Disconnecting The World

This is the story of how Facebook (TM) is trying to replace internet access for customers in the developing world with a walled garden of their own. Their mission statement is "Connecting The World", but, in true doublespeak fashion, they do the exact opposite.

Facebook has organized partnership, named "internet.org", between itself and six companies (Samsung, Ericsson, MediaTek, Opera Software, Nokia and Qualcomm), that "plans to bring affordable access to selected Internet services to less developed countries by increasing efficiency, and facilitating the development of new business models around the provision of Internet access." They advertise this initiative as some noble goal, to bring affordable internet access to those who can not afford it. This is a scam of course. Facebook makes their profits by connecting as much people as possible to their social networking service, and to grab the 5 billion people on the planet who aren't already caught in their web, they need to have an internet connection.

However, it's not real internet access that's offered through their internet.org partnership. To use their "free internet" service, customers have to use their app, called "Free Basics", and once logged in, users can only access a couple of dozens of handpicked sites, including Facebook of course. The project was launched in 2013 and had 100 million users in 2018; I'm not sure what the count is today. That's 100 million more users that Facebook can make money off with their personal data and targeted advertising. Free Basics is available in approximately 40 countries, all of which are in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America; it operates in countries where data is mainly charged by the megabyte or minutes, so the idea of free internet access can be very attractive to many of these users.

But it's not internet access. In fact, most of the first 100 million users weren't new to the internet, but merely people who use the Free Basics app to lower their costs; these users have effectively been taken off the internet and trapped in Facebook's walled garden of a few selected websites. Stripped down versions of those websites even.

That same report also pointed out that nearly all Free Basics users were already on the Internet before they started using Free Basics. They simply use it to reduce their data bills. Carriers participate because it's part of their customer acquisition strategy. It's a "free" thing they can offer customers.

Instead of providing Internet access to people who didn't have it, Facebook's Internet.org is more frequently taking people who do have Internet access and taking them off it.
_{source: Computerworld}

It comes down to this: internet.org and Free Basics is a business development initiative aimed at increasing Facebook's user base and revenue. It offers users in developing countries access to 0.00000005 percent of the world wide web, thereby severely limiting the information these users are allowed to consume. If that's not an Orwellian ploy of the first degree, I don't know what is. Linked below is a video about how this was promoted during the latest World Economic Forum in Davos, and not a word is said about how this really works and what Facebook's true aims are. But I guess we're used to that by now...

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