WHAT FACEBOOK & RELIANCE’S INTERNET.ORG MEANS TO NET NEUTRALITY, ME AND YOU – IS INTERNET REALLY ON ITS WAY TO BE FREE?

Is it really the philanthropy to connect the not connected or just a clever idea to expand its customer base?



Internet! Meet your new gatekeeper – Internet.org is here to dive you into a world of Facebook and other sites which are necessarily approved by Facebook itself in the veil of free internet, wait there’s more to the story, you’ll be warned that they’ll incur extra charges  in case you try to explore outside of the bubble served by Internet.org. So no clicks on links, no twitter, and no googling, all you do is Bing!

For starters who don’t know what the writer is talking about in above lines, Internet.org in their own terms is a Facebook-led initiative bringing together technology leaders, nonprofits and local communities to connect the two thirds of the world that doesn't have internet access. They say their motive is to make Internet affordable to the masses, essentially the first time users who have not yet experienced what it means to browse the web. According to Facebook, the app is free and Facebook and Internet.org don’t pay at all. Instead, the free access acts as an on-ramp to operator’s data plans. If users click-through to links outside of the services or use other apps, Internet.org will show users a roadblock screen that warns them they’ll be expending their data plan or need to buy one.

On February 10, 2015 India became the sixth country to see the launch of Internet.org which is Facebook’s tie-up with Reliance Communications in India. This ostensible philanthropic move from Facebook and Reliance comes to India after testing waters in Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Colombia and Ghana in that order. They promise to make you able to access the internet for free. But of course you’ll need to own a Reliance Communication’ mobile network to access it. The plight of the poor boy doesn’t just stop there! Let me ask you a simple question, say for example you came across this strange thing you have never heard of, it could be anything, from piece of remote news to some celebrity to history to anything, what do you do? You Google! Don’t you? So much so that Google.com is synonymous for search in our daily lives. For most of us, Google is the window to the talismanic world of Internet. But then, hold your hearts, that window is inaccessible under the Internet.org project. Google is just the tip of the iceberg among things which are not accessible under this endeavor which aims to connect the not-yet-connected from Internet. The tie-up  between the two enables people with Internet enabled handsets and of course those who have Reliance network to access 38 websites for free, yes, you heard it right, free. It’s a mix of news, weather, education and health sites which includes Facebook (of course!), Wikipedia and Reliance astrology! The only search engine available is Microsoft’s Bing; that answers why Microsoft is one of the many partners of this Internet for all project! And all this will be accessible via an android app. This selective give-away of sites is what causing unrest among the very people who claim to be advocates of net neutrality.

Like any other big program Internet.org has its own set of critics who disapprove of its restrictiveness. Selective access to the Internet is something that will make hard for rivals to compete in already stiff competitive market. Facebook in a way is zeroing in on its potential future customers in the name of philanthropy. It is here to tweak the competition which brings before us the best that exists in the crowded virtual world. For instance, if you travel back to the time when Internet was just taking shapes, which were the giants present then? What was their quality? How we got up to here where we are in today? Quite simple is the answer to this and many such questions – the companies and many startups then found a new frontier for innovation on the internet where they did so because of their engagement with open and equitable competition to see who the best is. Or that’s how we got Amazon, Google, eBay and of course the Facebook itself. This idea of narrowing someone’s choices in the name of free internet is not any new. There was this time when AOL in one of its similar program distributing free trial CDs which took most of the Americans though their first internet experience wherein they were funneled to the distilled version of the web. Yahoo and Microsoft too have tried similar tactics in the past to circumscribe the internet for you. When you buy Facebook’s free internet, you pay to access the full inhibited length and breadth of the web, and not few tools and services cherry picked by Reliance and Facebook. We need whole of the internet when you call it Internet.org and not Planet Facebook unless you change its name to some Facebook.org! It’s not just the Google or Yahoo! search that is left behind but scores of others. For example TimesJobs, Babajob have been selected but Naukri.com which is by far the most popular and most used jobs portal in the country is not in the list. Same is the case with JustDial, Getit, Ganeshaspeaks, Quikr, Sulekha.com, Yatra, GoIbibo, MakeMyTrip while OLX, Astro, Cleartrip and AccuWeather got lucky to be one of the few sites to be seen by first time internet users. The criterion which is used to select these few sites is still under the wraps, both Reliance and Facebook are yet to come open on the strategy they used to zero in on these sites. Reliance communication has put another hurdle in the accessing the ‘free’ internet. It will only equip you with option to read and post status messages, like or comment on statuses and pictures. But the pictures on the other hand will be blurred and will require to be downloaded which will incur data charges on you or you will have to buy a data pack like other users.


