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posted by Fnord666 on Monday July 31 2017, @03:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-will-be-assimilated dept.

Facebook's gratis web service, "Free Basics", is anything but free. Though it targets developing markets, it focuses on establishing a foothold for 'western corporate content' while at the same time violating net neutrality principles. The Guardian reports on a recent study by Global Voices on the problem:

[...] 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.

"Facebook is not introducing people to open internet where you can learn, create and build things," said Ellery Biddle, advocacy director of Global Voices. "It's building this little web that turns the user into a mostly passive consumer of mostly western corporate content. That's digital colonialism."

The actual report, Free Basics in Real Life — Six case studies on Facebook's internet "On Ramp" initiative from Africa, Asia and Latin America [PDF], and a summary of the study find a moderately long list of problems. In the list is the fact that "Free Basics" does not allow users to browse the Internet itself. Instead it restricts access to a small set of services selected by Facebook. It also presses subscribers to join Facebook, an act which is questionable even outside of "Free Basics" restrictions, and divides third-party services into two tiers of visibility and availability.


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