Maybe this is just a detail of Vice's way to sell their articles, but how is providing free services to people who could otherwise not afford them 'colonialism'?
The colonialism is attempting to enforce Western mores and laws about copyright on the Angolan population. As well as Wikipedia's own culture which is pretty Western itself.
While Wikipedia may be attempting to colonize Angola with some of its community conduct values, the population there has another view of Wikipedia's purpose which might be equally valid.
Would you express the same cultural relativistic sentiments about the validity of purpose if a small group decided to repurpose your Wiki?
It's very damaging to trade with the developing world if we start accusing companies of "attempting to colonize" because they have the temerity to expect people granted subsidised access to their website to actually play by the same rules as everyone else. I mean, if we start assuming that Angolans can't or shouldn't abide by the same rules as everyone else, it's very easy to just ensure services aren't affordable to the average Angolan again.
Angolans might have more reason to avoid paying for content than the rest of the world and they might have more reason to use Wikipedia or Facebook as a vector for delivering pirated content than the rest of the world, but the people pirating the content in this manner are at least as aware and deliberate in their circumvention of rules as crackers in other countries, and they should be respected for their clever hacks and blocked from uploading just like crackers elsewhere, and not patronised as people who couldn't possibly be expected to understand or accept Western mores.
> Would you express the same cultural relativistic sentiments about the validity of purpose if a small group decided to repurpose your Wiki?
Well, I do have a wiki farm now, so I feel compelled to reply. Yes, I would have the same relativistic sentiments. I would just impose the banhammer nonetheless.
That's kind of the thing about the DMCA -- it turns us all into enforcement agents. It doesn't really matter how I feel about the rules, because if I don't follow them I get shut down.
How I feel about the core of the issue is that copyrights and patents are imperialism. Imperialism in every culture. The poor and middle class can't afford to enforce their own copyrights, and the are subject to the whim of the the rich. They've created a place where the only culture of the past available is the one they want to sell. Only a few organizations like the EFF stand in the way of this madness, but the IP system is madness anyway.
I have an uncle who served as US Border Patrol for 20 years. He never believed that all of the illegals need to go back, but it's a job. Someone needs to watch the border and deal with problems or it would be complete anarchy. You can have valid reasons for enforcing rules you don't entirely believe in.
So I'll follow the DMCA because I'm the little guy. And I'll do nothing about the IP laywer who I believe has infringed about a hundred of my own copyrights and has acknowledged and then took no action a DMCA takedown notice from me. Because I cannot afford to go against him in a rigged system. And I understand why Angolans want to work against a system that's rigged against the them.
OK, then let's stop pretending this is a benevolent effort by Internet companies to get people on the Internet if that's not what it is. Facebook wants to have it both ways.
And the rampant profiteering entity that is Wikipedia?
Are you seriously arguing the Wikimedia Foundation's intentions can't possibly be benevolent because they won't let Angolans turn their server space into a repository of pirated content?
Well if your questioning of the Western web empires' benevolence wasn't in response to my statement that Wikipedia et al shouldn't be under any obligation to accommodate Angolans' copyvios then you sure picked the wrong subthread to express that view! :)
I don't know what anyone's intentions are but I do know that companies are going around pushing a version of Internet access that serves their interests without bearing much resemblance to the Internet you and I use, and getting out there and telling people "wait a minute, this is our site and you have to follow our rules" kind of spoils the illusion that that's not the case. It seems to me like the Wikimedia Foundation is lending their name to a questionable cause.
If I was providing the residents of Angola who didn't otherwise have internet with free access to only my wiki -- I certainly wouldn't be surprised when they tried to use my wiki for other than the purpose I wanted them to.
Nope, everybody on Facebook and Wikipedia is expected to play by Facebook and Wikipedia's rules, regardless of whether their local laws are stricter or laxer.
The vast majority of people on facebook and wikipedia are not limited to internet access _only_ to those two sites however.
If the only internet I had was that, and I had no way to start my own internet sites either, I'm sure I'd be trying to find ways to use them for what I wanted regardless of their rules too. As it is, I've got the whole internet and have no reason to try and abuse facebook or wikipedia that way.
