telco – in India’s case, Reliance – and offers to pay them the bandwidth costs of serving Facebook site and a small group of other sites.

So when the poor, who in theory cannot afford a net connection come to the Facebook Zero service confusingly called Internet.org, they are made to believe they are on the internet while in reality they are only on Facebook and a few hand-picked sites.

And the sites too are picked in secret under some unknown process. For instance, Facebook chose to offer the distant-second search engine Bing instead of industry-leading Google. Why? Is it rivalry with Google? Or because of Microsoft’s stake in Facebook? And then Facebook’s Zero product features a tiny job site like Babajob instead of the industry-leading Naukri. Why? So that the poor have fewer job options? No one knows. Facebook does not feature YouTube – the largest video site in the world and an immense education resource – but allows its own videos in full. It does not really look like charity any more, does it?

I was worried about this when I heard about Internet.org. It appears that it isn’t bringing the Internet to the poor, it’s instead bringing Facebook as the internet, along with the highest bidders.