&gt; &quot;What Facebook wants is our less fortunate brothers and sisters should be able to poke each other and play Candy Crush, but not be able to look up a fact on Google, or learn something on Khan Academy or sell their produce on a commodity market or even search for a job,&quot; he said.&lt;<p>Indians use connectivity very differently than the rest of the world(or at least different from the developed countries). To Indians, phone&#x2F;internet is a mode of communication first. It was the thing which has been missing from their lives the most. This is especially true for the demographics Facebook was targeting.<p>The reason is the language barrier. A lot more Indians can read and write English needed for directions, news headlines, legal documents, store names etc, than those who can truly express themselves in English. My mom is a great example of this, she can read and write English, but will have trouble understanding a conversation going on purely in English.<p>This is the reason her smartphone usage is almost all reliant upon content created and generated by others. WhatsApp and Facebook are the two most used apps on her phone. It isn&#x27;t that she wouldn&#x27;t like to read up facts about politicians and world events from Wikipedia, it&#x27;s just that Hindi Wikipedia and Google suck. However, if someone were to forward her a news article, a recipe or just make posts on their facebook, she&#x27;s a lot more comfortable doing that.<p>It&#x27;s been less than 5 years since she got WhatsApp and Facebook, but the social network she has created around the two facilitates her family in ways it was not imaginable 10 years ago.<p>BTW &quot;It&#x27;s East India Company all over again&quot; is a cliche at this point and should be considered racist in India (because it&#x27;s almost exclusively used against any non-Indian entrepreneurship in India).