Facebook wanted to
create a autocratic control on online content in India. On what
people can use the internet for. A stronghold on the free voice. A
control that it could then use at a later date to create financial
benefits as well as political influence.
First it tried to
dupe the Indian public with internet.org. Public immediately created
a strong opposition. Then it tried to repackage it as Free Basics.
someone must have told them that Indians will accept anything that is
free, even if poison. It also put in large scale advertising. Then
tried to influence TRAI using underhand methods of fooling
unsuspecting facebook users into sending template messages to TRAI.
The Free Basics
campaign was also a Trojan horse of the telecom companies who first
started charging higher internet data rates for use of
Whatsapp/Viber/Skype and other VOIP services to increase their
profits but had to back down due to public outrage. It was a backdoor
attempt to fool the public into accepting their profiteering tactics.
Free Basics implied
differential pricing, the end of Net Neutrality and the start of
oligopolic domination of few service providers who would charge
differential prices for data usage and effectively control what
people may or may not access on the net.
This plan of
profiteering and attempt to establish control over public access was
very nicely wrapped in the garb of providing free “basic” access
to the poor. If they really wanted to provide real benefits to the
poor, they could easily have offered the BPL card holders free mobile
connections and defined amount of free internet data without
restriction for the sites accessed. The amount of money spent in the
advertising campaign for Free Basics could have been utilised for
this purpose. But trying to provide benefit to the poor was never the
real objective, only the stated one.
However, despite all
backhand methods, people of India again proved that they are not so
easily fooled. The largest democracy of the world has again spoken as
one and made itself heard. TRAI has now given clear decision
prohibiting differential pricing of data, with provision for penalty.
The Indian public
has collectively and emphatically told facebook - "No ullu
banaoing, no ullu banaoing"
