‘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.”

Can’t stop. Won’t stop.

Mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell.

You’re thinking of The Moops.

The perfect hand doesn’t ex-

I’m not tempted to test the theory in order to find out. Either way, the sudden collapse in human life would put enormous downward pressure on carbon emissions. Can’t burn gas if you don’t have anyone left to pull it out of the ground.

Two in the back, one in the front.

The Shocker

Why implement a new feature for a product nobody is buying?

only being able to make him sound old and charming

He certainly sounded old. But we were nowhere near charming by the end. The guy was actively complicit in a genocide overseas when he wasn’t bumbling through a rising tide of fascist opposition.

I want that kind of boring president again.

Nothing about '21-'25 was boring. We needed a chief executive ready to dismantle the Trump 1 administration and scatter his Red State/Groyper/Business Plot coalition. Instead, we got him slow rolling prosecutions of the Trump Admin and handing blank checks to the same Silicon Valley goons that would flush his party out of power and begin chainsawing the administrative state to the bone.

Assuming we make it to '29 with a semblance of democracy still intact, the last thing we’re going to need is a Schumer tier do-nothing in office to clean up the biggest, bloodiest, most society-crippling mess of the last generation. All we’d be doing is queuing up Trump 3.

Even then, I think its clear that the damage being done today is functionally irreversible. DHS is becoming a junta in its own right. Everything from the HHS to NOAA is being scrapped for parts. The courts are already packed with fascists and are rewriting jurisprudence in real time. A full half of the liberal party’s representatives seem utterly blase at this turn of events, more interested in gassing up crypto scams and bailing out industrial giants than maintaining any kind of regulatory state.

You could bring in Bernie Sanders as King of America tomorrow and I don’t think we’d be able to pull out of this nose dive.

Hey, listen, you gotta… listen Jack, the path. You can’t get off it. There’s a dozen little guys, they’re all over the place. I just… It’s… when I was a young man I had this friend named Corn Pop and they got him too. Hairest legs. We used to go swimming and he felt like a cockroach. That’s why you can’t go off the path, Jack. They’ll tear you to pieces.

• Thanks, but can you just show me your wares
• [Vote] I nominate you for President
• That’s all I needed to hear, goodbye.

This joke gets funnier every time someone makes it

Margins on alcohol sales are fairly high, especially with high rates of industry consolidation over the last decade.

Retail alone collects a 20-30% vig on well standard hard liquor, for instance. Distributors can add another 40%.

The Gray Goose sticker price of $30 for 750mL includes an excise tax of $2.40 So around 8%, by comparison.

Unironically. Half the appeal of booze has historically been that its cheap.

I kinda wonder how much of the decline of high school/college drinking has to do with sticker shock.

Cash and Monero being on the same tier is very funny

Dear Past Self -

Do not piss off the nice assassin fellow that lives down the lane.

Sincerely

Future Se-

The Roman Aqueducts were largely slave driven like the rest of Roman society

The aqueducts were gravity driven. That was cumulative value add. They were an early form of automation.

Meanwhile, the cotton gin was slave driven. It still set off a rapid economic expansion in the southern US which mapped neatly to Marxist presumption of capital accumulation.

Capitalism as an encompassing system is only a few hundred years old

Industrialization as a global economic enterprise kicked off a few hundred years ago. The human propensity to accumulate wealth and the methods of compounding returns have always been with us.

The M-C-M’ circuit wasn’t always here.

Periodically, some community would find an opportunity for capital improvements that afforded a rapid growth cycle. Capital projects like the Roman Aquaducts and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, for instance, dramatically increased the surplus yielded by labor. The number of people who could live within a community rose and economic output rose with it. But it was still dwarfed by industrialization and geographic constraints limited the rate of expansion (you can’t build aquaducts and hanging gardens everywhere and expect to yield equivalent surplus). So you hit that classic Marxist diminishing return on profit and the rate of economic expansion fell back down into the low-single digits.

The circuit did exist though. The fundamental economic benefit of cyclical growth had a soft ceiling that primitive societies hit.

Now we’re in an industrial era that doesn’t feel like it has a ceiling. But it does. There really are ecological and resource limits, even to a post-industrial world. One day, we’re also going to hit that ceiling (assuming we haven’t already). I don’t think it would be fair to say - a few centuries after peak production / climate apocalypse sends us into a perpetual global depression - that Real Capitalism Has Never Been Tried.

Neither would I benchmark “When capitalism starts” the day after we construct a Dyson Sphere and master superluminal travel, because we’re kicking off a bigger wave of economic expansion than we enjoyed while earthbound.

What I might argue the ancient world lacked more than the M-C-M’ circuit was the degree of fictitious capital (which requires a big surplus-laden economically literate middle class). But that’s not capitalism et al, just a facet of modern speculative investment.

His neck isn’t nearly beardy enough.

Aeon Flux

Oh man, that was Heavy Metal tier crazy nonsense.

pulls out a list of Adult Swim cartoons

slaps them on the table

I also went to college in the '00s.