A look at the history of Facebook's Internet.org project, which it says has brought 100M online, from its 2013 debut to Free Basics
Five years ago Mark Zuckerberg debuted a bold, humanitarian vision of global internet. It didn't go as planned—forcing Facebook to reckon with the limits of its own ambition. Tweets: @karengeier , @wired , @laurengoode , and @eringriffith Tweets: @karengeier : Uh that vision was to basically privatize a sub par internet for the developing world to get his company's numbers up. It was a crap plan http://twitter.com/... @wired : For three years, Zuckerberg included his vision of global internet in his top priorities. Clearly, it didn't go as planned http://www.wired.com/... Lauren Goode / @laurengoode : What happened to Facebook's plan to wire the world? Great report from @jessiwrites https://www.wired.com/... Erin Griffith / @eringriffith : in which @jessiwrites unravels the mess that was Facebook's http://internet.org/ http://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Five years after Mark Zuckerberg debuted Internet.org in 2013, Wired is running the retrospective the coverage arc has been building toward: a history of Free Basics and Internet.org that traces how a growth initiative became a project 'besieged by regulators and net neutrality advocates.' The milestones along the way map the friction — the Free Basics launch in India in early 2015, Zuckerberg's attempt to reassure carriers at MWC weeks later, and then the reckoning.
First-order effects
- Facebook enters this anniversary with a defensible metric — Zuckerberg claimed almost 100M people accessing the internet via Internet.org in April 2018, up from 40M in November 2016 per his own accounting — but also with the project publicly framed as having fallen short of its stated humanitarian aims.
Second-order effects
- The net-neutrality critique of Free Basics as a privatized, subpar tier of connectivity forced Facebook into a permanent defensive posture: reassuring carriers that Internet.org was no threat to their business while defending walled-garden free data in markets like India.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform-led connectivity programs will keep growing their user counts while shedding their original universal-access framing — corporate-run access initiatives surviving only where they can clear local regulatory and neutrality objections.
The trend: Big-platform global connectivity efforts are being reshaped by net-neutrality resistance, with user growth increasingly decoupled from the founding ambition of connecting everyone.