Most people in developing countries have little to no Internet access. About a year ago, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, introduced Free Basics to India, as a way to provide web access to the developing world. However, many Indians have viewed it more as an aggressive PR ploy than anything else. Although purported to be a free internet service for the poor, Free Basics is actually a watered-down version of Facebook with some other services tacked on (e.g., weather reports and job listings). This, of course, has drawn the ire of Indian telecom regulators and many Internet activists.
"[T]he initiative has hit a major snag in India, where in recent months Free Basics has been embroiled in controversy — with critics saying that the app, which provides limited access to the Web, does a disservice to the poor and violates the principles of 'net neutrality,' which holds that equal access to the Internet should be unfettered to all.
Activist groups such as Save the Internet, professors from leading universities and tech titans such as Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder of Infosys, have spoken out against it. Another well-known Indian entrepreneur dubbed it “poor Internet for poor people.”
Certainly web access should be held as a human right--it is vital to global education and advancement, and more generally, to the spread of knowledge. But Facebook's interest in all of this, to me, evokes a more sinister undertone. To illustrate, the company's campaigns have vigorously conflated Free Basics with digital equality and free internet services; here are some examples (sourced from Reddit user, rdiaboli):
On top of that, Facebook has also sent text messages/SMSs to people in regional languages:
ફેસબુક દ્વારા ફ્રી બેસિક્સ સેવા બધા માટે બુનિયાદી ઈન્ટરનેટ સેવાઓ નિશુલ્ક ઉપલબ્ધ કરાવે છે. પણ આ બધી સેવાઓ પર પ્રતિબંધ લાગવા ની આશંકા છે. કૃપા કરી 1800 209 0921 પર આજેજ એક મિસ્ડ કોલ આપી અમારી મદદ કરો.
Rough translation: Free Basics by Facebook provides basic internet services for free, but these services may get banned. Please help us by making a missed call today to this number.
While we can all agree that digital equality is quite desirable, I think Facebook is really doing this to corner out the ad market and control of services and information in third-world countries. In other words, Free Basics--though guised as free Internet access--proposes, in actuality, a controlled and curated environment run by Western corporations rubbing elbows--all of which runs afoul with net neutrality rules. (Interestingly, Free Basics bears an uncanny resemblance to the "free" ad-run platform from which AOL developed decades ago in the US.)
As Reddit user, thegreatmaximillianj, puts it:
"Net neutrality is actually much more important for a poor country than a rich one.
In rich countries net neutrality is about things like Comcast slowing down Netflix. Net neutrality is a luxury argument, dealing with high data consumption issues.
In India, net neutrality is about how some newspapers are available with no data charge, and others aren't.
Now we are dealing with something fundamental: A person wants to read an article about the government and the Free Basics interface show them articles from preferred free news sources, but the second they go looking for another news source which may offer a different opinion/information the Free Basics interface says 'you have to pay for this. This isn't a preferred news source.'
That's a lot of power over the poor. And it would all be in the hands of Facebook, who has already shown a propensity to use the Facebook interface in India to achieve its own goals.
Free Basics means that a large percentage of the earth's population will be stuck in an internet box of Facebook's curation, their understanding of the world will be shaped by Facebook's preferences and business relationships.
That's why net neutrality is far more important in the poor world than it is in the rich."
I couldn't have said it better. The issue of net neutrality may yield many more negative externalities in poorer countries than in richer ones, which may end up doing much more bad than good. Plus, I must ask: Since when has Facebook been the arbiter of deciding which sites are essential for India's poor and which sites are not? At the end of the day, Facebook will always be a profit-seeking company--NOT an ISP or non-profit.
The whole affair reeks of digital colonization, and a quick history lesson will tell us that India has been there and done that.