Facebook’s free Internet initiative is exploitation disguised as charity

For those of you who have been living under a rock over the past few weeks, Facebook has been trying to spread its free Internet initiative across the developing world, but it’s being met with immense opposition from basically everyone. The idea might sound good on paper, but the reason people are so against this Free Basics initiative, especially in India, is that it doesn’t really give people access to the Internet, just the parts of the Internet that Facebook approves, which obviously includes its own services. Even though Mark Zuckerberg has tried to paint this is a charitable effort, all of the evidence suggests that Facebook is simply trying to exploit impoverished people in developing nations in order to increase its userbase and gain more control over the Internet.

You’re probably long-since familiar with the basic dispute: Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are offering free “internet” to India’s poor, with the caveat that it comes through Facebook and only includes a limited list of Facebook-approved sites (although technically anyone can apply to join). This, Zuckerberg argues, is a charitable mission to help bring the next billion internet users online. Critics counter that it’s a violation of net neutrality, giving the poor access to a walled garden that isn’t the real internet and that’s meant to turn new internet users into Facebook users. Zuckerberg seems to be baffled by the fact that so many Indians aren’t welcoming his “gift” with open arms. So baffled, in fact, that he recently wrote an op-ed in the Times of India about it. But whatever you think about Zuckerberg’s intentions and Internet.org as an idea, there’s no denying that his article is a patronizing, misleading mess. Zuckerberg’s article begins with a classic example of the false equivalence fallacy. “In every society,” he writes, “there are certain basic services that are so important for people’s wellbeing [sic] that we expect everyone to be able to access them freely.” Libraries, healthcare, education: these are examples of services Zuckerberg says societies agree to provide their citizens.