> Because of software problems at Facebook, which it has known about and failed to correct for months, people using the apps in free mode are getting unexpectedly charged by local cellular carriers for using data. In many cases they only discover this when their prepaid plans are drained of funds.
I suspect that Facebook has helped more people with their free internet initiatives than it has hurt regardless. It sucks some users got burnt due to leakage of paid traffic or bad communication/configuration/deal negotiation with carriers but those still seem to be just a fraction globally.
I'd be interested in seeing a more in-depth analysis of the total impact of the initiave to confirm though.
To be completely honest, I don't think this was a great deal for the users from the start. It seemed like Facebook prying on an uneducated, easily manipulated audience to increase their user base.
I know that I certainly wouldn't like my view of the internet to be delivered solely through Facebook's lens...
When the choice is no internet vs only having Facebook the latter simply gives you more options.
It's not a curated news site, you can at least talk to friends for free and only join whatever groups or pages are relevant to you which is a pure improvement over not having any options.
this is kinda tipa of the iceberg of what fb did in this area.
they also did a bunch of fiber in africa and i think south america in order to enable local internet/mobile providers. a bunch of software/hardware initiatives to allow setup wisps for cheap, etc. there is (or was) entire department dedicated to building/enabling internet/mobile infra in third world countries
Building fiber infrastructure alone doesn’t help the impoverished. If anything, it just exacerbates inequality and integrates the local elite with the first world, who then turn their back on the local poor. Globalism and imperialism are different constructs with the same ends.
This is an asinine take. Local elites were probably already connected with the broader world.
There are drove of case studies demonstrating real benefits to the poor int he global south from internet access [1]. Having access to weather info, commodity prices, and digital banking are revolutionizing small hold farming in a lot of African countries. If you know how much your crop sells for you no longer need to trust the word of the commodity trader who comes to your farm, you now have more power to negotiate.
It's frankly stupid and offensive to equate internet access with imperialism.
Imagine that. The United Nations promoting a capitalist scheme.
We gave (some of) them internet, but denied them the rights to produce a vaccine in the middle of a global pandemic!!! What could possibly be more offensive than that? Not just offensive to them, or some of them, but to the entire human race. Capitalism is an absolute scourge.
This is such a tiresome argument. Here's a paper in Nature that specifically endorses last mile internet infrastructure to improve farmers' income[1].
> but denied them the *rights a vaccine in the middle of a global pandemic!!!
What does this have to do with internet access?
> What could possibly be more offensive than that
You're just changing the subject.
> Capitalism is an absolute scourge.
People love to say this, but extreme global poverty has decreased from 36% globally in 1990 to 9.9% in 2015 even with population increasing. Extreme poverty is defined as living on less than 1.90 international dollars per day. Here's a nice graph starting in 1900[2], fewer people live in crushing deprivation today than in 1900 and they are 7x more people today. Capitalism may not be the ultimate way to discover process and organize economically but it has nearly eradicated extreme poverty. Bringing the internet to new places will only help lift more people out of poverty. The assertion that it will only entrench the elite is completely without evidence.
> Building fiber infrastructure alone doesn’t help the impoverished. If anything, it just exacerbates inequality
You literally said that building fiber exacerbates inequality and I am pointing out that evidence points in the opposite direction. I get it, we all hate facebook, but that doesn't mean that any evidence backs up your claim.
If poverty is defined as an absolute amount of currency, and inflation exists, wouldn't that rate always trend down? You also have to ask to what degree capitalism is responsible for the changes you mention - a huge amount is going to be due to 1+ billion Chinese people increasing their quality of life - but is that really due to capitalism?
It's based on purchasing power parity[1] and is adjusted for inflation, not absolute USD in a given year.
> a huge amount is going to be due to 1+ billion Chinese people increasing their quality of life - but is that really due to capitalism?
Almost all of that happened after Deng's market reforms with the bulk of the decline after 1995[2], so yes. The top 10 provinces in GDP per capita are all SEZs where China liberalized markets and trade. There are plenty of critiques of capitalism that are interesting and valid, but it is great for creating wealth and surplus goods/services. And that's exactly how you lift people out of extreme poverty. The Baumol effect, access to markets, and access to capital investment all break people out of subsistence.
I don't think "helped" is the proper term here. The entire premise is to get people on to facebook and to keep them engaged. Maybe that has some benefits to the user but the real benefit is to Facebook seeing that users are the product and that Facebook's value is tied to how many users are engaged.
Facebook tried this in India and backed off after vocal opposition from internet freedom groups.
Many argued that these groups are being elitist in denying some semblance of internet access and connectivity to those who cannot afford it otherwise. The supporters of government initiatives went so far as to label the critics antinationals or paid by out of state actors to keep India backward.
But the whole way FB planned it was that the users will have a curated and controlled view of internet based on FBs controls.
In essence they wanted a large population to grow up believing Facebook is internet. Also would have given FB the power to charge various sites for the privilege of being allowed on their free plan.
