Here‘s Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) destroying Facebook and Google’s ambition to “spread connectivity across the globe” in a single blow:
Facebook, Google’s closest competitor, pulls the same trick with connectivity. Its Internet.org initiative, which now operates in Latin America, south-east Asia and Africa, was ostensibly launched to promote digital inclusion and get the poor in the developing world online. Online they do get but it’s a very particular kind of “online”: Facebook and a few other sites and apps are free but users have to pay for everything else, often based on how much data their individual apps consume. As a result, few of these people – remember, we are talking about very poor populations – are likely to afford the world outside Facebook’s content empire.
Here is the Varian rule at work again: on the face of it, the poor do get what the rich have already – internet connectivity. But the key difference is not hard to spot. Unlike the rich, who pay for their connectivity with their cash, the poor pay for it with their data – the data that Facebook would one day monetise in order to justify the entire Internet.org operation.
Google‘s chief economist, Hal Varian, has such narrow-minded logic it could make someone think he’s overlooking some “details” in good faith, but when the “details” are the economic reality of 2/3 of the people in the globe, it makes very clear what’s behind the bullshit of his “Luxury is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed”: a desire to profit on top of people that have much less than you do, providing the same service the western-white-middle-class world already has, for much much more.