Facebook’s New Step with Free Basics Fiasco
At the current time, Facebook is going to compare with the treacherous East India Company, and the director Marc Andreessen is accused of being anti of Indian, a racist, and worse.
It would not shock us if Indian people start a “Quit India” movement to remove Facebook from India, modeled on Mahatma Gandhi’s efforts against the British in 1942. All this is because of a failure effort from Facebook to give The Internet to the poor people.
Facebook’s motive were good, but where Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg were wrong was in their misunderstanding of the tradition and important values of the poor people they were trying to help.
India suffers almost two centuries of subjugation by its British government, and, in the present era, it saw its treasure pillaged, its economy decimated, and its cultural values suppressed. The public became second-class citizens in their own country; they have to suffer untold criticism and sacrifice their lives. It will take generations to recover from such issues
That is the reason Andreessen’s tweet “Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for Indian public for decades. Why to stop now?” that is to create such an uproar. The damaged was too great and that Zuckerberg felt bad to disown the comments of his personal board member in the public statement
India suffers nearly two hundred years subjugation by its British government, and, in the present era, it saw it is treasured pillaged, its current economy decimated, and its cultural values suppressed.
Knowing Andreessen, I do not believe that his intent was in any how to condone colonialism. He was just trying being their aloof and playfully argumentative self, criticizing the Indian government for its decision to disallow Facebook’s Free Basics Internet giveaway.
Andreessen is one of the most open, comprehensive, and reachable of the tech moguls. He readily published and endorsed my own book, immigrant exodus when I ask him to and has been an important strongest proponent of skill immigration. In his own venture-capital firm, you will find so many Indian people, Chinese, and other nationalities at all of the levels. I have battled him on issues such as the jobless future that are created by technology, and I challenged his firm to add more n more women to higher level positions and questioned on ethics of having an investor on competing different tech companies’ boards.
In the Silicon Valley city, you can see such public spats with people you will hold in high regard. You can be violent and rough. But we cannot do this to the different borders well Andreessen inadvertently did—or impose your own values on them as Zuckerberg tried his level best.
Facebook’s Free Basics was a revolution to bring Internet access for poor peoples in India. It is created a walled garden in which Facebook and the Indian telecom providers selected some of the websites people could visit.
Facebook did not seem to understand that what is the exact limit of the growth of the Internet in India is not the cost for data access, which is so cheap, but the affordability of laptops and android phones. When the poor saves up to buy these, they want to be able to surf the web as western people and users do: viewing videos, visit the broad range of famous website, and a downloading game or entertaining app. Indian agriculturalist can already get climate information on their cellphones and on TV; they don’t want to be limited to visiting the health and education sites that Facebook directs them to.
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