This is very dangerous for a democracy. Even if it is slower to reach everyone a free internet -- as in sans middlemen controlling what you can access -- is the way to go.
At the time of this episode FB enjoyed a much better brand trust. Afterwards the whole 2016 election in US and FB's active and passive role in shaping public opinions has come to light and the enthusiasm for FB sponsored stuff at national scale has been tempered.
In the Philippines, you get prepaid promos. Nobody calls them "plans" here. Some of the promos are slim, like you might get 100MB or less of data along with texting.
Getting "charged" also sounds strange, because you don't get charges. You just use up your data and then you can no longer browse. But that's not quite true. If your data is gone, then you can still use Free Facebook. I always assumed that was the point of using Free Facebook. You don't use it when you have data, you only use it when your data is gone. But I guess there are people who are super conserving their data.
Free Facebook sucks, because you can't see images. I guess it sucks worse when Facebook is unexpectedly using up your data. I LOVE it because it's far less distracting.
Facebook isn't the only quirky service here. Many of the promos also give you a certain amount of data for YouTube. I found that the service I use just allows all Google data through. With YouTube data, I can still use Google and check Gmail. So, when I'm feeling cheap, I just proxy my connection through an instance on Google Compute, which I had already been using for other purposes.
You seem to be confusing these promos you mentioned with the low income plans offered in other countries. They are unrelated.
These free plans don't have any data limits, they have site limits. You're only allowed to use certain sites otherwise you get charged. However, the phones themselves are supposed to identify this and keep you off those sites so you don't get a surprise bill. For some reason the free facebook app is leaking data from other IP address/Domains that aren't included in the free data plan. The ISPs are picking this up as non-free data usage and are charging customers.
Facebook needs to fix their crappy free version to stop this "leakage".
Maybe the terms are just confusing to me. In the Philippines, there are no plans. You buy a SIM and it's ready to go. You can get Free Facebook immediately. There is no Free "plan." If you don't buy load, then you aren't going to get "charged" for using free Facebook because you don't have load. And you're right, you get free Facebook for as long as you need to use it.
Source: I live in the country and use free Facebook all the time because I'm always forgetful and run out of load. The main reason for using Facebook is to keep in touch with people while I'm on the run. The service is still very popular in the Philippines.
EDIT: To clarify, there are no prepaid plans. They call them promos. The terms "plan" and "charges" seem to fit better with a postpaid setup. I believe the reason they would have "promos" is because at one time you could just buy load and it would "just work" without buying any sort of promo. The cost was relatively expensive, and about the same as you would pay for an internet cafe. It was a bit of a pain, because sometimes you would buy load and instantly lose part of that as soon as your phone connected to the internet. You could shut that off though. I don't know if they still have an option for doing that.
Interesting! Facebook mostly runs behind Akamai right? Maybe there is a method of setting up a VPN that proxies your traffic through Akamai servers, e.g. through their serverless computing offering, that would similarly work.
Oh, I thought akamai was actually a facebook spin-off or in some way related, considering it made perfect sense to roll their own CDN, but also to offer this to other parties.
How much would it cost to make things right and provide full unrestricted broadband to both counties? It would go a long way to restore their image. Instead of old Google's "do no evil" adopting "make it right" would restore a lot of public faith.
There once was a person who worked to place land mines as part of their job for the khmer rouge, they spent their life trying to remove them. It didn't fix the initial destruction but it helped to set right some of the damage.
It's also carrier dependent, depending on the FB CDN and the local telecom carrier, the traffic may not have been routing properly.
I can talk with Philippines from direct experience, but the two big players, Smart/Globe telecoms do try to grab "load" for the free experience even though you're on the right plan for Facebook Lite.
There has been much conversation about this too, on local media in the Philippines.
While I'm not a fan of FB/Meta, I can see how this is 100% the carriers telecom fault since FB runs similar campaigns throughout all of SouthEast Asia.
> How much would it cost to make things right and provide full unrestricted broadband to both counties?
That's such a weird way to see things.
Facebook is spending billions of dollars building broadband in developing countries, which isn't costing these countries anything except being able to use Facebook, and they should... apologize by spending more billions of dollars building broadband free of charge?
"Building infrastructure so you can have a dominant position in an emerging market" isn't remotely similar to "placing landmines".
In India, the telecom regulatory authority does a great job protecting consumer interests. The article doesn't even mention India. Infact, India has some of the lowest data plan costs, even when adjusted for cost of living.
True. But FBs target markets were emerging ones, especially India, South East Asia, South America, etc.
I remember seeing huge branding spend via ads and hoarding all across India. With a billion population and 500+ million potential market, India is an important market for FB.
Also while TRAI, the regulating authority in India is phenomenol, the concept of compensation to users is non existent.
TRAI takes preventative and corrective actions policy wise, but does not take any actions that can compensate users.
