by Lucie Greene
Yet here again, China is not hanging back. Chinese phones, like Apple’s, are common in Cuba. Like Google, Huawei is courting the communist government to ramp up telecommunications on the island. And, while Cuba is closer in proximity to the U.S., China as a communist country shares historic trade links with Cuba.
Silicon Valley’s Cuba initiative sits as part of a wider strategy in emerging markets: presenting internet infrastructure as a gift and part of a wider humanitarian mission. But one with obvious commercial incentives—a fresh market with pools of consumers to reach. And this time, because they’re laying the cables, bringing phones, and offering payments, they’re able to claim a much more holistic set of data from consumers than when they were simply a search engine. All they need to grapple with are the governments.
Cuba is on the brink of a lot of change, but at the same time is very aware of its historic animosity with the U.S. and the implications of American tech behemoths infiltrating and spying. But in this borderless age, even this concern, as my local guide explains, is becoming irrelevant: “Most Cubans have Gmail already. Most have Facebook.” Though without easy connection to high-speed internet, the lucrative monetization of online searches and interactions has yet to start flowing to these companies.
The servers are the latest development for Google in a concerted effort to bring internet to Cuba. It has partnered with Cuba’s Museo Orgánico de Romerillo to offer free wi-fi. (Drive by on a weekend and this too, a quiet garden on the outskirts of Havana, is surrounded by residents. There are benches on the side of the road, near no residential developments, yet here people are hovering over their phones.)
The signs weren’t promising for Silicon Valley giants at first: Google offered to install wi-fi antennae throughout Cuba for free in 2015 and was rebuffed by the second secretary of the Cuban Communist Party, José Ramón Machado Ventura, who commented at the time: “Everyone knows why there isn’t more internet access in Cuba, because it is costly. There are some who want to give it to us for free, but they don’t do it so that the Cuban people can communicate. Instead their objective is to penetrate us and do ideological work to achieve a new conquest. We must have internet, but in our way, knowing that the imperialists intend to use it as a way to destroy the Revolution.”
Fast-forward to 2016 and it’s a different picture, but not for many Silicon Valley companies. Google and Airbnb stand as isolated success stories in this instance. Amazon started laying the groundwork to ship packages to Cuba by adding a “ship to Cuba” button on its website in Havana. But the option didn’t go live (and as of 2017, still hasn’t), prompting an error message that reads: “Due to export controls and economic sanctions laws and regulations, we are unable to process transactions from your current location.” Mark Zuckerberg has yet to bring Free Basics, Facebook’s emerging-markets free app, to Cuba but has said Cuba “definitely fits within our mission.”
Airbnb moved into Cuba in 2015 with a listing of 1,000 homes. A year later that had grown to 4,000 homes, which, according to Jordi Torres, Airbnb’s general manager for Latin America, makes the island the fastest-growing vacation market ever. Speak with homeowners in Old Havana, and many have been able to restore their homes using income generated from Airbnb lettings. The Cuban government is now seeking to regulate and tax this.
It’s strange that while Cubans themselves desire connectivity, and tourists might express frustration at not being able to post Instagram shots until they’ve departed—for outsiders, the rush to Cuba is being driven by its exotic standing as one of the last internet-free time capsules. Once internet and universal payments arrive, everything will change.
Cuba’s Disconnected Tech Scene
It’s remarkable in a place like Cuba that there are tech entrepreneurs at all. Several conversations are illustrative of the dynamic in Cuba now, and what might happen as Silicon Valley expands in Cuba.
A community of young entrepreneurs on the island have built apps designed to work around patchy access to the internet. These ingenious apps hold gigantic and detailed maps of the island created by local entrepreneurs, offering the benefits of Google Maps without requiring internet connectivity. There are apps that allow users to review restaurants, just like Yelp, only the review doesn’t post immediately. It’s stored, and programmed to post when the phone receives sufficient internet signal. It’s like a simulation of the Internet. Map guide Isla Dentro and lifestyle guide Conoce Cuba are two examples of sophisticated restaurant guides and commerce hubs with astounding levels of design quality and internet-like detail. These founders are the young face of Cuban ingenuity.
Would they be excited about more connectivity in Cuba? The answer is yes and no. After all, if high-speed internet arrives, anyone can simply access Yelp or other international websites. They won’t need a proprietary local map, and a gigantic file, clogging up their phone. Many of their apps thrive on the challenges that having no internet creates.
There’s a curious official black market to the tech world in Cuba. It’s almost like the government knows young people crave technology, U.S. brands, and connection, but don’t want to acknowledge or condone it in a formal way.
Around Havana, the streets are replete with tech repair shops. Many are luxuriously appointed with Apple branding, demonstrating a further appetite for Silicon Valley brands. These tech repair shops will unlock phones and install apps, sidestepping location restrictions. Everything has been conceived to look like official Apple stores. Technology is carefully repaired for maximum life, too. In the same way they continue to lovingly tend to their cars, Cubans will never throw their phones away like Americans do.
