Facebook's big trouble in its little world domination plan: China

Analysis One of the central themes of Facebook's F8 developer conference in San Francisco this week has been Mark Zuckerberg's plans to wire up the world with Facebook internet access.

Attendees were repeatedly reminded that even in this day and age, there are people not using Facebook – at least four billion people, allegedly. A fair proportion of them also need food, clean water, and electricity, but yadda, yadda, what they need is Facebook.

It's a view that particularly riles Bill Gates, who called Zuckerberg's plans "a joke." The former Microsoft robber-baron-turned-philanthropist pointed out that if you're dying of diarrhea – something that happens to over 2,000 children every day – then internet access is fairly low down on your list of priorities.

That's a tad harsh – internet access will make a lot of people's lives better and it's difficult to dislike Zuck's big idea. It won't be the panacea to some ills that some at the conference were claiming, and there's one block to the plans that didn’t get mentioned at all – China.

Zuckerberg has been assiduously wooing the Chinese government for years now, hoping to get a crack at the billion or so citizens of the Middle Kingdom. He has learnt Chinese, met with the nation's premier, and even went jogging in a heavily polluted Beijing as a PR stunt.

But it'll be a cold day in hell before the Chinese authorities allow Facebook's Aquila drones into its airspace to broadcast a free and open internet connection to its horny-handed sons and daughters of toil. The People's Liberation Army Air Force would take them out in minutes. China doesn't see the need for Facebook, and actively dislikes the possibility of people being able to chat to each other without local censors being able to monitor what is going on. The Chinese government has no intention of loosening its control on the local populace so that Facebook can earn extra cash.

Even assuming, for a moment, that China does allow Facebook to set up a service in the country, the results would most likely be disastrous for the firm. Facebook would have to allow Chinese monitors and censors onto any local service, and pass on a user's details if the police came calling.

When Google tried to move into China it agreed to similar terms. The resulting PR backlash dogged the company and was a big factor in getting it to leave mainland China shortly afterwards.

Some tech companies still operate in the Middle Kingdom, notably Yahoo!, and cooperate with the authorities. It earns them continually bad press, but Yahoo! has bigger problems than that at the moment.

But if Facebook started selling out Chinese users, who might then spend the next few years slaving in a Chinese work camp, the backlash is going to be huge. Facebook is all about social, and its users in the West would use the company's own site to organize against it.

So Facebook's plans for global internet have one big problem. It doesn't seem that it's going to hold Facebook back, and the push is producing some very interesting hardware, but it seems that almost 20 per cent of the world's population won't be part of Zuckerberg's empire. ®