Around the World, Net Neutrality Is Not a Reality
But in the emerging economies of the world, that’s pretty much how things already work, thanks to a growing number of deals Google and Facebook have struck with mobile phone carriers from the Philippines to Kenya.
In essence, these deals give people free access to text-only version of things like Facebook news feeds, Gmail, and the first page of search results under plans like Facebook Zero or Google Free Zone. Only when users click links in e-mails or news feeds, go beyond the first page of search results, or visit websites by other means do they incur data charges (see “Facebook and Google Create Walled Gardens for Web Newcomers Overseas”).
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But the existence of a free and dominant chat, e-mail, search, and social-networking service makes it awfully hard for any competitor to arise. And Susan Crawford, visiting professor of law at Harvard University and a co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, calls it “a big concern” that Google and Facebook are the ones becoming the portal to Web content for many newcomers.
“For poorer people, Internet access will equal Facebook. That’s not the Internet—that’s being fodder for someone else’s ad-targeting business,” she says. “That’s entrenching and amplifying existing inequalities and contributing to poverty of imagination—a crucial limitation on human life.”
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How things unfold in the developing world may have a bigger impact on the future of the Internet. Worldwide, the number of smartphones is projected to double from 1.5 billion last year to three billion in 2017. Most of those 1.5 billion new phones—and new Internet access—will be in the developing world.