Mark Zuckerberg’s Free Basics Initiative

The next speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Andrea Alarcon, whose focus is on Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet.org project. Its aim was to provide free basic Internet service around the world, especially for people who were within the Web’s reach but remained unconnected with it; access to Facebook itself was deeply baked into this initiative, and this generated significant accusations of building a walled garden.

Internet.org was subsequently renamed as Free Basics, and continues its activities; it was expelled from India, however. It represents an attempt to establish a socio-technical imaginary informed by a significant level of technological determinism; Zuckerberg presented a particular technological vision and was surprised that this was not shared by the people whom he attempted to address.

Zuckerberg built especially on development discourse, which in itself represents a particular, neo-colonial language; Andrea studied some 67 of the project’s promotional videos from the past five years (views of which have declined precipitously over this time; while the earliest videos attracted some 500,000 views, the latest have only been viewed several hundred times) to examine the rhetoric employed here.

Most of the videos map onto the Sustainable Development Goals promulgated by the United Nations; there is a shift from an emphasis on future potential, through the telling of individual stories, to the highlighting of local partnerships. Some of them are heavy on buzzwords and centre on the typical tropes of development. The Free Basics initiative may represent a failed imaginary, because it has not been as widely accepted as expected; at the same time, Zuckerberg continues to push it nonetheless.