What is net neutrality after all? Wikipedia has it that Net neutrality (also network neutrality, Internet neutrality, or net equality) is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or mode of communication. Three principles of the net neutrality are all sites must be accessible, accessible at same speeds and the cost of accessing them must be the same. Internet.org on the other hand violates each one of those principles and quite head on. With Internet.org you aren’t accessing the web like most of the people around the globe are doing but only a part of it which is approved by Facebook, in short the Facebook whitelisted internet. So you’ll get Bing, AccuWeather, and BBC News for free, but will have to pay to access Google search, Yahoo Weather, or any other local alternatives in India. Some of us  who are reading this might be happy with the project after all India has this dubious mindset of better-few-free-sites-than-none. But that’s not all the matter is about. It’s far beyond this luxury of few free sites. Since it is an exclusive deal with single operator (read Reliance Communications in this case), it also raises questions about the genuineness of Mark Zuckerberg’s widely stated motive of bringing the internet to billion people thereby bridging the digital divide that exists in the sub-continent. The program provides limited menu of services claiming to be the Internet like a cable TV network who throws into network only those channels which he finds interesting or where he sees his profit rather than the complete access at low cost which is being spread everywhere in the name of Internet.org.

Internet activist and director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, Ethan Zuckerman, told The Hindu in an email interview that "If Facebook were donating millions or billions to upgrade infrastructure - or even to lobby mobile phone carriers for cheaper data services for all - it would be less troubling. But instead, they're offering a limited version of the internet, one that centers on Facebook, to low-income internet users. That raises real concerns that this is not a charitable effort, but a customer acquisition strategy."

The problem with India is we have an enormous array of people with no connectivity at all. There happens to be still a population which dreams of electricity forget the internet, they might just be unaware of what that is. The real charity would be to let them have what they require to connect with the world which enjoys the gifts of 21st century. The internet is certainly the necessity of masses but the free and fair internet and not Facebook approved walled Internet.org. Most people not just India but across the globe draw no clear distinction between internet and the web, all because world wide web happens to be the most immediate, easiest and direct way to access the large network that connects and surrounds the globe. Facebook it appears is dreaming to achieve that dubious status, where internet users and Facebook users overlap to such an extent that they become unaware of the differences between the two.

Few months back twitter was abuzz with news of government walling the internet, news was that the government would block few sites, few twitter accounts too were blocked and internet like always busted with anger so much so that government was put to back foot and consequentially withdraw its decision. This one is more serious as it happens with those people who are yet to know what it means to be connected. Imagine the world tomorrow if you are told in the morning that google has seized to exist and you’ve to use only what Facebook is providing, that internet is all about this 38 sites, what it states in book that it’s large network of networks is all but fallacy!

On the other hand net neutrality in itself has a problem for it assumes access to internet as given. And then it makes those three principles. In India it definitely is not given. Moreover most of the fellow Indians can’t afford the high costs or those who get hold of it are outraged over the poor quality of services even after paying for the same. So the whole scenario in India is quite lot different plus net neutrality as a concept too is too sweet to be discussed against Indian backdrop. All in all the focus in India must be to make available the resources to connect the countryside which is yet to be connected with the outside world, to increase the speed and not to serve the 38 sites without improving the quality of service. For an India which lacks basic amenities required to be connected, Internet.org in its current form is mere a concept whose aim is not to connect the not-connected but to funnel the already connected-but-those-who-refuse-to-stay-connected because of high costs and low speed involved in doing so into a world where you only see what is shown to you and not what you chose to see.

So India, be mindful of your new gatekeeper who appears sweet at surface but will slowly engulf you into his walled world of Facebook.org where you will browse with Bing and see your fortune on Reliance astrology. Wake up now or you will soon lose your freedom to Google!!

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