Well that's exactly what Internet.org and Free Basics is. Transparently so. FB has 1.5 billion users in a world with 7.3 billion people. It's not an exaggeratio

Well that's exactly what Internet.org and Free Basics is. Transparently so. FB has 1.5 billion users in a world with 7.3 billion people. It's not an exaggeration to say that pretty much everyone 13 and up with an Internet connection that wants a Facebook account, has one. That means that the only way you can grow your user base is to increase the number of people with an Internet connection. Zuck and Facebook do bill Free Basics as a charity, but yet, they're not giving the Internet, they're giving poor people what Zuckerberg wants. They're not hooking up Twitter are they? They say it's because of "agreements", but really it comes down to the fact that they are paying the telcoms money, and they want an audience for their ads. Now that's not immoral, but it's not a charity, so don't expect people to say how great and benevolent they are. Now FB could pay for the real Internet, but they don't, because they're not a charity. It's this mismatch between rhetoric and actions that really pisses people off. We saw this before when Google first started operating in China. The Google Triumvirate said, "Hey, isn't some Internet better than no Internet?" (The exact same argument that Zuck is making today.) Of course, the Chinese had Baidu at the time, and Baidu actually worked better for Chinese language search than Google as well. The real reason Google wanted in China wasn't to spread knowledge, but rather to get access to the 1.4 billion potential users, because pretty much everyone with an Internet connection outside of China already used Google.