However, despite having the stated goal of connecting two thirds of the world' population to the Internet, the service appears to be launched for promotional purposes rather than providing user a connection to the world.
"We address the affordability of data by having beneficial services and then we’ll make it scalable for our partners so that once these users want to use more, they just buy the regular (data) plan," the director of Facebook's Global Operator Partnerships told Reuters.
On its website, the non-profit has a contact form for prospective content providers. However, the project does not have a transparent set of criteria for selecting partners, including possible monetary contributions to the service.
Although the service provides access to some non-commercial services such as Wikipedia, it gives an effective monopoly to specific commercial services such as OLX, an online marketplace, and Reuters Market Lite, a service for agricultural information.
Facebook previously launched similar services in Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania and Colombia. Facebook's partners in the project include phone manufacturers Nokia and Samsung, telecommunications companies Ericsson, Qualcomm and Mediatek, as well as Opera Software, creator of the Opera Browser.
