T-MOBILE uses Facebook as A Gateway Drug..

Anyone who has taken a middle-school
health class knows that drug dealers always
lurk, offering free samples of crack or PCP
to children to get them hooked and turn them
into paying customers. Apparently the good
people at T-Mobile were paying attention in those classes. On Monday the company announced that
GoSmart, a T-Mobile subsidiary specializing
in low-cost, prepaid phone plans, would offer
free access to Facebook and Facebook Messenger to all customers, even those who
don’t have a data plan. For T-Mobile, the
deal has the potential to get people used to
using their phones for Internet, then convince
them to migrate to a full data plan.
GoSmart’s monthly plan with unlimited voice and text service costs $30; adding 5GB of
high-speed data costs an additional $15 per
month. Facebook has been interested in such an
arrangement for some time as a way to
encourage increased use of the service
among people who can’t afford costly data
plans. When Mark Zuckerberg announced
Internet.org, an effort to increase global access to the Internet, one of the core
principles was to exempt such services as
Facebook and Wikipedia from data plans in
low-income countries. The exact terms of the
agreement between the companies aren’t
clear. Not everyone loves the idea of Internet
providers cutting deals with content
companies to provide advantages to some
services in reaching customers. Advocates of
net neutrality fear that offering preferential
treatment will quash innovation; Facebook’s next competitor won’t get free access to
GoSmart customers. But regulators in the
U.S. generally think that mobile providers
should be given wider leverage than physical
broadband providers to experiment with
plans like this because wireless Internet is so young. In any case, the deal offers further evidence
that T-Mobile is pushing the envelope when it
comes to offering novel services in order to
lure more customers to its network.