[kictanet] Wikipedia/Facebook Zero in Angola

[Mwendwa Kivuva]

Very interesting article: covers issues of zero rated services with clear
examples how the people crave the whole Internet.

Wikimedia and Facebook have given Angolans free access to their websites,
but not to the rest of the internet. So, naturally, Angolans have started
hiding pirated movies and music in Wikipedia articles and linking to them
on closed Facebook groups, creating a totally free and clandestine file
sharing network in a country where mobile internet data is extremely
expensive.

But people in developing countries have always had to be more creative than
those for whom access to information has always been a given. In Cuba, for
instance, movies, music, news, and games are traded on USB drives
<http://motherboard.vice.com/read/cubas-black-market-is-a-website-that-exists-primarily-offline>
that
are smuggled into the country every week. A 20-year-old developer in
Paraguay found a vulnerability in Facebook Messenger
<http://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-app-lets-you-piggyback-facebooks-free-internet-to-access-any-site>
that
allowed people to use Free Basics to tunnel through to the “real” internet.
Legal questions aside (Angola has more lax copyright laws than much of the
world <https://www.copyright-watch.org/files/Angola.pdf>), Angola’s pirates
are furthering Wikipedia’s mission of spreading information in a real and
substantial way.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/wikipedia-zero-facebook-free-basics-angola-pirates-zero-rating

Simply make the internet cheaper for all, that's the intervention that will
work in the longer term.

-- 
Warm Regards,

Phares Kariuki

*E*: pkariuki at gmail.com | *Twitter*: kaboro |


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