A recent report from wall street journal reveals that the service Free Basicsa free Internet formula offered by Meta to several developing countries, such as Indonesia, the Philippines or Pakistan, not working as expected. Users are faced with “hidden fees” billed by mobile phone operators.
Cellular carriers apply ‘hidden fees’ to Free Basics users
The documents obtained by the journalists of the wall street newspaper come from Frances Haugen, the whistleblower behind the Facebook Files. We discover that the free Internet access promised by Facebook to users in several developing countries, isn’t that free after all. Many Internet users have been billed without their knowledge by their mobile phone providers.
YouTube could also get into NFTs
The Free Basics service, offered through Meta Connectivity (formerly Facebook Connectivity) was supposed to provide users with a “free access to communication tools, health information, educational resources, and other low-bandwidth services”. The program has been running since 2013 and, as of October 2021, it served more than 300 million people worldwide.
Paid features, such as videos, appear in the free mode of the service… A flaw in the Meta system, that benefits operators and forces users to pay bills that they had not anticipated. Bills that can be particularly difficult to pay for people who already cannot afford Internet access. A lucrative loophole for operators: $7.8 million per month according to the report. This phenomenon has particularly affected Pakistan.
A way for Meta to gain new users
The problem seems to be in the Meta software and user interface. Videos are not meant to appear on this version of Facebook. Notifications that are supposed to inform the user that he will have to pay to watch videos do not appear. According to the documents consulted by the wall street journalMeta found that approximately 83% of fees came from these videos. Meta has every interest in promoting free Internet access. Most of its recent growth has come from developing countries.
While Free Basics does not limit users to viewing Facebook and other Meta-owned services, it obviously increases the chances that newcomers to the Internet register and drive the growth of Meta. Facebook’s growth has stalled in developed markets and is only growing in countries with low connectivity. Aware of this incentive to register with Facebook, the Indian government even banned the Free Basics service of Facebook in 2016, believing that it violated the values of network neutrality.