El Paquete is a highly known and evolved bootleg operation. It costs CUB$5, roughly $6.50, a week. “People want to consume the same way they consume in America. All the time. We have to keep up,” says one dealer I speak to (they preferred not to be named). El Paquete now sells advertising. And little wonder. The whole of Cuba is its audience.
As with Cuba in general, the island’s disconnected tech founders are also familiar to Silicon Valley companies. Many refer to Google’s local rep by his first name. They all own iPhones or smartphones. Many founders were selected for Obama’s 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Study and have visited Silicon Valley or New York. But they say they are committed to Cuba.
Do they mind if American internet companies come in? “The internet is like the ocean. It’s free. You cannot control it,” says engineer Jorge Enrique Fernandez. In Cuba still—as in its early, uncommercialized days in the U.S.—the internet is viewed with a degree of innocence as a liberalizing force. The gateway to freedom, in other words.
Fernandez’s statement is illustrative of the paradigm shift happening in all the new digital frontiers—from Kenya to the streets of Havana. One where connectivity, seeming so precious to those without it, is beside the point to others. It is freely given but only in return for data, which is much more precious.
Digital Rajas
The noise of Jaipur, Rajasthan, is that of any thriving, dense city. It’s a constant whirring and beeping, with car exhausts revving into action. This place, like many Indian cities, is surging frenetically into the future, yet grappling with narrow streets, dirt tracks, and roads built in previous eras for half the traffic. Drive through the streets past haggling traders and rickshaws, and there are pigs, cows grazing on garbage, and the crowds. Cars, mopeds, and lorries are all swarming through bottleneck junctions, around its beautiful Pink Palace, City Palace, and bustling stores. Somehow it all works.
Yet for all the chaos and humanity, there’s a rising common thread too: tech. There are billboards for YouTube. Oppo, a Chinese-owned smartphone brand, is advertised high above the markets. Ubers are operating on main roads. India is in love with technology, digital platforms, and more important, social media.
Few countries hold more potential for Facebook than socially minded India, and today the company is growing rapidly (it boasts 166 million users). But in 20
15 it suffered a major setback when a scandal erupted over the roll-out of Free Basics.
“Connecting the World” is a frequent headline. The project is part of Facebook’s wider mission to invest in new businesses and introduce new methods to connect the world. It invites governments, nonprofits, and local companies to partner. But it is also a business development tool for Facebook, allowing companies to access new audiences in tough-to-reach landscapes.
Facebook has been researching new ways to deliver this mission, too, at what the company calls its Connectivity Lab, looking at unmanned aircraft, lasers, and more: “The team is exploring a variety of technologies, including high-altitude, long-endurance planes, satellites, and lasers,” according to the project pages on the Internet.org website. The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that exploded in 2016 was carrying a leased satellite (which was also lost) intended for use by Internet.org’s project in Africa. The $200 million satellite was expected to extend social media access across the continent.
Free Basics has been successful in Africa, but critics have been quick to point out the issues of violating net neutrality through the limited internet included in the service, and for potentially discriminating against companies and competitors not on its lists. Some countries wanting better connectivity but with scant state funds to build it are grateful; but some are not.
India is a good example of the latter, and is a case study in Facebook’s blindness to cultural nuances in its attempts to introduce Free Basics there unchecked.
Facebook unveiled Free Basics in India in 2015, following a much-publicized visit by Mark Zuckerberg, with great fanfare and platitudes about connecting the world and unlocking potential for poor or rural communities. But it was swiftly met with a backlash that caught Facebook off guard. Critics of the closed—and therefore seemingly anticompetitive—nature of Free Basics dubbed it another form of tech imperialism. A grassroots campaign criticizing the app, made up of lawyers and a group of coders, sprung up calling itself Save the Internet. At the same time, a viral video made by All India Bakchod, a group of popular young comedians, exploded immediately online and raised awareness of the issue, explaining why net neutrality was important. In response, in February 2016, regulators banned the Free Basics service in India based on “Prohibition of Discriminatory Tariffs for Data Services Regulations.” Facebook swiftly withdrew Free Basics but has since returned with a paid-for platform in India.
Zuckerberg was clearly offended, penning an op-ed in The Times of India in response: “We know that for every ten people connected to the internet, roughly one is lifted out of poverty. We know that for India to make progress, more than one billion people need to be connected to the internet.
“That’s not theory. That’s fact.
“Another fact—when people have access to free basic internet services, these quickly overcome the digital divide,” he said.
He was quickly met with angry op-eds in response. “Zuckerberg is on the defensive because he doesn’t understand the culture and values of Indians. He doesn’t realize that Ganesh cherishes the freedom that India gained from its British colonizers in 1947 and doesn’t want a handout from a Western company. Ganesh may be poor, but he doesn’t want anyone to dictate what sites he can visit, what movies he may watch, or what applications he can download,” wrote Vivek Wadhwa in The Washington Post.
Adding fuel to the flames, accusations of imperialism were exemplified by a tweet from the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen who, after the ruling that made Free Basics illegal in India, commented: “Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for India for decades. Why stop now?”
