Facebook’s Next two billion plan
Facebook, a social media empire with two billion users, has launched a free internet initiative known as “FREE BASICS”. According to Global Voices, Advox, this program “aims to help bridge the digital divide through a mobile-based platform that allows users to connect to a handful of online services free of charge. In a vision statement for the program, Facebook surmises that “by introducing people to the benefits of the internet” they will help justify the cost of mobile data and thereby “bring more people online and help improve their lives.”
The program targeted poor countries such as Africa, Latin America, and South east Asia and is now active in 65 countries.
Global voices believe that the program was put under criticism since its inception, reviving the debate over open access and the digital divide.
According to them, digital rights experts have argued that the program violates network neutrality, brings an imbalance to local content and mobile subscription markets, and creates a “poor internet for poor people” that does not allow users to truly explore and discover the global internet.
Those were the direct reasons that lead India, the second largest market after USA, to ban the initiative. They believed that internet service providers (ISPs) should treat everyone’s data equally No content providers should have an unfair advantage Content should be equally accessible to all
Others have praised it for offering users some degree of experience with the web, and for incentivizing operators to make mobile data more affordable for more customers.
The concept of colonialism was apparent throughout the research regarding Facebooks initiative. Facebook indirectly practiced this concept on the 65 countries, controlling them using Free Basics, blending it with other concepts that convey a positive image of the initiative, shaping it into an opportunity to revolutionize life there. It is basically a publicity stunt to expand Facebook’s control on a vast area of users who can unfortunately be easily controlled due to their inconvenient life standards. Facebook used the idea of “some internet is better than no internet at all” to convince the people, therefore bypassing the huge motive they secretly have, mark Zuckerberg made it look as if this is an opportunity for better education, social relations, and eventually economic status. Free Basics was offered as the tiny window into a brighter future.
Free Basics application, which uses Facebook as an “on-ramp” to using internet, offers their users the basic internet needs. The catch though, is that for these people to use the full offered sources such as Bing search engine results, they’d have to pay for it, therefore offering a type of economic control. They only offer them a teste of the internet so they lure them into paying, subscribing, and joining the net of users which Facebook has control of.
According to the guardian, all user activities within the app are channeled through Facebook’s servers.
This means Facebook can tell which third-party sites users are looking at, when and for how long. This is a proof that colonialism is present in this initiative, even though Facebook is giving back to the people, it still doesn’t come close to what it is taking from them thanks to its design which “aims to gear new Facebook subscribers and harvest huge amount of metadata in the emerging social markets of the global south.
Global Voices conducted a study on countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Throughout the research they found that the initiative offers little to no images, and no videos to its users. The application was only offered in the English language and not in the countries native language, therefore making it useless to most of the people there due to being illiterate. Other than that, the app is partnered with sources that do not belong to the countries involved, but rather platforms which gain more users, similar to Facebook.
What Facebook basically did was conceive an idea which allowed it to gain an extra two billion users, therefore justifying its countries of choice, gain their data which is the vital source of power for Facebook, and earn money out of it too. They forced their language and their culture subconsciously onto the people, and they grew even more. Granted they are offering them internet and some of the basic needed, but not all, and not for free, ironically contradicting the initiative’s own name “Free Basics”
