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Leveraging Facebook's Free Basics Engine for Web Service Deployment in Developing Regions

Published: 16 November 2017 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper we analyze Facebook's Free Basics program, which provides free Internet access to a restricted set of web services. As the program grows to 60+ developing countries, an independent and data-driven audit of its scope and outreach is highly relevant to the ICTD community.
We provide the first large scale empirical observations on how content providers are using the Free Basics platform and what kind of user traffic is expected once a Free Basics service goes live. Implementing an Android app for data collection and recruiting participants from 15 countries, we analyze the current set of Free Basics services and their growth over time. We also deploy our own Free Basics services to gather first hand experience about Facebook's gate-keeping procedure in the program. One of our services Bugle News, an RSS news feed aggregator offered in English, Spanish and French, attracted 95.6K unique visitors from 55+ countries since Sep 2016. This enables us to characterize the nationality, demographics and interests of this Free Basics user population.
We specifically deploy an ICTD related Free Basics service called Awaaz: My Voice. Awaaz is a web-service, where citizens can report local issues with location and images. This citizen journalism portal has attracted several hundred users during its short two months deployment in ten cities across South Africa. Visitors have reported concrete issues in categories of road, electricity, water, health and sanitation, school and education, crime and others. Overall our experimental observations allow the ICTD community to understand how Free Basics works and our deployment experiences pave the way for other applications to be launched in future, geared towards important use cases the ICTD community cares about.

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  • (2021)Market, Testbed, Backroom: The Redacted Internet of Facebook’s DiscoverProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445754(1-13)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
  • (2017)Inside the Walled GardenACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review10.1145/3155055.315505847:5(12-24)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2017

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  1. Leveraging Facebook's Free Basics Engine for Web Service Deployment in Developing Regions

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        cover image ACM Other conferences
        ICTD '17: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development
        November 2017
        333 pages
        ISBN:9781450352772
        DOI:10.1145/3136560
        • Conference Chair:
        • Umar Saif
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Published: 16 November 2017

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        Author Tags

        1. Computing for development
        2. User characterization

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        • (2021)Market, Testbed, Backroom: The Redacted Internet of Facebook’s DiscoverProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445754(1-13)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
        • (2017)Inside the Walled GardenACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review10.1145/3155055.315505847:5(12-24)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2017

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