You are free not to use it if you want. You can pay for the internet. I wonder what people who actually use the service think. I remember using netzero. You had to view ads for that.
This argument can lead to a lot of unpleasant places. It's the regulators job to decide what offers are coercive to the poor, and make it illegal to offer them.
It's generally illegal to offer to buy an organ, buy sex, or buy someone in to slavery because the only people that would consider that offer are being coerced by their circumstances. I think that the same (obviously to a lesser degree) is true of facebook's offer here (but not of netzero's offer). They are not free to choose, they are coerced by circumstance.
In other words, they're coerced into staying broke if we make it illegal to sell organs.
Or, we could stop trying to justify abuse of the poor for the benefit of the wealthy.
The poorest who can't afford the internet don't even have the devices capable of displaying the modern web pages properly. The cost of internet comes secondary to the cost of the hardware necessary to access it.
A serviceable used PC can be had for on the order of $50. Internet service is on the order of $50/month.
This is bullshit. 1GB of 4G LTE costs less than $4 in India.
Even at $4/month = $48/year, how is that supposed to make buying a $50 device once every five years the dominant factor in affordability?
There are plenty of poor people who cant afford to make mobile phone calls or send sms messages. With this they would at least had some way to do so.
Say there is one mobile phone in the village (powered by say a solar panel). A person could just borrow that or rent it for a moment, to send some important message. Say to find out what the price of milk is today at the market in the next village. (If they cant read or write then they could get that one kid that can, to do it for them)
Small thing like this could create all kinds of new opportunities.
From my observations in Kumasi, Ghana and Kabul, Afghanistan (where I worked for a telco) having a basic cellphone and a cheap top-up plan is nearly universal. Prepaid SIM cards are sold on almost every street corner and the Facebook-enabled bundles are extremely popular.
After food, water, and clothing, family and business communications are the next most important need.
I would make a great ted talk. How cheap mobile communication is changing life in remote villages.
From own limited experience, I was struck by how expensive slow internet access was in the third world around 2008 (two years backpacking South America and South East Asia). The average local could not afford it. I could barely afford it. I remember for instance a Internet cafe in a small mountain town in Bolivia charged about $10 dollars an hour in 2008 (I guess it was internet by satellite).
I hope things have changed. Any internet access (however limited) would make a big difference to the poor.
The punchline is that when yo look at earth from space, the places that don't have visible (artificial) light are the places where innovation is happening, leapfrogging legacy wired infrastructure.
What happened to Net Neutrality?
If the Internet is really so beneficial and necessary to these people, they should be given the actual Internet. Accept no substitutions.
(Also, this is more than just "ad supported." This is a bundle of specific sites with their own biases and opinions, not real access to the Internet.)