![]() ![]() While Facebook initially presented the project as philanthropy targeting unconnected rural communities, it follows a gateway drug commercial model: this sample of connectivity will spur greater data consumption, and in the process grow Facebook’s user base while cementing the corporation’s position as the gateway to the Internet for mobile users across the Global South. Designed to work on both feature and smartphones and in contexts of limited bandwidth, this walled-garden model is reminiscent of a 1990s AOL web portal. Free Basics is both an application and website that provides free of data charges access to a variety of basic services like news, weather and health information, job ads, and of course, Facebook. ![]() One of the most notorious ones is Facebook’s Free Basics initiative. What made this quiet expansion possible post the India debacle? And what does it mean for the future of civil society resistance to tech corporations?Īs part of their efforts to increase their global reach, US tech corporations have invested in a range of connectivity projects across the Global South. Globally, however, the project kept expanding, particularly across Africa: by the summer of 2019, at least 32 African nations had offered the service at one point in the last five years. In 2016, Facebook’s grand project to ‘connect the unconnected’ was banned in India after a year-long national debate led by net neutrality activists. ![]()
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