Iain Marlow

[Commentary] When I arrived in a West African newsroom to help with a journalism training initiative, one of the first things to come up was my BlackBerry Bold. Despite what the foolish #firstworldproblems hashtag on Twitter would have you believe, my phone was probably the most out of date there. Everyone else in this Ghanaian newsroom was using Android smartphones from Samsung and HTC. That’s not to say everyone had a smartphone, or that there wasn’t hardship. But mobile Internet connectivity -- with the exception of our unstable WiFi -- was not the issue. Let me be even more clear: The Internet already exists in Africa!

Now Facebook, according to Techcrunch, is looking at buying a drone company called Titan Aerospace to do “bring” Internet service to Africans.

First: I don’t trust people in Silicon Valley to tell me what’s happening elsewhere in California, let alone what’s happening (or should be happening) in Africa. Second: This is an international export of the libertarian ethos that tends to afflict innovators elsewhere in the Valley, such as PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who wants to build an independent island country (coincidentally, with someone who used to work at Google) or those promoting Bitcoin. Why do Google and Facebook want to soar over extremely complicated but opportunity-rich countries such as Nigeria, Mali and the Central African Republic? The answer is obvious: They want to avoid the messy realities on the ground. Presumably, they also want to avoid paying taxes. Third: Like with the one-laptop-per-child idea and other lofty “connectivity” schemes, the ideas and goals of these types of ideas tend to misdiagnose the problem and then dramatically over-promise on results. By the time these plans come to fruition, everyone has generally moved on to something else, and the original euphoria is forgotten; in the cheap laptop case, the world moved on to tablets, and even that ended up being more complicated than originally promised. Four: To wireless carriers, this must seem like the telecommunications equivalent of dumping a bunch of excess grain into a poor country’s marketplace and putting that country’s farmers out of business for good, leading to more shortages and eventual dependence. Carriers, some of them foreign but some of them local, have been in many of these markets for years, providing for a fee services that companies such as Google and Facebook now want to provide for free.

[March 10]