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That businessman/reality TV star who just won the New Hampshire primary is far from the only famous person addicted to sharing his current thoughts and mood on Twitter. When you do that, you're bound to eventually make a mistake that has consequences. This time it was Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and co-founder of Netscape (and lead developer for the Mosaic Web browser before that), who got busted for tweeting a thought that shouldn't have left the hotel bar:
Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?
Indians complained; evidently they've grown accustomed to having their own country. It was noticed that Andreessen sits on the board of Facebook, which has been unsuccessfully trying to peddle free Internet service (featuring Facebook, of course) to India for awhile. Oops. Mark Zuckerberg wasn't pleased.
Andreessen, a master of the multi-part tweet, quickly backpedaled. And the original tweet was deleted.
takyon: The Register's Andrew Orlowski has a partial defense of Andreessen's comments that you may find illuminating and/or entertaining.
(Score: 5, Informative) by kadal on Thursday February 11 2016, @07:52PM
Andreesen's pissed because Facebook's curated Internet was ruled to be illegal, thereby cutting their ability to market to a billion eyeballs that haven't seen the internet yet.
If they cared so much about getting poor people on the internet, Facebook could pay the carriers to subsidize data charges for people with income X. They could also contribute to building infrastructure in the country, something the government is trying to do. But no, they care about poor people looking at their personally vetted impression of the internet = Facebook & friends only.
And no, this isn't better than no internet at all. Allowing this would set a non-neutrality precedent that would be hard to roll back, affecting everyone in the country.
Further, no matter how post-independence policies have fucked India, colonialism fucked it a whole lot more. Building a railway system does not make up for the wholesale starvation of multiple millions of people or the wholesale destruction of any kind of local industry.
(Score: 2) by kadal on Thursday February 11 2016, @07:55PM
"If they cared so much about getting poor people on the internet, Facebook could pay the carriers to subsidize data charges for people with income X."
I should clarify: Facebook would have to subsidize every carrier that provided data.
Indeed, it would be much better for the government to subsidize it should be subsidized. Private companies could contribute to the fund since more people on the internet benefits such companies. That would then allow cheap and equal access.