I still don't understand the argument why people who are suddenly given a free thing, and not forced to use it, are now a victim of that and entitled to get everything for free.

If we give free drugs for certain diseases to a poor country, would that mean that we enforce our "Western view on health" on them, and that they are actually entitled to get all drugs for free, otherwise it is a form of colonialism?

That, generally, is not the argument. The side you don't see goes a bit like this[1]:

Folks in poor countries aren't stupid, and know Facebook isn't just being nice. Zero-rating strangles local startups who have to compete with the free walled garden; it is a spigot for western culture, which many object to[2]; and it smacks of a particularly Valley-flavored mix of paternalism, greed, and the sort of tote-bagger do-gooderism that led to some major travesties of charity. (You could go look up how Jello Biafra picked his stage name on Wikipedia, over a zero-rated link, if you like.)

Suffice to say, there are good reasons why many people in poor countries are extremely wary of westerners bearing gifts.

This bit isn't directed at the parent, and is something I wanted to say in a different thread about poverty, but here's a rule of thumb that may help: If you observe something that doesn't make sense to you, it is likely that you don't have the whole picture. This rule applies to the behavior of people with less money than you, as well.

[1] If you're really interested, reading some history of colonialism would be good. I don't know your background, but if it involved typical high school U.S. history, you likely learned that colonialism was a sort of adventure-phase where westerners explored and planted flags and whatnot, mostly ignoring the commercial interests driving it. And a lot of the horror.

[2] Not even going to get in to that one, aside from saying that if leading contenders in the Republican primary can hate on U.S. culture, so can folks who actually got the pointy end of the stick.

While your critique is valid when targeted to the "Free Basics" programs (or similar) when it comes to this particular instance of piracy you're reading too much into it. This is just a piracy hack. People everywhere have been doing this kind of thing for as long as there has been an internet and the reason is usually convenience, not some PolSci-level critique of neoliberalism.

I was responding to the parent comment, not the piracy.

On piracy, of course you're absolutely right - given the existence of a storage mechanism, someone will put stuff in it. See also: hacks that use dynamic DNS updates to store and share information.

I personally would welcome a free (as in no money) unrestricted but low bandwidth Internet connection for everyone. Paid would be faster.

I'm in the UK. Free mobile broadband at something like 256Kbits with cheap USB dongles would allow access for all children & low income adults who could find a suitable client device (recycled laptop/cheap smartish phone whatever). Sort of basic income argument applied to Internet connectivity.

Am I being colonialist? Remember I live in the country that more or less invented colonialism!

Kinda depends. Do the people in the UK who use this service have to abide by laws of other countries, laws that don't exist in the UK? That's the problem here, right?

Can you clarify your comment?

My proposition is 'basic income Internet' provided at low cost in each country by $Government and $PreferredSupplier. Lowish bandwidth, possibly with fair use style bandwidth cap.

All currently existing legal frameworks remain in place in $Country.

The comment was in response to your last question "am I being colonialist?", and my response was intended to point out that the problem isn't really "here's some free stuff", but "here's some stuff that doesn't cost anything (and may well be donated by people who mean well), that comes with other strings attached"

It isn't really classic colonialism of course (we're not talking about enslaving a nation and stealing their goods). But if the basic income internet were not in fact provided by $Government, but instead by $corporation or $otherGovernment, and carried with it strings - "abide by $otherGovernment's laws while using the internet here in this country", then you could argue that's a colonialist approach. It's especially problematic when governments are subverted to transmit corporatist legal frameworks.

In your example in the most basic sense, it's not colonialist - it's just good sense, a government providing a basic level of access to the internet to all.

On the other hand to all of this, I feel like sometimes we're missing the mountain while staring at molehills. Yes, facebook's free basics seem like a naked grab for users and an attempt to stifle homegrown innovation in countries that don't have a lot of network infrastructure. On the other hand, we're still very much dealing with actual colonialism in our global economy. The fact that it's cheaper to ship cotton to Bangladesh to make t-shirts that in turn get shipped back to the US for me to wear (than, say, making the shirt in the US where the cotton is grown) says a lot about the influence of north/western economies on the rest of the world. We (meaning northern and western nations for the most part) still extract tremendous value from the countries we used to explicitly call "colonies". This is probably a much bigger problem (both ethically and in terms of long-term sustainability of our markets)

If this is important to you, and it's a noble goal, I suggest you go to Africa, build a startup and give those Angolans free internet access. Accusing others of not making their business free is not the way to go.

I think it's going to be easier to build my startup here, and then fund access to the internet from developing countries.

But I wouldn't fund only access to just my website, I'd fund access to the whole thing.

Which is my objection to zero-rating.

And yes, I'd see this as an absolutely worthwhile use of philanthropic donations if/when I ever make enough to do that.