SOMEONE in Cuba wants to know about AC/DC. The query pops up on a screen in Atlanta. After a quick web search, the answer is on its way back to Cuba. Next up: a request for the English translation of a Spanish phrase.
Launched last week, Cuba Intercambio is an email-based service that connects Cubans to people who act as their online proxies. The service exists because Cuba鈥檚 internet provision is one of the most restricted anywhere, and expensive to access. Only 5 per cent of the population is hooked up to the web, although the state telecoms company has announced that it will begin offering home broadband access. But censorship could still make even a Google search impossible for most.
However, many people in Cuba have access to the national email system, so Amy Bruckman and her colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology built Cuba Intercambio around that. It receives users鈥� queries by email and puts them up on a Facebook group. Anyone outside Cuba canlook up the information requested and send it back. The set-up is deliberately low-tech, says Bruckman.
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Cuba Intercambio is one of several projects trying to bridge the gap between internet haves and have-nots. Many parts of the world, including large swathes of Africa, South America and Asia, have limited or no access. Last May, the UN鈥檚 International Telecommunication Union estimated that there were about , meaning more than half of the world鈥檚 population is still offline.
鈥淲hat Facebook are doing might be more palatable if they weren鈥檛 pretending it was an act of charity鈥�
Use of the internet has already reached saturation levels in the rich world, so extending the net鈥檚 reach elsewhere is a way for tech giants like Facebook and Google to grow their userbase. Facebook鈥檚 project aspires to bring the net to offline parts of India and Africa 鈥� possibly with high-flying drones that will beam it using lasers to ground stations. Google has plans to connect the world using solar-powered balloon relays. Others are working on internet by satellite or servers that dish up preloaded web content and can be carried in a backpack.
Such projects make lofty promises: better education, more entrepreneurship, greater access to crucial information, a globally connected world. But not all interventions have been greeted with open arms.
Facebook鈥檚 Free Basics platform, which gives relatively humble phones free access to Facebook, Facebook Messenger and a limited list of partner websites, was criticised for violating net neutrality 鈥� the principle that internet providers should not favour some services over others. In India, public opposition mounted and the platform was suspended in December. For reasons that are unclear, Free Basics hit another snag in Egypt at the end of last year, shutting down after just two months.
The uproar might seem counter-intuitive. Shouldn鈥檛 people be happy to receive the internet, even in limited form, rather than have nothing at all? Or, as Mark Zuckerberg put it in an article for The Times of India in December: 鈥淲ho could possibly be against this?鈥�
The danger of a service like Free Basics, says at the University of Oxford鈥檚 Internet Institute, is that it could give Facebook a monopoly over how an entire region of the world gets online, turning millions into locked-in customers. Graham compares it to an electricity company offering free power that can only be used to run appliances they supply.
鈥淲hat they are doing might be more palatable if they weren鈥檛 pretending that it is a pure act of charity,鈥� he says. 鈥淚f they genuinely want to help the poor, and genuinely want to stand behind the claim that they are not benefiting themselves, why not offer access to the open internet?鈥�
One way to do that might be to find new ways for users to pay for their connections. For example, Grameenphone, a Bangladeshi service partnered with Mozilla 鈥� the organization behind the Firefox web browser 鈥� offers 20 megabytes of free data per day, supported by advertisements.
Other approaches are more radical. In Paraguay, developer Matias Insurralde is working on an app called that uses Facebook Messenger to connect users with limited internet access to those with good access 鈥� in effect hijacking Facebook鈥檚 app to create a virtual network. Similar services, like the free , have allowed people in China to circumvent the Great Firewall.
The idea for Cuba Intercambio came from field interviews by Bruckman and her colleagues. They found that Cubans wanted to use the internet to find trustworthy sources of information 鈥� alternatives to the national media or government sources. Their work will be presented later this month at the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing conference in San Francisco.
The chance to observe people using the internet for the first time is a powerful one, says Bruckman 鈥� especially as a lens to see how the net can transform lives. 鈥淐uba is one of the last places in the world where we can watch the introduction of the internet to a relatively developed culture,鈥� says Bruckman. This matters because people tend to have utopian assumptions about its impact. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e in 1993 when they think about the internet.鈥�
鈥淲alled-garden initiatives that give net access to naive users could leave them open to exploitation鈥�
In some parts of the world, the online world remains hard to conceive of. A study due to be published later this year, for example, surveys mobile phone owners in rural Zambia with little or no experience of Facebook about what they imagine it to be like. 鈥淚f I were on Facebook, at least I would be able to send photos of my crops to those who support me with fertiliser and seeds,鈥� says one respondent. 鈥淚 have never used Facebook before,鈥� says another. 鈥淚 have just heard about it, it is where people find friends. You can get to have more friends throughout the world.鈥�
The findings suggest that walled-garden initiatives involving users with no concept of net neutrality or what it may mean to share personal data with a corporation could throw up a host of issues 鈥� and that Silicon Valley might take advantage of that naivety.
鈥淎ll of these things that most of us take for granted and mostly understand from using a computer most of our lives, all of this stuff will be unfamiliar to large segments of the world鈥檚 population,鈥� says Susan Wyche at Michigan State University in East Lansing. 鈥淚t鈥檚 really tricky to get into this mindset where you have no idea what the internet is.鈥�
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淔irst-time surfers鈥�
