Mark Zuckerberg visiting Taman Kampoeng Cyber in Yogyakarta
Remember when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made his much talked about visit to Indonesia last October? The main reason for his visit, which included stops at Borobudur, Yogyakarta and Jakarta, was the promotion of Internet.org, a Facebook initiative the company is touting as a way to get more people in the developing world connected to the Internet.
Well just about an hour ago (at the time of writing) Zuckerberg made a post to his personal Facebook page announcing that Internet.org has officially been launched in Indonesia.
In the post, Zuckerberg says, After today, everyone in Indonesia will have the opportunity to share in the benefits of the internet and access free services in areas like jobs, health, education and communication on the Indosat network.”
He goes on to say, “Through this effort, we will lower the cost of accessing the internet and raise awareness of the internet’s value. And we’re going to continue rolling out Internet.org in more and more countries so that one day everyone can share the opportunities of a connected world.”
While that sounds awesome, what does Internet.org actually do? Well as we’ve written about before, Internet.org’s showpiece is an app that provides free access to Facebook, Facebook messenger, and a handful of other services.
One of the ways Facebook and providers are able to provide this free access is because the Internet giant has worked with telcoms to implement a number of software improvements to their underlying network architecture that greatly speeds up access – to Facebook’s mobile application.
So while Indonesians (specifically those using Indosat) will now be able to access Facebook for free through Internet.org, it doesn’t give free access to the wider internet, just a handful of selected services (“in areas like jobs, health, education and communication”). To access the open internet, mobile users will still need to pay for data plans.
So while there is definitely an altruistic element to Internet.org, there is also no doubt that Facebook gets a lot out of it as well (Internet.org is not a separate non-profit btw, it is in fact fully under the umbrella of Facebook). By giving away Facebook access for free, it ensures that users who don’t have the money to pay for data plans will spend the vast majority of their online time on their social network. Which ultimately means more eyeballs on Facebook ads, which equals more profits for them. Hopefully Internet.org’s users will be similarly enriched.
