Needs

Responding to criticism of its Internet.org program in India, Facebook announced that it is opening it to more sites and services. Chris Daniels, VP of product for Internet.org, tells Pranav Dixit of the Hindustan Times: “Sites and services that are part of the Internet.org platform will need to adhere to three principles: they need to offer a simpler version of their existing service to encourage people go out and explore the broader internet. They will also need to be extremely data efficient because this has to work for [telecom] operators. It can’t be a constraint on their networks. So things like video or high-resolution photos aren’t going to be appropriate for this.” He adds, “some access is better than no access.”

Developers will have to apply for their services to be included in Internet.org, something no one has to do on the real internet. But in Facebook’s video announcing the move, Mark Zuckerberg argues that this doesn’t contradict net neutrality, condemning his critics as people who “put the intellectual purity of technology above people’s needs.” (It’s tempting to compare Zuckerberg’s impassioned speech in this video to the lese majeste tone of Bill Gates’ letter to his fellow computer “hobbyists” back in 1976, condemning them for copying and sharing Microsoft’s software without paying for it.)

Responding to the move, Nikhil Pahwa, a volunteer with SavetheInternet.in, writes that this is still “a fundamental, permanent change in the way the Internet works,” and that Internet.org is a privacy nightmare because “Facebook, your telecom operator and the government will know what you are doing.”

Secure content is not currently supported by Internet.org, but according to this exchange between Open Whisper Systems’ Frederic Jacobs and Mark Zuckerberg, it’s coming.

Two of the central Twitter activists at the heart of the new civil rights movement, DeRay Mckesson and Netta Elzie, are profiled in next Sunday’s New York Times magazine by Jay Caspian Kang. The story nicely illustrates some of the online network-weaving that they do constantly, and pushes back gently against the desire of many, older civil rights veterans for charismatic “leaders” to articulate the movement’s demands. Oddly though, the piece makes no mention of the origins of the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the wake of the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer in 2012, leaving the impression that today’s wave of activism started this past summer with #Ferguson and the killing of Mike Brown.

In response to the story, Clay Shirky tweets: “it seems like just yesterday when Malcolm @Gladwell insisted social media would be largely useless in civic rights campaigns.”

John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, takes to Medium to announce a new hub called “The Briefing” that will provide the public with “direct access to the facts” about Clinton and the Clinton Foundation, and which “will be accompanied by a suite of co-branded social media platforms—from Twitter to Vine, YouTube to Facebook.” Mark me as still curious why the Clinton campaign website doesn’t have a blog for these kinds of announcements. Surely they want the traffic and the metadata that comes with it?

Clinton will testify before the House Benghazi committee sometime this month, to answer questions about her email server Deirdre Walsh reports for CNN.com

In case you missed it, Carly Fiorina failed to register CarlyFiorina.org. But someone else did.

Robinson Meyer of the Atlantic catches his readers up on the work “crisis mappers” are doing to help earthquake-stricken Nepal.

Iceland’s Pirate Party now has more public support (32 percent) than the ruling party. Birgitta Jonsdottir, the party’s founder, will be speaking at Personal Democracy Forum 2015 next month here in NYC. (h/t Guojon Idir, the executive director of the Icelandic Modern Media Institute)

Mayor Bill de Blasio of NYC is committing $70 million of the city’s capital budget to making high-speed broadband accessible and affordable to low-income New Yorkers, Miranda Neubauer reports for Capital NY. $60 million will go toward creating new wireless corridors providing low-cost service to low-income residents and $10 million will upgrade existing corridors.

The White House is celebrating the “maker movement” this year with a “Week of Making” from June 12-18, the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Tom Kalil and Roberto Rodriguez blog.

NY Governor Andrew Cuomo wants to have a “summit” with legislative leaders and state officials to discuss his 90-day email deletion policy, report Josefa Velasquez and Jimmy Vielkind for Capital, but most of them aren’t interested.

The Sunlight Foundation’s president Christopher Gates announces a big consolidation of the flagship transparency organization’s core data offerings.

Speaking of government transparency, the Washington Post has shut down its congressional votes database, making the New York Times the only large news site hosting one, as Derek Willis points out.

Frontiers of Democracy, the annual conference on civic renewal convened by Peter Levine, is taking place June 25-27 at Tufts University. Details here.