ABHILASH MHAISNE

January 25 2016


Free basics by facebook and net neutrality : A dozen biases worth a dime?

"Hey Mom, the PM is going to start a clean India campaign all over! Finally all the dirt everywhere will be gone!".
"How come you know? There is no mention of it in the newspaper!".
"Mom! The PMO account tweeted it just now!"

The most suitable phrase to describe today's world would be the 'age of the internet'. The Internet has reached out to each and every aspect of the human sphere, and beyond. All kinds of work, which were done 'offline', only a couple of decades back, are made easy today by the ever growing prowess of internet. Indeed a notable gift of technology, the internet has made the world efficient like never before!

Image source : Tribune media services

Perhaps, a major role in the fast exchange of both formal and informal information around the world has been played by social networks. And the leading player in the league has been facebook. With well over a billion users, facebook has not only reduced the communication gap, but has helped a large number of for profit and non profit institutes in a number of ways.Jumping to the earlier context of the internet, one of the most trending technical topic of 2015 in India was net neutrality. Net neutrality means; you are connected to the internet through a connection provider, then you are able to access any given public location on the internet and the service provider must give you equal bandwidth for accessing everything and must not charge differently for certain websites.

Image source : thetartan.org

The issue gained light when airtel released its 'airtel zero' plan, with reliance, offering access to certain websites for free and no access to remaining websites. The suspected (almost obvious) after effect of the said violation of net neutrality was that this would result in certain corporations monopolizing the internet by restricting what the users will visit on it. Also this would leave little scope for small corporations to increase their productivity using the internet. This garnered huge criticism on social media opposing the platform.



However, some felt its not that huge a blow! Or its not even a blow.

Free basics is a similar service provided by facebook as a part of its internet.org initiative, which aims at free of cost internet all over the world. As the name suggests, it offers certain basic websites for free by pairing up with operators. A service can choose to become a part of it by signing up with facebook.

With this scheme, facebook aims at letting a large number of people access the internet free of cost, a possibility which is tough to explore otherwise. Already many services have become a part of free basics. As they are available free of cost to the users, they are well promoted as a result, to a wide audience. Now as persuasive as the above sounds, many, even Mark Zuckerberg, the facebook CEO, has raised question on why the scheme is being criticized in India. It seems that the reason is the obvious violation of net neutrality by the free basics scheme.


The critical aspect by a large number of people opposing it lies, again, in the suspected after effects. The scheme will surely bring the internet to more number of people; but not neutrally, that is, only the signed up services will be available, and those will be chosen by none by facebook. This, many feel, would give a lot of power and control in the hands of the social media giant. The scheme does not offer important knowledge sharing websites like wikipedia, khan academy, etc. which would benefit a lot with those having less access to knowledge platforms. Despite the criticisms, it is true that a large number of people will actually experience the internet. However, given the large number of problems the majority of Indian public faces, it is again a question whether the internet has an answer to those problems?

Whatever schemes are introduced, let us hope that the internet leads us to a bright, better tomorrow for everyone, instead of a deluge of injustice on many!


About Abhilash Mhaisne

Chief content manager at Skyline blog. Free software contributor, wikipedia editor and tech-evangelist. Working on Linux kernel and Moodle
@55abhilash