Why do people assume good faith motives when talking about corporations? It should be the opposite, they're going to harm you. Sorry -- rather, the actions are amoral, the end goal is making moves that will make them more money. So it's very obvious that there's something to be had in this game, and introducing ads is one possible result.
How do you make money? You provide a product or service in which people can choose to buy/use, if it provides enough value for the cost. If you don't think a product or service is worth the cost, don't use or purchase it.
Exactly. In this case, just abstain from internet access until it makes its way to your part of the world in a few years or decades. Just ignore that your neighbors have access.
You know that many practices, like price dumping (having preditorially low prices of things) is illegal for the obvious reasons? In a price-dumping kind of way, do you see how what Facebook is doing could be very bad?
Did Ford harm America for wanting more money? Why assume corporation = harm? Their end goal is money, not harm. Unless you prove me that money is harm is universally true.
They're trying to control the "tube"[1] (if you will) of information. That's not to say they'll do a good or bad thing with it, but I think the ideology here is that "open access" is "better" than "controlled access" - especially when it comes to something like the internet.
The analogy would be closer to the Rockefeller relationship with Oil. They controlled the entire system (and was eventually found to be a monopoly and broken up).
The above comment wasn't meant to say that Facebook is going to do harm (intentional), but that it's "harmful" (for the overall internet ecosystem) for Facebook to control internet access (for close to 2B people) like this.
[1] please don't take this comment down a "series of tubes."
See, corporations are highly amoral entities. not entirely, but overall when all + and - add up, they don't care about doing good, only about making profit for shareholders. And in many/most cases, doing high profit while being nice and friendly and all this is much harder than using dirty tricks and breaking rules (moral/law/whatever).
From my personal view as an employee of one corp, it all comes down how people are rewarded/motivated to get things done. If short term profit is the king, morals are not so much part of the equation, resulting in all kinds of mess.
Exceptions do happen, but they are what they are - exceptions...
Maybe not evil. But surely they have NO moral compass. A big company is made of 1000's of moving parts - people. Each is in charge of a small part of the product. Imagine a company making a missile. You are in charge of the fuse port cover. What can you do to make the missile more moral? Nothing.
Even if an employee is in charge of the big decisions, still no dice. No one of them can decide "Choice A makes more money, but choice B is the moral one" and make choice B without repercussion. Said repercussion usually being firing, demotion or career derailing. Then you get somebody in their position who WILL make the profit decision.
Everyone in a company is responsible to the board, who are responsible to the stockholders, who are individually interested in profit only (by definition).
Because their primary objective is not yours. You have an interest that somewhere in the middle meets theirs, but only just meets that interest. You do not share that interest until you become a shareholder.
Money is not just money, it equals to power as well, so those with the majority will rule.
Money is in that sense not directly harmful, but misunderstanding that companies have their own agendas is rather harmful.
