The Internet.org App Is Now Called Free Basics

Facebook's Internet.org app is now known as Free Basics.

The app, which is available in 18 countries, including India and Nigeria, provides free mobile internet access to select "basic services" on the web like health and employment information, local news, and, yes, Facebook itself.

Facebook said it was changing the name of the app in order "to better distinguish" the broader Internet.org intiaitive from this specifc app and its related services.

Internet.org was first announced in August 2013 with the goal of making internet access more widely available to the billions of people in the developing world without internet access. (A recent UN broadband report notes that 57 percent of the global population still does not have internet access.) While the project was initially widely applauded, the Internet.org app eventually come under some criticism over the amount of private data it collects from users and over the process by which news publishers were selected to be included in the app.