Where did Facebook go wrong? What’s wrong with free internet? In presenting the internet as a gift, Facebook tapped into deep Indian cultural sensitivities about imperialism, having been occupied and “civilized” by the British Empire for many years. Also India, unlike many African developing economies, has a rich native digital industry and landscape of tech companies.
There were other missteps. Tensions were heightened during the peak of the conflict by a misjudged and heavy-handed messaging campaign. Facebook appealed to its Indian user base with a message in response to the imminent ban: “Free Basics is a first step to connecting one billion Indians to the opportunities online. But without your support, it could be banned in a matter of weeks.”
Macon Phillips, former head of digital strategy to President Obama and later coordinator of U.S. international programs, remembers when the Facebook story broke. He was in India as the controversy unfolded. “It was remarkable to see it play out on a day-to-day basis there. No one in the media, the government, even the activists, had any expectation that things could have happened that quickly. It really surprised everyone. We have an expression, ‘the dog caught the car’—dogs are forever chasing cars and they finally catch one, and that’s what it felt like.”
Of Facebook’s messaging campaign, Phillips highlighted another issue: control of information when it’s a sole internet provider. “They pushed messages telling people to advocate with its policy. But for me the question is, how many people learned about the original video through Facebook? And at what point do you start seeing Facebook not only promote its viewpoint, but perhaps suppress other viewpoints that have to do with its own corporate interest? Or, when it’s promoting its viewpoint to its users in India, does it have a responsibility to also let them know about a super-popular counterpoint? What’s its role as an open platform versus a self-interested company?”
Indeed, people can visit other websites for news and content. But what happens when Facebook is the internet? It is swiftly becoming so in many developing markets.
Google’s experience in India stands in contrast to Facebook, from a PR standpoint. Google has been quick to step into India, but with a much more open approach. Various figures are quoted but essentially, to meet a government target of adding a further 100 million internet users in India, state-run carrier BSNL announced it would set up 2,500 public wi-fi hotspots across the country by March 2017. In 2015, Google CEO Sundar Pichai also announced a partnership with Indian Railways and RailTel to install 400 wi-fi hotspots at railway stations, making wi-fi available for the more than ten million people who pass through the stations every day. Once this is fully operational, it will be the largest public wi-fi project in India, and one of the largest in the world. Crucially it will also be fast and free, with the long-term goal of making it self-sustainable. One would assume that access to Google-owned sites will be faster.
Google’s wi-fi project has largely been welcomed, and highlights the fundamental flaws in Free Basics. While Facebook was trying to sell the idea of a limited “Zuckernet” to India, Google was giving away the entire internet, and at fast speeds and a level of service that most of the connected world already enjoys. In short, Google has attempted to address the key issue of connectivity, rather than condescending to Indians as Facebook’s Free Basics had done.
“The thing that I’ve come back to as I’ve looked at a lot of these questions is that competition’s a really good thing,” says Phillips. “Competition requires a level playing field, which is why we need some government regulations. You also have to have multiple players on the field. And so I wonder what end game Facebook has in mind when all services and internet traffic for consumer things are on Facebook? When you start to not have any competitors, that’s when Facebook becomes lazy. And that’s when their services start falling apart.”
Silicon Missionaries
Facebook’s mission, though, continues apace. Beyond lucrative territories like Southeast Asia and India, where the focus is on rising affluents joining the middle-class, poorer developing and frontier markets have also become a key focus. Here, bringing internet to people who have never before had it is again being positioned as a philanthropic mission. And in weaker countries, Silicon Valley is finding governments much more amenable to their encroachment.
“The story is rather familiar, from a histo
rical perspective. Google, Microsoft, and Apple will come to India to say, ‘We will offer you enormous benefits. We bring you capital, we bring you technology,’ but of course, they’re asking for something in return . . . You can see clearly from China’s perspective that their idea for their e-commerce was largely to block international and the global domination and to carve out a territory for their own companies, for their own political control. So far, it seems that they’ve been successful,” says Dongsheng Zang, an associate professor of law at the University of Washington. In larger economies, the tech companies are increasingly facing pushback, says Zang. “Look at emerging economies like China, Brazil, and India, not even to mention Russia. They’re not just being passive and waiting for domination—rather, they have their own strategies. There are enormous efforts to talk back to the imperial projects.”
But it’s not that simple, especially with poorer countries. In Africa in particular, a lot of evidence suggests that the biggest barrier to development is weak institutions. It’s long been identified that well-functioning state institutions are a really important factor in development. If companies are allowed to come in and build and own their infrastructure—like Google offering to build fast internet infrastructure and put up all the masts, give everyone broadband, but in return for less regulation, all the data it wants, and a very, very lax regulatory infrastructure—the governments are effectively over a barrel. They’ve got a choice between going for an important free thing that they really want for their people and will make them very popular, but this meaning they are essentially giving up control of governing the internet in return. What that’s actually doing is undermining the state. It also means that, while the access supports local businesses, the data gathered, and the value of that data, goes back to the U.S.