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Re:Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with... by elcapitan on Friday March 25, 2016 @06:38AM (#11359350)
I still don't understand the argument why people who are suddenly given a free thing, and not forced to use it, are now a victim of that and entitled to get everything for free.

If we give free drugs for certain diseases to a poor country, would that mean that we enforce our "Western view on health" on them, and that they are actually entitled to get all drugs for free, otherwise it is a form of colonialism?

Re:Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with... by __jal on Friday March 25, 2016 @09:57AM (#11360070)
That, generally, is not the argument. The side you don't see goes a bit like this[1]:

Folks in poor countries aren't stupid, and know Facebook isn't just being nice. Zero-rating strangles local startups who have to compete with the free walled garden; it is a spigot for western culture, which many object to[2]; and it smacks of a particularly Valley-flavored mix of paternalism, greed, and the sort of tote-bagger do-gooderism that led to some major travesties of charity. (You could go look up how Jello Biafra picked his stage name on Wikipedia, over a zero-rated link, if you like.)

Suffice to say, there are good reasons why many people in poor countries are extremely wary of westerners bearing gifts.

This bit isn't directed at the parent, and is something I wanted to say in a different thread about poverty, but here's a rule of thumb that may help: If you observe something that doesn't make sense to you, it is likely that you don't have the whole picture. This rule applies to the behavior of people with less money than you, as well.

[1] If you're really interested, reading some history of colonialism would be good. I don't know your background, but if it involved typical high school U.S. history, you likely learned that colonialism was a sort of adventure-phase where westerners explored and planted flags and whatnot, mostly ignoring the commercial interests driving it. And a lot of the horror.

[2] Not even going to get in to that one, aside from saying that if leading contenders in the Republican primary can hate on U.S. culture, so can folks who actually got the pointy end of the stick.

Re:Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with... by rpgmaker on Friday March 25, 2016 @12:30PM (#11360974)
While your critique is valid when targeted to the "Free Basics" programs (or similar) when it comes to this particular instance of piracy you're reading too much into it. This is just a piracy hack. People everywhere have been doing this kind of thing for as long as there has been an internet and the reason is usually convenience, not some PolSci-level critique of neoliberalism.
Re:Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with... by __jal on Friday March 25, 2016 @01:19PM (#11361267)
I was responding to the parent comment, not the piracy.

On piracy, of course you're absolutely right - given the existence of a storage mechanism, someone will put stuff in it. See also: hacks that use dynamic DNS updates to store and share information.