Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Bollywood Tearjerker - Facebook Version

The Facebook ads in print, promoting it's version of internet is getting larger and looking more like a pre-election promise, our politicians make - free education, free health-care, better quality of life, et al. Four, yes four, effing full page advert today.
Intuition tells me that something this heavily marketed cannot be altruistic; and this is FB's step in the door, for untapped "billion", given the ad market in the west is saturated and is a duopoly, with Google getting the bigger pie.
Granted, no Corp works on altruism; but them why couch it on such tear-jerker human angle ads? Just call it for what it is: we provide free internet access, if you agree to access a very specific subset of sites and services that we allow for; and see if it violates/meets net neutrality principles. Don't couch it in effing Hindi movie scripts... it insults our collective intelligence !

(Here are couple of links from the very newspaper that carried 4 full pages of facebook advert:
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/nothing-free-or-basic-about-it/article8042334.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/crony-connectivity-and-internet-for-us/article8042342.ece
)