Josh Braun
Revisiting this piece by Olivia Solon on Facebook's Free Basics program and thinking about where this playbook begins. When it comes to media, it seems to me you can trace it back at least as far as Hollywood. 🧵 1/12
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/27/facebook-free-basics-developing-markets
Josh Braun
Thanks to a first-mover advantage and the enormous size of the U.S. audience, American TV networks and Hollywood studios were able to recoup the investment they laid out for film and TV programs domestically, meaning that any money they made in international markets was pure profit. This allowed them to engage in predatory pricing, rolling out programming in foreign markets at cut rates that kneecapped other countries' domestic film and television industries. 🧵 2/12
Josh Braun
Today, Meta engages in a similar game, plowing profits initially made off its large U.S. user base into Free Basics, providing free access to Facebook to people in impoverished nations who could not otherwise afford internet access at all. For those consumers, Facebook can effectively become synonymous with the internet. 🧵 4/12
Josh Braun
At the height of Hollywood's hegemony, only countries with substantive public funding for local media production, protectionist cultural policies, or some combination thereof managed to buck the trend. Erik Barnouw's "The Image Empire" gives a good account. 🧵 3/12
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