Maybe colonialism, like racism, is something much more easy to spot when you are the side suffering from it.
They are not forced to use Wikipedia. They just happen to live in Africa, where most people live in 19th century by Western/Northern standards and they are hacking their way to 21st century. What would you do if you had to pay 80% of your salary for 1Gb of internet?
The hacker culture is about "creatively circumventing limitations of systems to achieve novel and clever outcomes". I can't find a better example of it.
Let the others call them pirates, but here I think we should celebrate what they did and call them by what they really are, true hackers.
I was never arguing the creativity part of the wikipedia hack, I adore that and welcome it. I can absolutely understand why they do it and how they do it.
I was just questioning the sense of entitlement that is apparently hidden in the "colonialism" criticism, but this seems to be so ideological that it's hard to get to a basic agreement. Different views on the world, I guess.
I can understand the sentiment of feeling offended by the term "colonialism" when giving away something for free. It implies a negative intent when really people/organizations intended to do something charitable.
That said, I can also understand the sentiment of feeling "colonialized" when people are only allowed to use something under conditions/mores imposed by a "foreign party".
Different world views then? I think it's more like two sides of the same coin...
It might be more comparable to missionary work. Wikipedia is providing valuable resources, but that charitable work can be interwoven with foreign ideals.
But it seems like Wikipedia are conscious of that, so they've taken a hands-off approach to this.
Hacking doesn't always cost the system operator anything, in fact I think the confusion between hacking as the activity of creating creative improvised solutions and the circumvention of security comes from settings like the hacking of the phone system where the cost to the phone network of phreakers making calls was negligible.
File sharing is a big resource hog. It's a totally different story.
Well define 'forced' in your view please. If I hold a gun to your head and say your money or your life am I reeeallly forcing you to give me you money or are you giving me your money out your own choice? Absent Mindflayers 'forced' is always going to be on a continuum.
So if I roll in and say "Here have this access to this thing everyone in the world claims is an economic and social miracle. Free!" and then later once you start using it I roll back around and say "oh yeah, by the way you have to follow the laws of the United States, the laws of a country you are entirely unrepresented by, if you want to use this thing that you're already using. This thing which every one swears is an absolute game changer, this thing that people claim will jump you into the 21st century* , this thing that everyone around the world swears you need."
Okay it's not a gun to their head but it certainly feels more than a hair coercive.
*people being varying levels of racist/ignorant in believing that "the 21st century" is not a date on a calendar but instead a particular sort of culture.
It may "feel" coercive but you didn't make any sort of case that it is. You may view words as having personal definitions that make your point valid but that is a linguistic trick, not an argument.
This is the objection to zero-rated services. Angolans get to use the internet, but they only get to use the zero-rated bits of it. And they have to use them in ways that westerners approve of.
It comes down to money, really. Do we put a "you must be this rich to use the internet" sign up on the planet's communications, or do we allow people to bring their culture and ideas to the party despite their poverty?
This whole thing reminds me of UseNet in the early days. It was supposed to be about news and conversations. It ended up being about sharing copyrighted content, because it was one of the only ways we could do it.
So we (Westerners) misused our internet services to share copyrighted content in the early days of our internet experience, why are we even surprised, let alone objecting, that others are doing the same?
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?
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.
Encouraged, is perhaps more appropriate, as Wikipedia is the service being zero rated rather than something else that would be more suitable to the task at hand.
Forced, to the extent that they cannot afford to use other services that are not zero rated. The article mentions $2.5 for 50 Mb which is quite expensive by any measure.
It's not about Western mores, it's about people stealing other peoples stuff. I'm sure stealing in Angola is not tolerated, stealing from these "pirates" would make them angry.
Didn't Zuckerberg steal the Facebook idea from the Winklevoss twins?? Aren't folks in the west also using platforms like YouTube and Facebook to post copyrighted videos and content??