> In India, the telecom regulatory authority does a great job protecting consumer interests
For years DoT (Dept of Telecommunications) has stifled innovation in VoIP and cloud telephony, mandated surveillance of calls and SMS, invited regulatory capture strangling any chance of ISP / MVNO upstarts, called for ending encrypted communication... but sure: In this one case, they care about the consumer, so everything's fine and dandy.
You're going to give a source for the first sentence, that is just not true in my opinion. Lower prices doesn't matter if the internet is heavily controlled and is shut down in areas like J&K.
It's also obvious that the push for low prices in India wasn't out of good will, it was for gathering massive amounts of data on new internet users and selling them on products and locking them into the "Jio ecosystem".
The prevalance of whatsapp in latin america is because of this.
I remember seeing ads all over the place where I live here for 'WHATSAPP GRATIS!!!' 'FACEBOOK GRATIS!!!' everywhere from cellphone providers like movistar and claro... haha yeah great thanks for that like 5 years ago now what do we have? Oh some kind of dystopian schizophrenic nightmare? Thanks mark! FUCKING GRINGO
The amount of damage it's done to our society is immesurable. Ineffably bad. Unspeakable in the enormity of how horribly awful the consequences have been and continue to be when we all know our conversations are being monetized.
I guess it wasn't news to me. They did that exact thing to 0.facebook when Facebook was the hot new nerdy thing 10 years ago at my area. I would keep my prepaid in at the lowest denomination of currency possible (think 0.01) to be able to browse 0.fb since it charged for my browsing even though it was supposed to be free.
Overall I find it actually suprisingly usable, which is a habit that I more or less carried until the "modern" times where I browse Facebook on my Android Firefox instead using the bloated app and Messenger.
I’m somewhat disappointed that most of the comments in this thread take the form of:
“anything that Facebook does is bad even if it helps people” and “poorer people are better off in the dark than using anything Facebook made”
Having some form of internet is clearly better than none at all and criticizing efforts to expand internet access should at least come with some viable alternative.
Applying first world values like data security and privacy to third world farmers just shows a total lack of empathy.
Data colonialism is bad enough on these poor people. I see a future world divided into data literate privileged people who can secure their privacy and those who are colonialized and exploited.
A western corporation gives people free voluntary access to a certain part of the internet and in exchange sucks them for their data (in exactly the same way that it does this to perfectly middle and upper class western users of the same platform) and this is somehow comparable to colonialism, but with "data"?? Oh please, enough with the absurd cliche leftist caricatures about western technologies being hegemonic and so forth. Yes, some of them are, but why not ask the billions of FB users in the developing world if they'd prefer to have companies like Facebook simply leave under the present circumstances? I happen to live in a developing country where Facebook use is widespread. People criticize the company's crap regularly enough, but many of them also willingly, even happily use much of its platform. They're not being forcibly "colonized" in any coherent sense of the word.
Yes people in all parts of the world have different levels of data literacy. Understanding what one is giving up by allowing someone else to own so much data about one's self and community is not common anywhere but particularly uncommon among less privileged.
Not sure if we can save the people of today but we can take steps to make sure this doesn't happen to the next generation. In my case I've expressly forbidden family members still using Meta platforms from posting pictures of my kids there. Once they get to a certain age I'll be blocking said platforms on my home network. It's the responsible thing to do.
Facebook tried to pull this shit in India too. Didn't work out. A lot of Facebook execs wrote Twitter posts about how India "threw out the capitalist baby with the colonial bathwater". Believe it or not those were the exact words.
India literally did that though, and they are still suffering because of it. There are probably more than 100MM people waking up next to a loom in their hut...that they work each day,all day, making fine cloth for subsistence wages.
Getting a peek at how they talk to each other internally is really eye-opening, it's incredible how they've gathered such a large group of people that are completely detached from reality.
Genuine question, can you explain what's upsetting to you about it?
To "throw the baby out with the bathwater" is a common idiom in America, meaning roughly to discard something valuable along with other things that are inessential or undesirable.
I can't figure out any interpretation of the statement which is offensive, so I'm guessing there's something getting "lost in translation" between countries or cultures here that I'm hoping you can help me understand.
Because colonialism is not merely “inessential” nor “undesirable”. I mean, some hyper-nationalist or supremacist groups do feel proud of the colonial history, but if that’s not the case, the phrase just show the ignorance regarding the history of colonialism.
> I can't figure out any interpretation of the statement which is offensive, so I'm guessing there's something getting "lost in translation" between countries or cultures here that I'm hoping you can help me understand.
You can read that sentence as "you are trying to remove colonialism remains but you are kicking out us; we are just capitalists, not colonizers!" while they probably indeed are, or are seen as, colonizers as well.
You've been tricked by the author of the article. This wasn't 8 million dollars, it was likely closer to $500,000. The 8 million dollars is after PPP adjusting (for example, Philippines has a 20x PPP multiplier).
Wow. I considered that, but then thought "well that would make no sense at all" and discarded it.
Not that it really much, though. Both figures are nothing to Meta and arguably less than they could get of customers that trust them over the long term.
Seems like a breach of contract.