Column: No such thing as free Facebook for emerging world users

There’s nothing wrong with the ambitious plan just unveiled by Facebook and friends to bring the Internet to the two-thirds of the world’s people who don’t have it.

It would have gone over a lot better, though, without the pretense that Mark Zuckerberg is some kind of benign 21st century missionary bringing the gift of Facebook to the benighted denizens of the third world.

That’s the unfortunate impression left by the announcement last Monday of a technology company partnership that is supposed to work on ways to reduce the cost of data plans so that customers in the developing world can afford to subscribe to them.