facebook criticized policy preferential treatment

Facebook criticized policy preferential treatment code#
Facebook criticized policy preferential treatment free#

For example, although Free Basics includes access to the Bing search engine and will show snippets of listings for free, reading any of the results of the search requires payment. When a user tries to access information outside of the tiny walled garden, a pop-up appears urging them to buy more data. In Ghana, everything is in English, even though other languages, such as Twi and Hausa, are widely spoken. Kenyan users can choose an interface in English or Kiswahili, but most of the services are offered in English only. Bizarrely, the same app also offers two Nigerian websites and a regional news outlet for Argentina.įree Basics is also restricted in terms of language. In the Mexican version of the app, offered by Telcel, there’s only one local site on the first page: for the foundation of the billionaire Carlos Slim, the CEO of Telcel. “The content does not include some of the important websites Ghanaians want to look at,” said Kofi Yeboah, who researched the app in Ghana, noting that popular news websites such as MyJoyOnline and CityFM were missing.

Facebook criticized policy preferential treatment code#

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.