Mumbai: Over the past few months, Facebook has tried more or less everything to acquire some sort of support for its “Free Basics” services in India. However, recent developments suggested that, despite all the effort put in by the social media giant, a majority of the country’s population have voiced against the platform.
Apart from the pioneers of the protest, Save The Internet (STI) group, several other activists, actors, musicians and even renowned IT professionals have criticized the platform for violating net neutrality norms.
Latest to join the protests were IIT and IISC professors who have published a joint statement “rejecting Facebook’s misleading and flawed ‘Free Basics’ proposal”.
The statement pointed out that it is lethal to allow a private entity to define for Indian Internet users what is ‘basic’, to control what content costs how much, and to have access to the personal content created and used by millions of Indians.
It said: “The first obvious flaw in the proposal is that Facebook assumes control of defining what a ‘basic’ service is. They have in fact set up an interface for services to ‘submit’ themselves to Facebook for approval to be a ‘basic’ service.”
“This means: the ‘basic’ digital services Indians will access using their own air waves will be decided by a private corporation, and that too one based on foreign soil. The sheer absurdity of this is too obvious to point out.”
(Also Read: Facebook tricking users into supporting Free Basics?)
Another issue pointed out by them is that Facebook would be able to “decrypt the contents of the ‘basic’ apps on its servers”.
To explicate the technicality behind Free Basics, the report said, “This flaw is not visible to the layman as it’s a technical detail, but it has deep and disturbing implications. Since Facebook can access un-encrypted contents of users’ ‘basic’ services, either we get to consider health apps to be not basic, or risk revealing health records of all Indians to Facebook.”
“Either we get to consider our banking apps to be not ‘basic’, or risk exposing the financial information of all Indians to Facebook. This is mind boggling even under normal circumstances, and even more so considering the recent internal and international snooping activities by the NSA in the US”, it said.
Moreover, the professors explained that the services are not free and is nothing but a marketing gimmick.
According to them, if Facebook gets to decide what costs how much, Indians will be surrendering their digital freedom, and freedom in the digital economy, to Facebook.
“So this is not an issue of elite Indians able to pay for the Internet versus poor Indians, as Facebook is trying to portray. It is an issue of whether all Indians want to surrender their digital freedom to Facebook,” the report added.
Less that one per cent Indian online users support Free Basics
While Facebook has been desperately trying to market their platform, not even one per cent of India’s total online user-base is supporting the platform.
Facebook said that around 3.2 million people have signed up in support of Free Basics services in India, however, there are around 400 million Internet users in India as of December 2015, according to Communications and Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.
No. of Internet users in India increased by 100 million in 2015 to touch 400 million. @_DigitalIndia #FlashBack2015 pic.twitter.com/FLHMhpwEjf
— Ravi Shankar Prasad (@rsprasad) December 30, 2015 So next time when you see that 3.2 million people are supporting the platform, don’t get deluded into believing the message.
A post on Free Basics’ Twitter page indicated that 800 developers are supporting the platform in India.
What #FreeBasics opponents won't tell you. #FreeBasicsFacts #5 pic.twitter.com/fN1qL9vxNs
— Free Basics (@Free_Basics) December 29, 2015 However, a 2013 report pointed out that India had around 2.75 million developers back then, which is expected to rise to 5.2 million by 2018. In such a scenario, the number 800 seems insignificant.
Moreover, the nation is also witnessing large-scale physical protests against the platform. Earlier only start-ups and Facebook’s competitors were protesting against, and CEOs of distinguished online platforms have criticised the platform of being monopolistic.
Apart from that, the platform has also received sufficient denigration from a large number of people on various social media platforms in form of memes, cartoons, and regular posts.
Even Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of World Wide Web, wants people to “just say no” to initiatives like Facebook’s Internet.org (Free basics), as these are not the internet and are just branded similarly.
Earlier this month, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) asked Reliance to suspend Free Basics services temporarily till the issue on differential pricing and net neutrality is resolved.
Interestingly, Trai Chairman Ram Sevak Sarma recently said that the telecom regulators have recieved around 18.27 lakh replies from Facebook's platform, but he also mentioned that a large number of replies supporting Facebook's Free basics service were ambiguous and users have ignored specific questions asked by them.
TRAI has extended the last date for receiving comments on its consultancy paper on differential data pricing and net neutrality to January 7.
Free Basics explained
We spoke to Sandeep Pillai, an Internet activist, who had earlier filed a petition on Change.org during the first wave of net neutrality fiasco in India. Interestingly, his stance on free basics is not different from the thousands of other activists fighting against it.
He said that Facebook’s Free Basics or Internet.org is basically acting like a content gatekeeper, which has also been illustrated by a DOT paper that came out earlier. He pointed out that the platform will be really harmful in the long run.
“As of now people will think they are getting something for free but that’s not true and they will only get a portion of the internet and that too Facebook has the authoritative power to decide which services are eligible to join their platform,” Pillai said.
He also said that there is no problem in giving the rural population of India access to the Internet, but there are so many models like this model by Mozilla, which supports equal rating plans.
Also, Facebook will not allow several services like VoIP, high-resolution content, and several other services, which are fundamentals of the Internet. “It is not even basic as Facebook claims it to be”, he added.
Interestingly, Facebook does not have any zero-rating service in the US, but India is a prime target for them as there are no “proper regulations and laws regarding net neutrality”.
Companies like Facebook or Google are hiding their devious schemes behind altruism by saying that they want to connect the people in India.
“If you want to connect the people, give them a limited data pack and let them browse whatever they want to and don’t restrict them from benefiting from the whole internet,” he said.
