Inside the Walled Garden

Abstract

Free Basics is a Facebook initiative to provide zero-rated web services in developing countries. The program has grown rapidly to 60+ countries in the past two years. But it has also seen strong opposition from Internet activists and has been banned in some countries like India. Facebook highlights the societal benefits of providing low-income populations with free Internet access, while detractors point to concerns about privacy and network neutrality. In this paper, we provide the first independent analysis of such claims regarding the Free Basics service, using both the perspective of a Free Basics service provider and of web clients visiting the service via cellular phones providing access to Free Basics in Pakistan and South Africa. Specifically, with control of both endpoints, we not only provide a more detailed view of how the Free Basics service is architected, but also can isolate the likely causes of network performance impairments. Our analysis reveals that Free Basics services experience 4 to 12 times worse network performance than their paid counterparts. We isolate the root causes using factors such as network path inflation and throttling policies by Facebook and telecom service providers. The Free Basics service and its restrictions are designed with assumptions about users' device capabilities (e.g., lack of JavaScript support). To evaluate such assumptions, we infer the types of mobile devices that generated 47K unique visitors to our Free Basics services between Sep 2016 and Jan 2017. We find that there are large numbers of requests from constrained WAP browsers, but also large fractions of high-capability mobile phones that send Free Basics requests. We discuss the implications of our observations, with the hope to aid more informed debates on such telecom policies.

The past, present, and future of (net) neutrality: A state of knowledge review and research agenda

“…Here, zero-rating end users only have access to a downsized version of content and services, for example, Facebook “Free Basics” (GV, 2017; Facebook, 2018). A downsized version excludes data-intensive elements such as pictures, audio, and video (Sen et al, 2017). In contrast to throttling, where content and services are downscaled dynamically ex-post due to bandwidth restrictions, downsized versions are an ex-ante reduced form of content and services.…”

A Large-scale Examination of ”Socioeconomic” Fairness in Mobile Networks

“…Perino et al [29] reports the effort of bringing affordable Internet access to under-served, remote communities. A recent work by Sen et al looks into Free Basics, an initiative of Facebook to provide zero-rated web services in developing countries, and study the performance impairments [35]. Elmokashfi et al [7] specifically focus on availability of mobile broadband, and examine the status across Norway.…”

Constitutive Surveillance and Social Media

“…In a broader sense of the word, Free Basics functions as a simulation or microcosm of the open internet. Internet.org pitches itself as a path to internet access, but has so far only offered a corporate, US-centric facsimile with inferior network performance (Sen et al 2017).…”