I really hate that there's some whiny wiki editor complaining that those Angolans are exploiting their fundamentally exploitative zero system. I'm all for it, good on them.
It is not exploitative at all to give people access to wikipedia (or even facebook) without giving them general internet access.
I can accept that it would be better for the health of the internet as a whole to give people full access or not at all. But it cannot be exploitative to give something of value for free to someone, just because that someone wants something more/something else.
> But it cannot be exploitative to give something of value for free
One of the (many) criticisms of Nestle is that they went to 3rd-world countries and gave new mothers free supplies of bottled formula. Then after the mothers switched to formula and stopped lactating, they took away the free milk offer and forced them to pay out the nose for a life-essential product that their bodies would have otherwise produced naturally.
Just like with Nestle, giving away limited Internet that can only access Facebook/Wikipedia has the effect of forcing those services to become critical architecture. It denies nations the autonomy to decide how their own networks should be run, and puts them at a massive disadvantage when competing on those networks or building their own services.
In exchange for giving away access to their product (and only their product) for free, Facebook gets a monopoly-level stranglehold on how information is transmitted across those regions -- and that's not just bad for the Internet as a whole, it's bad for the countries and their citizens.
Have heard the worst things about Nestle, and that baby formula fact does not seem surprising.
I agree it could be on the national interest of a country to forbid nestle formula given like that (or, for that matter, basic internet given by facebook). Also, the nestle case seems more clearly exploitative to me, because they meant to deprive women of something by giving them the formula.
Facebook has no other reason to supply them with their zero service other than to get valuable data out of them. Unless FB is the most well disguised charitable organization ever
