| Okay, let’s give the users of Facebook predecessors of Free Basic a voice. Here am I, a German who used to use Facebook Zero (free access to Facebook via 3G) while I was in middle (and later high) school. As soon as it became available, I – and some of my friends – stopped using SchuelerVZ, the social network most people used to use at the time – and instead actually tried to convince others to switch to Facebook, too. "It’s free! You don’t need to pay anything!" We tried to get as much content as possible inside the network, and never actually left it – because we had literally no money on our prepaid SIMs, and therefore couldn’t access other pages. Everything that wasn’t on Facebook didn’t exist for us. In only a few months after Facebook Zero launched, the user numbers of SchuelerVZ and StudiVZ rapidly declined. Today, we don’t have a choice for social networks anymore, Facebook has a monopoly. ----------------
Facebook Zero: http://0.facebook.com/ |