[joelrunyon]

They're trying to control the "tube"[1] (if you will) of information. That's not to say they'll do a good or bad thing with it, but I think the ideology here is that "open access" is "better" than "controlled access" - especially when it comes to something like the internet.

The analogy would be closer to the Rockefeller relationship with Oil. They controlled the entire system (and was eventually found to be a monopoly and broken up).

The above comment wasn't meant to say that Facebook is going to do harm (intentional), but that it's "harmful" (for the overall internet ecosystem) for Facebook to control internet access (for close to 2B people) like this.

[1] please don't take this comment down a "series of tubes."

[alandarev]

I am not defending Facebook. My comment was addressed to parent's post, which was generalizing all corporations as a purely evil-doing organizations.

On the other hand, I agree that we are going to see some awful things as a result of internet.org activities.

[saiya-jin]

See, corporations are highly amoral entities. not entirely, but overall when all + and - add up, they don't care about doing good, only about making profit for shareholders. And in many/most cases, doing high profit while being nice and friendly and all this is much harder than using dirty tricks and breaking rules (moral/law/whatever).

From my personal view as an employee of one corp, it all comes down how people are rewarded/motivated to get things done. If short term profit is the king, morals are not so much part of the equation, resulting in all kinds of mess. Exceptions do happen, but they are what they are - exceptions...

[JoeAltmaier]

Maybe not evil. But surely they have NO moral compass. A big company is made of 1000's of moving parts - people. Each is in charge of a small part of the product. Imagine a company making a missile. You are in charge of the fuse port cover. What can you do to make the missile more moral? Nothing.

Even if an employee is in charge of the big decisions, still no dice. No one of them can decide "Choice A makes more money, but choice B is the moral one" and make choice B without repercussion. Said repercussion usually being firing, demotion or career derailing. Then you get somebody in their position who WILL make the profit decision.

Everyone in a company is responsible to the board, who are responsible to the stockholders, who are individually interested in profit only (by definition).