>>22680
Should I read this, or save my braincells? Also, screencap it and give an imgur link, so I don't give them clicks.

As an Indian citizen I find this infuriating and I am appalled my Gov. hasn't served a legal notice to facebook's establishments in India for disrespecting our national idols which is mind you a capital crime in India punishable on the same level as treason.

If not else i know one of the fringe nationalist groups would beat up and ransack facebook's employees and establishments on our soil respectively and that'd be justice served.

Jai Hind! Goro ke ma ki chuth.

Yes, it's a shitty article. It never even connects the facts it presents with actual reasons why Facebook's Free Basic is imperialism. Not to mention there are many holes in logic and presentation. For example:
> In the global context of today’s digital knowledge economies, these digital absences are likely to have very material effects and consequences.”
No, further elaboration was given as to how these "very material effects and consequences" take form. It even uses the weasel word "likely" because the author knew she couldn't write that sentence without that word.

Then there's the Super Mario quote:
>Representations of colonialism have long been present in digital landscapes. (“Even Super Mario Brothers,” the video game designer Steven Fox told me last year. “You run through the landscape, stomp on everything, and raise your flag at the end.”)
Again, no elaboration here. It's just thrown in as if this example means anything.

Facebook was totally laying down a bit of a Trojan horse here. They were going to be making a bucket of money off of ads and data. I might have been more tolerant of it if they had been more honest about it from the start.

context:
http://recode.net/2016/02/11/another-thing-andreessen-got-wrong-on-india-its-the-techies-that-are-against-facebook/

>On Monday, Facebook’s mobile service for emerging markets, Free Basics, was banned in India for violating net neutrality.

>On Tuesday, Facebook board member Marc Andreessen leapt to its defense — a plodding attempt that has produced a miniature continent-spanning controversy, a series of apologies and a rare condemnation from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

>It also did something else: It brushed over the issue’s complications in India.

>Andreessen’s point, one reiterated by others in his venture capital firm on Twitter, is that the benefits from Facebook’s Internet access program — a telecom partnership that subsidizes data costs for Facebook and other apps — outweighs any costs. The Valley investors framed the opposition to it as “ideological,” equating the critics with India’s historically anti-free-market government.

>But they missed the point. The opposition is from the techies. In actuality, a bulk of the effective resistance to Facebook’s Free Basics came from a wide swath of Indian industry and politics, including plenty of tech entrepreneurs and boosters.

>“Many Indian startups see Free Basics as a threat to a level playing field and fear that it could lead to distortions and cronyism,” said Sumanth Raghavendra, founder of mobile startup Deck in Bangalore. Raghavendra also wrote a rebuttal to Andreessen on (where else) Medium laying out his opposition. (It’s worth reading if you want to dig into the fascinating weeds here.)

>He’s not alone. Last month, 854 Indian startup founders signed a letter to the prime minister warning that differential mobile pricing — the mechanism behind Free Basics — would hamper innovation in the country.

>>22680
>Any thoughts on this development initiative of Facebook's
I don't care about the rest (of the post) because one would assume that the thought that Wikipedia was colonialist isn't a very wide held belief.

Facebook can go fuck itself with its "free basics". "basics" my ass, the plan is to capture a big market of untapped information and locking a big sector of people in a closed ecosystem a la AOL, everyone knows fb is in the information game, and what better information than the one that's hard to acquire, poor people information.
The Facebook West India Company if you will.

>>22710
as an Indian citizen, when the fuck did they ever do that?

>>22680
>Maybe I could give that some credence if it, y'know, had an army or a navy
Naive. wars are a waste of money. Old empires would have never used force if they knew how to conquer through other ways.

But yes, that article is shit, as if people searched Wikipedia only through the random article button.

>>22746
>the plan is to capture a big market of untapped information and locking a big sector of people in a closed ecosystem a la AOL, everyone knows fb is in the information game
This. I think I've said it before on /news/: Facebook will be able to experiment on how to control markets way easier in a market that they control completely. There's a lot you can math out a population and learn about social dynamics, and how to exploit them. All the while also making good money

>>22738
>The Valley investors framed the opposition to it as “ideological,” equating the critics with India’s historically anti-free-market government
>But they missed the point. The opposition is from the techies

>start-ups afraid that Facebook is more apt to compete in a free market
>must now regulate the market
>this somehow isn't anti-free market