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Is Facebook's New Connectivity Platform a Product of Benevolence or Greed?
Facebook announced last week the launch of internet.org, an initiative to connect “the next five billion people,” according to a white paper by Mark Zuckerberg. In it he contends that connectivity is a human right, at least basic services like messaging, social networks, and search engines. Some are sure to be skeptical of Zuckerberg's benevolence, since he has already been accused of trying to take over the world wide web. Even more damning, the day following Facebook's announcement, a piece published in The Guardian suggested that Facebook's monopoly in Burma is hindering the progress of media.
A Quartz piece from last September spins the tale of Facebook as an evil Internet overlord, slowly taking over entire markets:
This is the story of Facebook’s rapidly unfolding plan to take over the world, or at least the world wide web. It’s a tale that’s been hiding in plain sight for years, and it begins with an explanation of how Facebook has reached almost a billion users. It continues with a roadmap for how the seeds of Facebook’s future growth – to two billion and beyond – have already been planted. In both cases, what matters is emerging markets in Asia, Africa, and Latin America: the striving, proto-middle class “next billion” whose first impression of the internet is often that it seems to consist entirely of a site called Facebook.
How did Zuckerberg accomplish such a feat? With Facebook Zero, a version of Facebook that works with simple feature phones, and that is completely free, at least until you download data chugging photos or click on a link to an external website.
Read the rest of Jessica McKenzie's article on the TechPresident.