If Facebook will provide free limited internet (and as always, you can pay regularly to get full internet access) for a lot of basic service, it only seems reasonable they will package their facebook and messenger apps as well.
On the whole, do you think internet.org is a bad, negative effort?
Personally, I'm torn. I'm all for free access to Wikipedia. The problem is, not all of the world's knowledge exists there, so you therefor are only giving people a taste of knowledge.
With Facebook and Google, you are choosing the silos for people, and making it very very difficult for competitors. And without competition, localized monopolies tend to stagnate, which ultimately hurts consumers.
Imagine someone in the slums of India (there are tens of millions in these conditions) wanting to learn more about irrigation. Is it more important that they have no limited internet for the sake for competition, or limited internet?
This is something that's totally compatible with net neutrality while providing the same benefits you're advocating.
Even without that, thumb drives are usable with smartphones via OTG cables.
Why not give X megabytes/month data to the user for free and let HIM chose what the "essential internet services" for HIM are? Internet.org is a non-profit so it would be completely fine giving it for free. But even if they wanted to recover their costs, they could do it in a neutral manner - by ads.
Even with your premise accepted, there are better solutions. Internet.org's current model makes sense only when you consider the ulterior motives as well.
I could see pages used as public group walls, profile pages as personal walls, "discuss"-pages as discussion. Only thing missing is "private" chat/pages -- but a browser-plugin with support for OTR/GPG (encrypt to many recipients...) could fix that, and be way more secure/private than Facebook...
As more and more people come out of poverty, they will be able to access basic services such as water, electricity and data plans. There is no reason why data plans is the only service among the three services that needs to be free. If it is free, it is the government that should provide it rather than private corporations whose single interest is profit.
Now, people who are super poor may not be able to pay for electricity let alone will access free internet.
Either way, FB and bunch of other companies want to profit out of the people who are uninformed and these people may end up buying only services and products from those limited free websites that they get from free internet.
It also looks like the telecom services might take advantage of this and partner with some companies provide selective access to some websites and the biggest losers of this kind of partnership could be companies that dont have enough capital to pay each of the telecom providers to be in their "basic package"
I don't know, but I can conceive of it as a possibility that Internet.org would hinder the propagation of NN "real internet" providers.
Eventually these companies will work towards making internet difficult to access so their own sites can have the monopoly.
Internet isn't impossible to provide eventually every one will have access. But to do it this way will create problems which takes decades to solve.