For the record

[image building from Meta]

From time to time I have a pop at the evil doings of Facebook, so I thought that in fairness I should notice another aspect of those doings.

Doings which might well be primarily intended to build their presence in poorer parts of the world, but which are also providing a service.

With the report at reference 1 which prompted this post being prompted by a six hour shutdown of the Facebook operation last October, a shutdown reported at reference 2. In brief: ‘… configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt…’.

The story seems to be that there is no regular Internet access in many parts of the world, say rural parts of India or Afghanistan, but there are mobile phones and mobile phone networks. These telephone networks can be leveraged to provide Internet access of a sort and this is what Facebook is doing.

I was puzzled by the numbers part of the story where we are told that: ‘… more than 3.5 billion people around the world use Facebook’s suite of social networks and apps, including Facebook.com, Messenger app, Instagram, and WhatsApp, among others. The country with the largest population of Facebook users is India, with an estimated 340 million users. (The United States, by contrast, has an estimated 200 million users.)…’. So where are the other 3 billion? It seems like an awful lot.

But the trick seems to be to provide Internet-lite on a mobile phone without that phone incurring data charges – data charges which many of the intended users could not afford. With the Facebook umbrella under which this is done being called Free Basics. See references 3, 4, 5 and 6. Mostly quite easy going. But not reference 7, turned up by Bing, but which looks to be about something else altogether.

In order to work mobile phone operators and website providers need to sign up and get on board – and what these last are buying for their bother is reaching many more people – perhaps potential customers – than they otherwise would. Facebook clearly wants to be seen to be promoting good works, so we are told about the healthcare people at reference 8 who are using Free Basics to massively increase their reach.

A quick look at refence 8 did not tell me what there business model was. Maybe they provide some basic, free health support and you buy stuff from their shop. I don’t think that they are a charity.

While reference 6 is geek-stuff about how Free Basics works – and how it does not support JavaScript or high volume content. Presumably older mobile phones don’t do JavaScript and high volume does not sit well with free.

So as well as all the bad stuff, it seems that Facebook are doing some good stuff. Good in the sense that they help people in the short term and by so doing help themselves in the long term. Much the same deal as Google: suck in lots of people with lots of free service – then sit back and collect the advertising revenue that comes with them.

Whereas you pay Microsoft for their services and it is only recently that they have started loading them up with advertisements. And while the advertisements are irritating, I imagine that people paying for their services still accounts for most of their revenues. The tail is not yet wagging the dog.

References

Reference 1: Millions of people rely on Facebook to get online. The outage left them stranded: For huge parts of the world, Facebook is synonymous with the internet - Eileen Guo, Patrick Howell O'Neill, MIT Technology Review – 2021.

Reference 2: https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/04/networking-traffic/outage/. The outage story from Meta (aka Facebook).

Reference 3: https://www.facebook.com/connectivity/solutions/free-basics/. Introduction to Free Basics.

Reference 4: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org. More on Free Basics.

Reference 5: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org/platform-technical-guidelines. What doesn’t work on Free Basics. A click from reference 4.

Reference 6: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org/how-to-submit. More do’s and don’ts for wannabee participants. A click from reference 4.

Reference 7: https://freebasic.net/. But I think that this is something else altogether.

Reference 8: https://mayadigitalhealth.com/. The healthy people.