14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook's original plan of building its own satellite have been scraped due to maintenance costs higher than the company originally expected.
With a price tag of around $500 / €442.5 million, and additional running costs of about the same value, Facebook decided to pull the plug and search for an alternative solution.
The company is still planning to provide free Internet access to developing countries and remote areas of the world through its Internet.org initiative, but at the moment launching and overseeing its own satellite fleet seems to be a dead end.
It is rumored that Google had the same dilemma before it started the Loon project, which focuses on using high-altitude balloons to relay Internet signals to remote areas of the globe.
Facebook's Internet.org is still on track
Facebook has not given up on the basic principles behind its Internet.org initiative, and the company is also investigating other means of reaching its goal.
According to The Information, the website which broke the news, the company is also looking into renting satellites as an alternative, which apparently can be cheaper than running your own.
The Internet.org website also features a project that relies on solar drones that can keep flying for months, as a way to provide Internet access to under-developed nations.
Fighting the good fight, or is it?
Alongside Google, Facebook seems engrossed with the idea of getting more people online.
While you might think that more people online mean more people can register for Facebook, that's a narrow-minded approach that doesn't take into account that it will take an extensive period of time to monetize these new accounts into returnable funds.
"How many people can register for Facebook" is not a financial metric which investors can turn into money. The most obvious approach is for Facebook (or Google for that matter) to ask Governments to pay a small tax if they want their drones or balloons to fly over a specific region.
This is a much more logical and economically-sound solution, one that does not require Facebook or Google to deal with a black-hole in their yearly budgets, and one that does not taint their vision of taxing the population itself (or at least directly).