Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg on Monday tried to extend an olive branch to mobile phone companies, on which the popular social network company increasingly relies, but which are also among his biggest critics.
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He also added that, India for connecting people, Facebook will now focus on various other programs such as those parts of the internet.org and that it wants to work with all other operators.
Other programs that the CEO is now considering are the network of drones, lasers, and satellites.
The photo from Samsung’s event – posted on the Facebook CEO’s profile – has been doing the rounds on the Internet all day, showing Mark Zuckerberg in a trademark plain t-shirt walking among a crowd of journalists and experts wearing VR headsets, oblivious to his presence.
Zuckerberg sounded little annoyed since his Free Basics has not taken off as he wanted to be and it has not acquired its full face value. “We just do this as a long-term goal, a long-term investment”. The former provided internet access in locations where internet was available but not affordable, whereas the latter provides internet access to areas that didn’t have it before.
Free Basics is a service that offers no-cost access to 38 websites, including Facebook and its Messenger service, Bing Search, Dictionary.com, BBC News, Reuters Market Lite for crop and farming information, and local jobs and news sites. The ruling in India says there’s no differential pricing even for basic services. So far, 36 countries are benefiting from Free Basics and the number could be higher than that had it not be that politics in certain countries like Chile led to the rollback of the service. Priority should be given to people who don’t have access to internet and companies should make sure that everyone gets internet before moving on to the 5G network.
We all know the controversies created by Free Basics in India before it got banned by the TRAI on the grounds that it had potential to create a two-tier internet for the poor and the rich.
India is one of Facebook’s critical growth frontiers.
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Last year, Egypt also suspended Free Basics due to irregularities, which saw anti-government protests being planned on the social network.
