[kictanet] Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein In a Wild Web - The New York Times

[Ali Hussein]

Listers

As a follow up to my post last night here's another article this time from the New York Times on Facebook's complicated dance with Regulators across the world, its avowed defense of the principle of the Internet without borders and fight against Balkanization and its continued focus to add more and more users.

I've taken the liberty to extract a particularly interesting part that focuses on Kenya.
The Play for Kenya

Blocked in China and troubled by regulators in Europe, Facebook is trying to become “the internet” in Africa. Helping get people online, subsidizing access, and trying to launch satellites to beam the internet down to the markets it covets, Facebook has become a dominant force on a continent rapidly getting online.

But that has given it a power that has made some in Africa uncomfortable.

Some countries have blocked access, and outsiders have complained Facebook could squelch rival online business initiatives. Its competition with other internet companies from the United States and China has drawn comparisons to a bygone era of colonialism.

Read on from the beginning:-

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/17/technology/facebook-government-regulations.html?emc=edit_ta_20170918&nl=top-stories&nlid=65658228&ref=headline

This global conversation on the benefits and threats of Big Tech in a world seemingly in conflict with itself reminds me again of the declaration by John Perry Barlow, American poet, essayist and cyberlibertarian political activist:-

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of the Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
- John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996

I daresay citizens the world over are caught between the proverbial rock and hard place.

I would also encourage listers to read the book:-

WORLD WITHOUT MIND - The Existential threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer.

Ali Hussein
Principal
Hussein & Associates
+254 0713 601113 

Twitter: @AliHKassim
Skype: abu-jomo
LinkedIn: http://ke.linkedin.com/in/alihkassim

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit."  ~ Aristotle


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