Instead of being a walled garden that will restrict individuals within its boundaries, Facebook indicates Free Basics is in charge of converting and starting millions that are the hitherto unconnected to the broader Internet. Yet, on a closer look, more questions are raised by this 40% conversion number on the foundation it appears to have been computed.

To comprehend someone would be identified by Facebook as a first-time Internet user, we must understand how tracking functions in the internet world. An electronic business like Facebook, wants some sort of identity tracking to understand a user’s Internet use and behavior with time. If a user hasn’t appeared on the network of Facebook – Facebook has quite restricted means to understand anything about him. In the event of PC internet Facebook might still have the ability to use cookies to construct a rough browser established identity if a user visits a website which has “login/like/share facebook plugin” on the webpage. Nevertheless, in the event of internet/programs that are cellular, the idea of cookies does not function. While some cellular programs incorporate Facebook marketing SDK with monitoring a user’s life journey in their code, which might help Facebook, other top players like Amazon, Yahoo or Google will not set it because of competitive reasons. Thus, creating an account and logging to Facebook is required for Facebook to understand a user’s identity.

Another manner for Facebook to monitor a Free Basics user is its only telecom associate in India, through Reliance Communications.

Facebook can miss a first-time user despite using both these strategies. In India this amount will probably be quite large due to a number of variables.

10,000/- are double SIM handsets. Additionally, not all Indians that are on-line are on Facebook. According to other business figures and IAMAI, India has everywhere between 300-400 million mobile Internet users that are active. Facebook’s own marketing dash suggests that approximately 115 million Indians us it monthly via mobile phones. This implies that above 60% of Indians that are on-line do not use Facebook. This also contains many who may may have attempted Facebook previously (on a non-Reliance SIM), but now decide not to use Facebook whatsoever on Free Basics (on a Reliance SIM). Eventually, a Free Basics user with one sim cellphone also might have used information on another cellular telephone network before they signed up for Free Basics and changed to Reliance. With high penetration of cellular telephone number portability and prepaid connections, the obstacle to changing connections is lower in a marketplace, where the churn rate is anyhow quite high. All these user types we only identified, would get wrongly counted as first time Internet users. As well as their amounts may not be insignificant.