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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, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday February 11 2016, @08:02PM
The fact is one way or another the poor communities they are talking about will have 'internet' soon. One way or another.
Facebook would very much like them to get a counterfeit internet, a walled garden where all these people will be captive eyeballs for facebook and friends to exploit. They're so eager to see this happen they are willing to invest some money and make it happen, on their terms. And if allowed to do so they probably WILL be able to bring SOME level of service to these communities a bit more quickly than anyone else.
BUT if they are allowed to do so, the will get that first mover advantage and probably wind up delaying the day that these same communities have real internet access, quite possibly by decades. That's WHY they are so willing to invest in this, of course. But there are plenty of other companies that are willing to provide real internet access and only make a fair profit for providing the service. Since they do NOT expect to make so much money off the deal as Facebook does, they don't have the same kinds of funds available, and they will likely do it more slowly, but it will certainly happen one way or the other.
If I was a resident of one of these communities, I could see being tempted by something now, but I still would probably rather wait a relatively short period of time and see real internet service come just a little later instead. The price of Facebook "free" - in the long term - is extremely high.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?