Facebook’s efforts to force Free Basics into India by violating the principles of net neutrality saw a much deserved failure when finally TRAI suspended them. Through Free Basics, Facebook sought to collaborate with Indian service providers for issuing Facebook and some other services for free. It meant if a user is using Facebook or any other website on the list, he just didn’t need to pay internet charges.
This might sound very pleasing to the ears because we were getting things for free. Oh no! Why didn’t it work out!
And that’s exactly how Facebook shrewdly changed the name of its campaign from Internet.org to Free Basics. It knew what psychology the term, “free”, plays in the mind of Indians. But where is the problem? Internet is penetrating in India at an exponential rate. If some websites could be surfed for free then that would have been very advantageous, isn’t it? Absolutely not! This is where the common people failed to comprehend the clever and selfish marketing strategies and blindly started supporting them by changing the color of their Facebook profiles. Shockingly enough, changing profile pictures became a trend!
If someone gives a quick look at the list of websites that Reliance in collaboration with Facebook was providing, one can easily conclude that there was certainly nothing significant. No beneficial websites pertaining to education, news, business etc were covered. So anyway one would have to pay charges for using Internet.
There was one massive advantage for sure. But wait, not for the “people of India” as they so greatly declared. It was a sheer win-win situation for Facebook and the telecom providers like Reliance who teamed up. Providing some services for free would simply have increased their customer segment. More and more village people who had never even typed a URL would have joined hands. Gradually, they would have moved to other non-free websites. So now guess who the winner would be!
Now let us for once keep aside the profits that the companies would have made. This step would have provided a basic picture of how the internet looks like to the deprived ones and the rest would be their choice- to switch to a full internet pack or not. Actually, the problem lies elsewhere.
Net neutrality is something which is basic, a basic right to surf all websites equally at a uniform cost. In such a case, who would have decided the free websites? Why some particular websites for free and not others? What if they made Snapdeal free but a user preferred Flipkart more?
The issue is if Free Basics would have been a success, it would start manipulating the content in the internet’s sea of information. All the competitors in the market are in fair competition with each other because users have access to all of them equally. Imagine if Ola would have preferred more than Uber through Free Basics, the focus of these companies would have shifted, even slightly, from providing useful service to be a part of Free Basics.
There is no denial that a major half of the Indian population is still not connected. But to achieve that, we cannot just accept any policy, rather forceful and biased policies that comes over. There are certainly other ways out. The government can consider providing the “complete internet” for free to a certain limit, may be up to 500 MB per month or so. This can at least give a basic insight of internet to everyone. So we must not get swayed by the “free” banner from the next time and put our minds to understand scams like this.