Facebooknet

Mitchell Baker, the CEO of the Mozilla Foundation, takes a close look at “zero rating” and explains clearly why it is a threat to the open internet. One half of “zero rating” (which is what Facebook is doing with Internet.org) is helping cover data charges for poor users, which she lauds. The other half, where “the parts of the internet that are available for citizens to choose from is limited, and predetermined by those entities with financial power,” Baker says “is disastrous.” She notes that yesterday Mozilla wrote to Prime Minister Modi of India supporting the open internet and stating that “zero rating is not the right solution.”

Mozilla Corporation’s senior VP for business and legal affairs Denelle Dixon-Thayer points out that there are alternatives to the Facebook “Internet.org” approach. She notes that in Bangladesh, a Mozilla partnership with Grameenphone allows users to receive 20MB of free data usage a day in exchange for viewing an ad, for example.

Related: Mozilla staffer Ben Moskowitz writes that “Internet.org is offensive.” Instead, he says,

Internet.org is neither the “Internet,” nor a charitable and development-oriented “.org.” Internet.org is now a carefully managed partnership program, through which Facebook has curatorial power similar to an app store.

And Josh Levy of Access writes in Wired that we should actually refer to Internet.org as Facebooknet.

Writing in The Guardian, imprisoned whistleblower Chelsea Manning makes an impassioned case for increased freedom of information. She writes, “I believe that when the public lacks even the most fundamental access to what its governments and militaries are doing in their names, then they cease to be involved in the act of citizenship.”

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has hired Revolution Messaging the lead his digital efforts, bringing on several veterans of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, including RM founder Scott Goodstein (external online director for Obama ’08 and the one-time keeper of @barackobama), Arun Chaudhary (new media road director in ’08 and Obama’s first official White House videographer), Shauna Daly (Obama ’08 deputy research director), and Walker Hamilton (site architect for Obama ’08). Kenneth Pennington, Sanders’ Senate social media director, is also joining the team. According to a release from Revolution Messaging, the Sanders’ campaign raised $3 million in its first four days, outperforming the current Republican field with 75,000 contributions averaging $43 each. 185,000 supporters have signed up at BernieSanders.com.

So far, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has released little information about its fundraising. And as Patrick Caldwell reports for Mother Jones, it also has yet to say anything about what it will reveal about its bundlers, those key individuals who frequently round up hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars in contributions on behalf of campaigns. The 2008 Clinton campaign released limited information about its bundlers, only offering a list of 324 people who pulled in $100,000 or more. The Obama campaign that year offered a more detailed list of 556 names broken into four monetary tiers. The 2012 Romney campaign released no bundler information.

With voters in Great Britain going to the polls, the BBC’s Mike Wendling chews on that old bone, the so-called “social media election” (aka the “Facebook election” or the “Twitter election” etc.—luckily here in the US we’re onto “the Meerkat election”). Far more likely it’s a data and analytics election, but so far we’ve seen little coverage of that critical element in digital campaigning.

Searching for his insights under the lamppost where the light is brightest, British digital analyst Carl Miller writes in Buzzfeed that lots of his compatriots are using social media to hurl curses at politicians.

Voter advice apps have proliferated in this UK election (is it the “voter advice election?”) but most of them have lousy UI, reports programmer and activist Francis Irving, the CEO of ScraperWiki.

Becky Bond, the brilliant director of CREDO Mobile, the for-profit mobile phone company with 100,000 customers that is also a progressive social change organization, gets profiled by Samantha Lachman in the Huffington Post.

And FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel is profiled by Dana Liebelson, also in the Huffington Post.

Elle Magazine highlights twelve influential women in tech, including Jennifer Pahlka of Code for America.

Surprise, surprise: Verizon’s online marketers are trained to lie to potential customers about the benefits of their pricy 75 Mbps broadband plan. But they got caught in the act when the customer they were trying to oversell turned out to be the vice president of StreamingMedia.com, reports Zach Epstein for BGR.com.

Nick Bilton of the New York Times cites social science studies suggesting that wealth makes people self-centered and less empathetic to others to explain Silicon Valley’s culture of self-absorption. Ya think?

ICYMI: This week at Civicist we featured Anthony Townsend writing about civic tech and urban science can learn from each other and Dave Karpf on the real tools making the world a better place.

Our Jessica McKenzie looks at a new service called Protestify that is trying to get extra eyes on your protest pics, and (hopefully) a few dollars in your pocket.