Who’s Connected: 2 Stories of “Free Internet”

[Commentary] Facebook’s Free Basics and NYC’s LinkNYC both promised to bring Internet connectivity to the masses. So why was the community response to both so different? In addition to being important efforts on their own, two recent initiatives serve as compelling examples of who gets heard, and when, any time a big institution tries to create a technology infrastructure to serve millions of people.
Example One: Free Basics: Free Basics is the name given to the effort from Facebook’s Internet.org to (ostensibly) get India’s poorest onto the Internet.
Example Two: LinkNYC: Standing in stark contrast to Free Basics is LinkNYC, the recently-launched program to bring free broadband wifi to New York City.

There’s one key lesson we can take from these two attempts to connect millions of people to the Internet: it’s about building trust. Technology infrastructure can be good or bad, extractive or supportive, a lifeline or a raw deal. Objections to new infrastructure are often dismissed by the people pushing them, but people’s concerns are seldom simply about advertising or bring skeptical of corporations. There are often very good reasons to look a gift horse in the mouth. Whether we believe in the positive potential of getting connected simply boils down to whether we feel the people providing that infrastructure have truly listened to us. The good news is, we have clear examples of how to do exactly that.

[Anil Dash is an American blogger, entrepreneur, and technologist, and cofounder of makerbase]