This week has been crucial for Indian’s 400 million plus internet users. Hovering over all is the controiersy surrounding Free Basics, the Facebook initiative being promoted so enthusiastically by founder Mark Zuckerberg. Today in fact is the start of counter comments from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) which will end on January 14 and will be one more step towards the decision to allow Reliance Communication to launch the service or not.
Journalism students of SPICE’s batch of 2015-2016 write about the issue:By Ranjana Konatt
India’s community of internet users are making full use of the 7-day extension granted to them by the Telecom Regulatory Authority Of India (TRAI) to file comments, for and against Facebook’s Free Basic service up to Thursday, January 7.So far, TRAI has received as many as 18.27 lakh responses up till December 31, out of which 8.9 lakh came in through text messages and 5.44 lakh through Facebook messages. This was in response to TRAI’s consultative paper on December 9, following the response to the criticism received by Free Basics a Facebook initiative by Founder Mark Zuckerberg.
The paper seeks individual opinions and suggestions on differential pricing for data services. From January 8 to 14 TRAI will file its counter comments. Free Basics provides selective access to services like health care, education, job listing, farming information and communication, all without any data charge. Free Basics works on the zero-rating platform which states that Indian Service Providers (ISP) will not charge for the service they provide. However, Facebook does the selecting and some of those important sites which are not going to be made available through Free Basics are Google, YouTube, Amazon, Flipkart, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapdeal, Quickr, BSE, and NSE. In fact, according to most of the protesting parties, only two out of 40 of the most accessed sites in India have been included. These are Facebook and Wikipedia.
Former head of Infosys and the man who brought India the Adhar card, Nandan Nilekani, has called Free Basics a “walled garden”, that is, the user operates in an ecosystem where the internet service provider has control over applications, content and media, and restricts access to non-approved apps or content. He adds, “Not having laws on Net Neutrality has created a vacuum” indicating that the interests if the general public need to be protected. Mahesh Murthy, co-Founder of Pinstorm, one of India’s leading digital brand management firms and an angel investor targeted Facebook, saying “Big sites don’t want Facebook to own their customers, and they don’t want Facebook to snoop on their customer data, because all traffic will go via Facebook servers”. To this comment Facebook was quick to reply “Regarding your privacy concerns, we do not keep any customer personally identifiable past 90 days”.
Currently in India the number of people using the internet has reached 402 million and is expected to rise to 550 million by the year 2018 according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI). Free Basics is actually the new avatar of internet.org which was set up in August 2013. It was renamed in September 2015, soon after Prime Minister, Narendra Modi visited Facebook headquarters. Though the Indian government did not take an explicit stand on zero-rating or internet.org during the visit, a controversy erupted in India when Facebook introduced a profile picture tool, that helped all Facebook users to show their support for internet.org and the Digital India campaign through a color filter that could be applied to profile pictures in a uniform manner. Free Basics is a partnership between social networking company Facebook and six other companies namely, Samsung, Ericsson, MediaTek, Opera Software, Nokia and Qualcomm.
The countries who have adopted the Free Basics initiative are Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Colombia, Ghana, Philippines, Guatemala, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malawi, Pakistan, Senegal, Bolivia and South Africa. None of these countries have a significant GDP. Egypt’s mobile network Etisalat began offering Free Basics to its customers two months ago and Facebook says that three million Egyptians had since signed up. But the service was shut down on December 30 2015 for reasons which remain unclear. Facebook claimed to have received support for Free Basics from 3.2 million of its users. However some have complained of having voted for the initiative on Facebook without being aware of what it entailed. Nikhil Pahwa, founder and CEO of Medianama, an Indian mobile and digital news portal, in his blog writes about ways one could correct a possible misinterpretation by Facebook.
“Firstly, tell the TRAI that Facebook’s claim of your support for Free Basics is not valid. You can mail the following letter to [email protected].” He also provides sample points to go with the letter for those against the Free Basics initiative. Music composer and singer Vishal Dadlani, who has a Twitter following of 1.45 million, has released a video to make people aware about Facebook’s Free Basics proposition. Calling it a sham, he urged people not to sign up as it violates the idea of net neutrality.