1. Copyright violation is not theft
2. Copyright is not a right, it is a government granted, time limited, monopoly. In the Act of Anne it was for 12 years and that is how it should have stayed. Now it is life plus 75 which is simply oppressive and counterproductive.
It's colonialism because it's patronizing. You can have this much of the Internet, but no more.
If that's your approach then you don't understand the main value proposition of the web.
These programs are silly and ineffective. Facebook and Wikipedia should just channel their funds to a join effort at making all of the Internet accessible.
We've been down this road before, it didn't work for AOL, why keep trying it?
It's training users to only use their products, and by the time access becomes cheaper, those products will be able to crowd out any competitors. It also means that any local competitors don't get fair treatment, and will automatically lose to these services provided by the 'colonials'.
Is that an argument that makes any sense in the context of Wikipedia? Where users actually form the content itself, and where access and content are free anyway everywhere?
I thought it was a liberal use of colonialism (but still fair) until I reached the part in the article about disabling IP ranges for not using the service in ways that align with admin sensibilities. In particular, the reenabling of an account because its contributions were seen as valuable illustrates the power relationships at play here. Angolans don't seem to be able to form content the way they think it should be formed, and are required to go through an outsider gatekeeper. Colonialism becomes more relevant when you consider that these services are the only ones that were made free and widely accessible. Over time, it pushes western/northern concepts of knowledge, data organization, copyright, etc onto a culture that didn't ask for it. That's colonialism.
I'm largely in favor of a reduction in quite a few of those concepts here in the West(North).
HOWEVER, you can survive if you can't pirate and edit wikipedia at the same time.
You can use wikipedia for free, and express yourself better, within wikipedia rules. Same for all of us. That's a pure bonus (that some poor people I know here would like to have for education btw).
How does that prevent you from having a better internet ? Because you're too poor as a country ? Well preventing to have Free wikipedia will not solve that. having a free wikipedia will 1) show you the greatness of internet even if limited, 2) make you more educated so potentially richer so potentially with more disposable income to afford full internet. Then you can't say well, it discourages you from getting anything other than wikipedia because it's good enough AND you're missing an important part of internet which is pirating US movies (which are much more invasive worldwide).
I don't see many differences between this situation and the one in the west ~10/15 years ago without torrents sites, and barely a few sites available for free if you used the free AOL 50hour CDs, trying to pirate photoshop with disks.
We managed to survive and grow internet also.
Of course, Facebook offering is entirely different.
Offering free internet for the whole earth would be nice. It's not a requirement however.
> Over time, it pushes western/northern concepts of knowledge, data organization, copyright, etc onto a culture that didn't ask for it. That's colonialism.
Is the thrust of your argument that Angolans should be deprived of knowledge and data because they didn't ask for it, or that Wikipedia admins should only be allowed to block and unblock people from the same culture as them?
I mean, Angola has had copyright laws for a while now: the idea that the people behind these hacks are noble savages whose fragile culture is imperilled by Wikipedia admins is really insulting and patronising.
I think it's harder to argue colonialism for Wikipedia specifically, given that they go out of their way to provide a plethora of sites for as many locales as they can, presented in a way best suited for their locale. Similarly, Wikipedia doesn't strike me as particularly interested in market capture and selling information behind the scenes. But, on the other hand, of the big names, WP seems to be the only site with this approach.
>how is providing free services to people who could otherwise not afford them 'colonialism'?
The British sold cloth in India at lower prices, undoubtedly providing many people with cloth they could not otherwise afford, and destroying India's textile industry making India dependent on buying British cloth.
Oh, they also insisted upon opium (that China could not otherwise afford?) being legal in China, when China wanted to prohibit it, and fought a war over it, because they wanted to sell opium in China.
The concept is basically that facebook is trying to establish a colony of users by drastically undercutting the competition in terms of $/byte. They establish an unequal playing field tilted in their favor.
Inhibiting development by providing imports at prices that are difficult to match by local offerings, that's about as colonialistic as it can get. In the case of pirated entertainment on donated bandwidth, the effective price of those imports is zero.
But this is surely not what the article meant by "digital colonialism", so your question remains unanswered.
