| How is this nonsense even being upvoted here? Who seriously thinks Google and Facebook bringing the Internet to the whole of Africa isn't a good thing for Africans? The only things I'd be worried about in this case is 1) Google/Facebook enabling mass surveillance of Africans, against Africans' will, but there would be nothing they can do about it except "stop using the Internet", in their case, since they wouldn't be able to control them (at least that's what the author is insinuating, too) 2) They serve a very restricted version of the 'Internet', where they heavily promote their own services But in case 1) the majority of the African countries already decided to implement deep packet inspection at the ISP level at that last ITU meeting, and other such technologies to enable mass surveillance of Africas, and in case 2), I can't imagine they would do that, because their services would become a lot less useful, too. As for stuff like providing competition to their local carriers - come on. Most ISP's and carriers can't cover the whole Africa and they won't do it anytime soon anyway in the traditional way. Either they do this sort of stuff themselves in the future, or others do it before them. One way or the other, it's much easier to bring Internet to the whole of Africa this way, from the sky. |