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Angola's Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing Loopholes in Zero Rating
Reader Jason Koebler quotes a Motherboard article: Wikimedia and Facebook have given Angolans free access to their respective websites, but not to the rest of the internet. So, naturally, Angolans have taken to hiding pirated movies and music in Wikipedia articles and are also sharing links to these files on Facebook, creating a totally free and clandestine file sharing network in a country where mobile internet data is extremely expensive. It's undeniably a creative use of two services that were designed to give people in the developing world some access to the internet. But now that Angolans are causing headaches for Wikipedia editors and the Wikimedia Foundation, no one is sure what to do about it.
Facebook and wikimedia are disgusting to exploit the poor in this way
The tragedy of the wikimedia commons.
Well, it's also amazing how quickly people realize "wait, this is free and that isn't, so if I rename this to look like that it's free"
If you tell people they can only use a communication medium one or two ways, they'll eventually figure out how to do all of the rest by piggy-backing on those methods.
This isn't "this is why we can't have nice things". This is telling people "we have nice things, but you can't have nice things so you get these things". And then those people turned around and said "no, we can have nice things too".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I think that it is great that the locals are taking facebooks "altruistic" 'hey, let's lock down the emerging markets on an awful walled garden non-internet before anyone else does!' plan and getting actual use out of it. Good for them, and hopefully throwing a spanner in facebook's plan(or at least inflating its costs a bit, I'm assuming that the local telcos want to get paid by someone for the extra traffic).
It does seem somewhat unfortunate that wikipedia, rather than facebook, is the one whose relative openness is being exploited to serve as an improvised transfer mechanism for assorted blobs. Allowing themselves to be included as the 'altruistic' face of the plan was a dubiously principled move; but they are still eating the additional costs of hosting a bunch of stuff that doesn't advance their mission at all because a blatant market distortion makes anything you can squeeze into their system effectively 'free' in certain cost-sensitive markets. I'd be much happier if they'd figured out how to use facebook's systems for the purpose.