One must wonder why a company with a couple of hundred crores in India revenues is spending one-third of it to promote a supposed charity. Especially when the company is Facebook - and its earlier attempt to slide its monopolistic tool Internet dot org into India was roundly beaten back by Indian citizens a year ago. Remember the one million email campaign? That convinced Trai there was something fishy about their offer - and while Facebook has come back after a year of lobbying, the fishiness remains, albeit in rebranded form.
Facebook is pulling out all stops in telling us - nay, shouting at us, that its Free Basics service - the renamed avatar of Internet dot org, is good for India, and we must allow it.
What is the issue about Free Basics?
At the root is a decision we need to make. Wireless spectrum is a scarce resource - like oil and gas. How should we use it? Our contention is that it needs to be used in the most inclusive way possible - to get the full internet to as many people at as low a cost as possible. So far, in India, our telecom policy has clearly forced carriers to offer the full internet experience to all takers, a part of what’s called a “Net Neutrality” policy. We’ve grown to the world’s #2 internet country on this policy. Facebook wants to break this by offering a “Facebook and a few” product that will deny the full internet to its takers.
Why we should not let Free Basics in?
The user gets a tiny part of the internet to use: a few dozen sites. Only 2 of the sites are in the top 40 that Indians use: Facebook itself and Wikipedia. The rest are completely obscure. These aren’t the ‘basics” by any stretch of the imagination. Second, letting Facebook create its own disconnected enclave - people here don’t even get email - will open the doors for others - Google, Twitter, Rediff, whoever, to offer their own unconnected islands.
What of the argument that it gets poor people online - what’s wrong with it?
Two things. One, by Facebook’s own admission 80% of the using the service are people who have used the net before. And of the remaining 20%, 11% drop out after sampling the sites in there.
And second, it’s cheaper and easier to offer the full internet to people. Mozilla, Bangladesh, and Orange in Africa have pioneered net neutral ways of getting the poor online. In fact, by one estimation, Facebook could have paid for full internet for 5 million Indians for a year if it spent money there instead of on advertising its desire to do charity
No poor internet for poor people. let us beat back the 21st century version of the East India Company.
Net neutrality allows individuals to access freely all content and applications equally, regardless of the source, without internet or telecom service providers discriminating against specific online services or websites.
Zero-rating is a practice, where service providers do not charge customers on data for select apps they use. It also means service providers connect you to the internet but will not get control on what you do on the internet.
(The writer is an investor and entrepreneur)