Facebook founder dismissed accusations that Free Basics service is anti-competitive in India’s internet market. Essentially, users of Free Basics can not access websites and services that have not been approved by Facebook.
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This makes Zimbabwe the latest African country to be activated for the service which was launched in 2013 and first hit Africa in mid-2014 through a launch in Zambia. “The data is clear”, he says.
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Who’d have thunk giving away free Internet access would be this hard? “There’s no Google, no YouTube”, said Mahesh Murthy, a venture capitalist who co-founded Seedfund and marketing startup Pinstorm. Well surprisingly in India, this has been a big issue for debate.
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India is the world’s second most populous country in the world.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gives a “namaste” gesture as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg applauds after a town hall at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on September 27. “The fears that Facebook is going to get new consumers locked into Facebook, that’s a problem to some extent because social networks rely on the number of people they have”.
But Indian supporters of net neutrality have been ramping up their opposition to Free Basics in the past few months as well.
A week after Indian regulators halted the company’s Free Basics program, which provides free access to select online services by partnering with local telecoms, the Associated Press reported that the program has also been halted in Egypt.
“This is not helping at all” says Zuckerberg. Thus, the new letter emerges as a support towards open Internet and shows unfavourability for Mark Zuckerberg-led Facebook’s campaign that presently run across all major media platforms. Instead, critics have accused him of making a poorly disguised land grab in India’s burgeoning Internet sector.
Facebook’s free basic Internet service has been criticized by activists for limiting online access to websites partnered with the company.
In his piece, “Free Basics Protects Net Neutrality”, Zuckerberg maintained that the Free Basics service is a bridge to the full Internet and digital equality.
But prominent tech activists are not convinced. They see it as a trojan horse being used by Facebook to control access to the Internet. The personal appeal and defense of Zuckerberg seems to be part of that campaign. “One of Zuckerberg’s objectives has always been for Facebook to be the Internet for people”, Carroll noted. “This is why the battle for Net Neutrality, with the last and current TRAI consultations included, is the battle for our Internet Freedom”, he wrote. But critics of the company say that’s nonsense. Telecom operators will have to recover the cost of “free basic” apps from the non-free services (otherwise, why not make everything free?).
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Free Basics has come under criticism in India over the way it exempts other websites from data caps. According to one report, India will have more than 500 million using the Internet by the end of 2017, thanks to affordable smartphones and 2G subscriptions. Available in six Indian states, the program offered residents access to more than three dozen Web services. So we put him on a free trial of Free Basics and watched as he enlightened himself on the usage of a chocolate bomb. However, Facebook had been spending millions of dollars to change to change India’s policies. What about using this money to subsidise internet access for the poor? Implicit mistrust of corporations with monopolistic tendencies is a solid strategy, but what the SaveTheInternet campaign hasn’t disclosed in all its communications is that the people behind it, who mostly belong to the nascent Internet startup community, have some skin in the game as well.
