Question

Give a brief outline of Facebook's Internet.org initiative.

Must be 300 words. Thank you.

Answer 1

Here is the brief outline on Facebook internet.org initiative:

• It is a partnership amongst various social media sites that plan to bring access in an affordable manner to less developed countries.
• It aims to bring more efficiency, helping and supporting more business models around the internet services and access.
• Facebook partnered with six other companies namely Samsung, Ericsson, Media Tek, Opera Software, Nokia and Qualcomm.
• Over the years it was criticized for the net neutrality aspect. Many claimed it was discriminatory to the companies not involved in the process.

Other brief details:

• It was launched in 2013 and a ten-page paper had elaborate vision and purpose plan explained by Mark Zuckerberg. It was emphasized thar internet.org is a step in the direction to improve internet access for people around the world.
• The idea was to make the internet more affordable.
• The efficiency of data was another targeted objective.
• For many years Mark kept internet.org in his top priorities providing resources, publicity and his own personal time to make the project happen.
• Mark also appeared before the UN General assembly to share the idea with the members and gathered many engineers to work on distribution assignments.

Internet.org was communicated as a non-profit business. The idea being to make sure underdeveloped economies and markets have access. Partnerships with Indonesia and Pakistan were great examples of early success.

But the charitable purpose became an issue as people required to download Freeabasic app from facebook which had issues of censorship or increasing the number of users.

A lot of the users nearly 100 million came from Myanmar because of certain partnerships in the country. But eventually, the Free basics initiative part of internet.org ended very abruptly meaning the free of cost promise was no more existing. Following which in many other countries the program was called off.

Digicel a telecom partner of the program confirmed that many nations could not use the services any more citing commercial reasons.

Six years since the launch internet.org is not known at all. The concerns of net neutrality overshadowed the purpose of the concept.

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