Facebook’s ‘Digital Colonialism’ Made Monday’s Outage A Crisis For The World

More than 2 billion people globally use WhatsApp each day, and in countries like Brazil, 90% of daily smart phone users rely on the app to communicate with family, friends, customers and co-workers. Later studies conducted by digital advocacy groups would conclude that this is exactly what Facebook had done and accuse the company of engaging in “digital colonialism.” As Brazil worked toward the passage of a Digital Bill of Rights in 2014, open internet advocates argued that zero-rating was a “dangerous practice that threatens to undermine the open internet,” and asked lawmakers to ban it, as India eventually would two years later. The law included net neutrality provisions meant to guarantee an open internet, but almost immediately after it passed, one of Brazil’s major phone carriers began exempting Facebook and WhatsApp from its data plans, allowing users to send messages and make calls via those apps for free. “They provide access so they can extract as much data as possible, especially in middle-markets where they don’t have that access.” The metadata WhatsApp’s encrypted messaging produces, Nemer added, “is like gold for Facebook.” “Across the Global South, a U.S.-based company has amassed near-monopolistic power over people’s basic ability to communicate without any real accountability to the countries or citizens who rely on it most heavily.” Since then, Facebook has only made WhatsApp an even more essential part of daily life in Brazil, where regulators in May finally approved the company’s plans to allow users to make in-app financial transactions. And even if Monday’s outage and Facebook’s scandal-plagued recent weeks do lead countries to decide that a communications system dominated by a single private entity from afar isn’t what they want, unwinding the system Facebook has created ― and that lawmakers and regulators across the world, and especially in the U.S. have allowed it to build ― won’t be easy or clean, not when it is so deeply intertwined with daily life.