The comment was in response to your last question "am I being colonialist?", and my response was intended to point out that the problem isn't really "here's some free stuff", but "here's some stuff that doesn't cost anything (and may well be donated by people who mean well), that comes with other strings attached"
It isn't really classic colonialism of course (we're not talking about enslaving a nation and stealing their goods). But if the basic income internet were not in fact provided by $Government, but instead by $corporation or $otherGovernment, and carried with it strings - "abide by $otherGovernment's laws while using the internet here in this country", then you could argue that's a colonialist approach. It's especially problematic when governments are subverted to transmit corporatist legal frameworks.
In your example in the most basic sense, it's not colonialist - it's just good sense, a government providing a basic level of access to the internet to all.
On the other hand to all of this, I feel like sometimes we're missing the mountain while staring at molehills. Yes, facebook's free basics seem like a naked grab for users and an attempt to stifle homegrown innovation in countries that don't have a lot of network infrastructure. On the other hand, we're still very much dealing with actual colonialism in our global economy. The fact that it's cheaper to ship cotton to Bangladesh to make t-shirts that in turn get shipped back to the US for me to wear (than, say, making the shirt in the US where the cotton is grown) says a lot about the influence of north/western economies on the rest of the world. We (meaning northern and western nations for the most part) still extract tremendous value from the countries we used to explicitly call "colonies". This is probably a much bigger problem (both ethically and in terms of long-term sustainability of our markets)
It isn't really classic colonialism of course (we're not talking about enslaving a nation and stealing their goods). But if the basic income internet were not in fact provided by $Government, but instead by $corporation or $otherGovernment, and carried with it strings - "abide by $otherGovernment's laws while using the internet here in this country", then you could argue that's a colonialist approach. It's especially problematic when governments are subverted to transmit corporatist legal frameworks.
In your example in the most basic sense, it's not colonialist - it's just good sense, a government providing a basic level of access to the internet to all.
On the other hand to all of this, I feel like sometimes we're missing the mountain while staring at molehills. Yes, facebook's free basics seem like a naked grab for users and an attempt to stifle homegrown innovation in countries that don't have a lot of network infrastructure. On the other hand, we're still very much dealing with actual colonialism in our global economy. The fact that it's cheaper to ship cotton to Bangladesh to make t-shirts that in turn get shipped back to the US for me to wear (than, say, making the shirt in the US where the cotton is grown) says a lot about the influence of north/western economies on the rest of the world. We (meaning northern and western nations for the most part) still extract tremendous value from the countries we used to explicitly call "colonies". This is probably a much bigger problem (both ethically and in terms of long-term sustainability of our markets)