What Does India’s Refusal of Facebook’s Offer Mean for the Future of the Internet?

By Zosha Millman | LXBN | February 9, 2016

One day after the 20 year anniversary of the passing of “the most important law on the Internet,” and two days after a major data breach at the Department of Justice, one thing is abundantly clear: People are starting to view Internet connection as a basic right. Even if nobody can agree on how we supply that basic right.

What “proper Internet access” looks like has been a debate a lot longer than net neutrality has been in the news cycle (even when as net neutrality did, people were still debating about whether it was the best option). 

As the web became an increasingly relevant and necessary part of most people’s daily life, people started to treat it as a necessity and a right, not a commodity. In 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Internet freedom as “fundamental as free speech itself,” noting that the web was the 21st century version assembling in the town square.  

For some, that’s an important enough reason to take a stand about what kind of Internet is being offered to them. That’s why Facebook has lost its months-long battle in India, over its Free Basics program. Facebook has billed the program as a way to introduce the poor and technologically-lacking populations in three dozen countries to the Internet, by providing mobile users with a free, text-only access to Facebook, as well as certain news, health, and job services. But as The New York Times reports, even a country with 132 million Facebook users wasn’t pulled into a deal they didn’t feel one-hundred percent sure about:

But the program quickly became the target of critics, who said that it was an attempt to steer unsophisticated new Internet users to Facebook and other services that were working with the company. They argued that Free Basics and other “zero rating” programs violated the concept of net neutrality, which says that Internet providers should provide equal access to all web content.

…The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said in its policy document that mobile phone companies should not be allowed to “shape the users’ Internet experience” by providing free access only to certain services.

Since most Indians are not yet online, the agency noted, such programs have great power to shape a newcomer’s whole view of the Internet.

“This can prove to be risky in the medium to long term as the knowledge and outlook of those users would be shaped only by the information made available through those select offerings,” the agency wrote.

It’s an issue the U.S. is grappling with, as the purposefully ambiguous stance on zero-rating, or allowing certain sites or apps to fall outside the data cap, leaves plenty of room for companies to take advantage of. While Facebook has maintained that their intentions were nothing but altruistic (similar to Verizon, T-Mobile, andComcast) India now joins the growing group of nations who have prohibited zero-rating with no qualifications.The Netherlands, Chile, Japan, and Slovenia have all taken a strict stand against it in their net neutrality rules.

And it’s hard to see the case against those rules: In addition to essentially creating a two-lane system net neutrality was enacted to avoid, if Facebook really wanted to altruistically bring the web to rural farmers in India, there’s other programs they could fund, like funding India’s lagging telecom infrastructure.

The truth—at least so far—is that there aren’t many examples of people getting into this business altruistically. 

And not everyone feels so comfortable turning away programs, even if they come with a sort of hidden price tag. 

As The MIT Technology Review writes getting online cheaply is the main concern, and American companies are often the ones enabling that to happen:

But the existence of a free and dominant chat, e-mail, search, and social-networking service makes it awfully hard for any competitor to arise. And Susan Crawford, visiting professor of law at Harvard University and a co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, calls it “a big concern” that Google and Facebook are the ones becoming the portal to Web content for many newcomers.

“For poorer people, Internet access will equal Facebook. That’s not the Internet—that’s being fodder for someone else’s ad-targeting business,” she says. “That’s entrenching and amplifying existing inequalities and contributing to poverty of imagination—a crucial limitation on human life.”

…Google and Facebook are doing more than just providing various forms of free data access. Those two companies and others, like Microsoft, are increasingly in the business of trying to expand infrastructure and related data-efficiency technologies that will, inevitably, be deployed in ways that benefit themselves.

Perhaps the only way consumers and governments can escape is by exploring the possibility of circumventing the commercial broadband providers altogether and facilitating cities’ own connections to the Internet. Until that happens, governments may be left to figure out when a deal is worth accepting, and when it’s a net neutrality violation in opportunity’s clothing.

Original