The effect of this de facto monopoly is, that any authoritarian government can target individuals for any reason- for instance claim, they are terrorists,-press charges and request to release the chat metadata (contacts, locations) from the centralized Meta database. Zuckerberg will comply. nostr:note1882727vuxpeankfu2sj293ledcsncxu3vl3nupxgwc63sef5kdxsuafcyt
Discussion
Is there evidence of Zuck complying with said authoritarians? I’m not doubting you, but curious if so.
Yeah, Facebook is still very much “the internet” for a lot of people in certain countries. Believe it or not, for some, it’s the ONLY online experience they’ve ever had.
It was marketed as a “let’s democratize internet access” initiative for developing nations, pushed by local telecom operators with silent Facebook’s backing. The numbers never really added up, so it’s pretty clear that Facebook was heavily subsidizing those deals. That’s why internet plans that only allow access to Facebook products are up to 80% cheaper , they made sure their ecosystem became the default.
Makes you wonder if this was about connectivity or just locking in entire populations to Facebook’s version of the closed internet. The only solution out of this would be to actually democratize open internet access for them Via Satellite , or for the decentralized networks to start working on low accessible low bandwidth products