Consider the role of “identity services,” the mesh of publicly issued identifications that has traditionally meant things like driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers, but has come to include things like Facebook accounts. In a short essay outlining the vision behind Internet.org, Mr. Zuckerberg says one of its goals is to offer credit and identity infrastructure “that is still nascent in many developing countries.” Such services might be of some help in developing countries. But is Facebook the best entity to provide them?

One start-up that demonstrates how all this might work is Lenddo, a lender that operates exclusively in the developing world. It provides credit by assessing the applicant’s activity on social media sites. For Lenddo, Internet.org is great: The more time its applicants spend inside Facebook, the better it can assess their suitability for credit. However, with Facebook as a key provider of identity infrastructure for other services, it’s not clear just where the borders for such tracking — and users’ anxiety over it — would stop. Whatever homilies Mr. Zuckerberg might deliver in Sun Valley, Facebook and its allies are for-profit companies, whose interests fundamentally diverge from those of everyday citizens.

To be sure, the “Internet” in “Internet.org” is not a natural resource that looks and costs the same everywhere based on its inherent features. It is a result of complex, controversial policy decisions over the use and ownership of communication infrastructure. These decisions follow years of lobbying and clever manipulation of national and international bodies by telecom operators, and are a direct consequence of various privatization and liberalization reforms in those countries. Facebook, because of its own long-term interest in expanding its advertising reach in the developing world, can make that Internet more accessible. But to accept its bargain is to abandon the fight to create different institutional arrangements — say, to rein in the power of telecom operators and provide cheaper, more equitable services.

Nor should we accept a development agenda that gives students no option but to surrender their data to Facebook or pay for online courses (in Rwanda, Internet.org is already offering such courses — with Facebook as an intermediary). The answer given by telecom operators — and tacitly endorsed by Internet.org — is that there’s simply no other alternative: that the market always knows best, and that connectivity itself, beyond some basic threshold determined by Facebook and its partners, ought to be treated as a commodity.

Any emergent social movements concerned with matters of universal and affordable connectivity — as opposed to the corporatism of Silicon Valley — should not take this premise for granted. Nor should they fall for the pseudo-humanitarian rhetoric of rights espoused by technology companies. Whenever Mark Zuckerberg says that “connectivity is a human right,” as he put it in his Internet.org essay, you should think twice before agreeing. There is, after all, little joy in obtaining free access to an empty library, or browsing a bookstore with empty pockets — which is, in effect, what Internet.org offers, while holding out the promise of robust content, if users will pay, a few cents at a time, for the privilege.

In this way, Facebook and Internet.org are following a well-trod path. As the World Bank has demonstrated, when development becomes just a means of making a buck, the losers will always be the people at the bottom. Thus, to Silicon Valley’s question of “Is Internet access a human right?” one could respond by turning the tables: What kind of “Internet,” and what kind of “access”?