There are no other social networking sites apart from Facebook and no email provider.Īlongside them are country-specific offerings, but their presence is determined by which companies have adapted their code to meet the requirements of the Free Basics platform, rather than those that meet local needs. These include AccuWeather, Johnson & Johnson-owned Bab圜enter, BBC News, ESPN and the search engine Bing. But many of the services with the most prominent placement – on the app’s homepage - are created by private US companies, regardless of the market.

Each version is localized, offering a slightly different set of up to 150 sites and services. Mobile operators agree to “zero-rate” the data consumed by the app, making it free, while Facebook does the technical heavy lifting to ensure that they can do this as cheaply as possible.

To deliver the service, which is now active in 65 countries, Facebook partners with local mobile operators. “It’s building this little web that turns the user into a mostly passive consumer of mostly western corporate content. “Facebook is not introducing people to open internet where you can learn, create and build things,” said Ellery Biddle, advocacy director of Global Voices. However, the Global Voices report identifies a number of weaknesses in the service, including not adequately serving the linguistic needs of local populations featuring a glut of third-party services from private companies in the US harvesting huge amounts of metadata about users and violating the principles of net neutrality. Free Basics is skewed towards generic, western-produced content.

Basic version facebook