Facebook’s Net Neutrality Stumble in India May Threaten Free Basics Elsewhere
India's telecom regulator has finally ruled on banning Facebook's lightweight free internet service known as Free Basics by invoking net neutrality: equal access to all internet content for the country's online users.
The threat is not just the immediate termination of the service within India which was already suspended last year over the highly polarized debate of net neutrality.
"If a group of activists could successfully reframe Free Basics as an insidious land grab, rather than an act of corporate largesse, and mobilize a country against it, what's to stop them from resisting elsewhere?" wrote Fusion columnist Kevin Roose as picked up by The Atlantic.
The bigger fear that is creeping up on the horizon is the dangerous precedent the ruling has set for all other regulators elsewhere who might think of doing the same out of net neutrality concerns for their citizens.
"This is a major setback for Facebook. Not only because India was expected to be such a critical piece of the overall Internet.org success story, but more so because it has potential dangerous knock-on effects for the universal access initiative in other markets," said lead analyst Naveen Menon of A.T. Kearney in Singapore as quoted by the Reuters.
According to a report by New York Times, Zuckerberg's signature program called Free Basics provides a limited and often text-only version of Facebook and other partner media sites that offer a variety of news and information services.
So far, the social media giant already has 132 million users connected to its vast online network. About 300 million Indians are believed to be connected to the internet today. However, the company envisions to make internet more accessible to the remaining unconnected 1 billion people in the subcontinent.
