India Bans Facebook's 'Free' Internet for the Poor

India Bans Facebook’s ‘Free’ Internet for the Poor is a report published by The Washington Post on 8 February 2016, written by Annie Gowen. The article covers TRAI’s landmark decision to prohibit discriminatory pricing for internet services, effectively banning Facebook’s Free Basics programme in India. It includes commentary from Sunil Abraham, who suggests that Facebook’s overreach in its public relations campaign undermined trust and contributed to the regulator’s decision to reject the zero-rated service model.

Article Details
Full Text
Context and Background
External Link

Article Details

📰 Published in:: The Washington Post
✍️ Author:: Annie Gowen
📅 Date:: 8 February 2016
📄 Type:: News report
📰 Newspaper link:: Read Online (Subscription needed)

Full Text

India's telecom regulator said Monday that service providers cannot charge discriminatory prices for Internet services, a blow to Facebook's global effort to provide low-cost Internet to developing countries.

Facebook's "Free Basics" program provides a pared-down version of Facebook and weather and job listings to some 15 million mobile-phone users in 37 countries around the world.

When it debuted in India in April, however, Free Basics immediately ran afoul of Internet activists who said it violated the principle of "net neutrality," which holds that consumers should be able to access the entire Internet unfettered by price or speed.

On Monday, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India agreed, prohibiting data service providers from offering or charging different prices for data — even if it's free. The Free Basics program has run into trouble elsewhere in the world recently — with Egypt banning it and Google clarifying that it pulled out of the application during a testing phase in Zambia.

In a statement, Facebook said that while the company was "disappointed with the outcome, we will continue our efforts to eliminate barriers and give the unconnected an easier path to the Internet."

In an interview before the ruling, Chris Daniels, Facebook's vice president for Internet.org — the umbrella organization of the global effort — said India's negative reaction has been "unique versus other markets we've seen. We've been welcomed with open arms in many countries."

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg launched the program to great fanfare in 2013, partnering with other international tech firms on a mission to connect the 4 billion people in the world without Internet access — which he says is a basic human right.

India has 300 million mobile Internet users but still has close to 1 billion people without proper Internet access. But it is second only to the United States in number of Facebook users, with 130 million, with vast expansion potential as Facebook works to increase its user base beyond the developed world.

Yet the Free Basics program was controversial from the start in India, where critics accused Facebook of creating a "walled garden" for poor users that allowed them access to only a portion of the web that Facebook controlled.

Dozens of well-known tech entrepreneurs, university professors and tech industry groups spoke out against it, saying that the curated app, with its handpicked weather, job and other listings, put India's scrappy start-ups and software developers at a disadvantage.

On Monday, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the founder and creator of India's payment application PayTM, applauded the regulator's move.

He had been among the program's fiercest critics, dubbing Free Basics "poor Internet for poor people" and comparing Facebook's actions to that of British colonialists and their East India Co.

"India, Do u buy into this baby internet?" Sharma tweeted in December. "The East India company came with similar 'charity' to Indians a few years back!"

"In a country like India that's just taking off, it's important that there is an equal playground for every app developer," he said in an interview.

In December, India's regulator put out a position paper on differential pricing and asked for public comment on whether such programs were fair.

In response, Facebook launched a public relations blitz, with television and newspaper advertisements, billboards and an opinion piece by Zuckerberg in the Times of India in which he argued against criticism that the social-media giant was providing the service simply to expand its user base.

Facebook also engineered a prompt to users that sent "robo" letters of support for Free Basics to India's telecommunications regulator. The regulator, flooded with form letters, was not amused.

Facebook's behavior may not have helped its cause, some analysts said.

"Facebook went overboard with its propaganda [and] convinced 'the powers that be' that it cannot be trusted with mature stewardship of our information society," said Sunil Abraham of the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore.

Yet David Kirkpatrick, the author of "The Facebook Effect," says that Zuckerberg is determined to see the program succeed.

"Facebook is relentless," he said. "Zuckerberg has said from the beginning his goal is to make the world more open and connected. And that's a phrase he continues to repeat 10 years later."

The regulator had asked Facebook, and its local telecom partner, Reliance Communications, to suspend Free Basics' operations during the public comment period. But the social-media giant and its partner appeared to flout the suspension order, with the program continuing to be operational on Reliance SIM cards.

A spokesman for Reliance earlier said that the application was in "testing mode" and that it was not commercially promoting the product.

The regulatory body said Monday that anybody violating the order in the future will be subject to a fine of about $735 a day. It will return to review the policy in two years to see if it is effective.

Context and Background

This ruling represented the culmination of India’s most significant net neutrality battle and established one of the world’s strongest regulatory prohibitions against differential pricing. TRAI’s decision went beyond merely blocking Free Basics—it articulated a principle that zero-rating any service violated the fundamental openness of the internet, regardless of whether the discriminatory pricing benefited consumers in the short term. The order’s sweeping nature reflected regulatory determination to prevent platform gatekeeping before such arrangements became entrenched across India’s mobile ecosystem.

Sunil Abraham’s observation about Facebook’s propaganda overreach identified a tactical miscalculation that transformed a policy debate into a credibility crisis. The automated prompt encouraging users to send template letters to TRAI backfired spectacularly, signalling to regulators that Facebook viewed public consultation as a marketing exercise rather than genuine deliberation. When combined with apparent defiance of the suspension order through continued “testing,” Facebook’s behaviour suggested a company unwilling to accept regulatory boundaries—precisely the concern that drove opposition to giving such an entity control over millions of Indians’ gateway to the internet.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma’s comparison to the East India Company tapped into post-colonial anxieties about foreign corporations wielding structural power over Indian markets. His invocation of “baby internet” and “charity” reframed Facebook’s human rights rhetoric as patronising rather than altruistic, suggesting that platforms viewed developing-country users as consumers to be cultivated rather than citizens with sovereign rights to shape their own digital infrastructure. This nationalist framing helped mobilise opposition beyond tech circles into broader public discourse about India’s digital future.

The regulatory apparatus proved surprisingly robust despite Facebook’s resources and political connections. TRAI’s willingness to reject the world’s largest social network’s marquee programme, backed by extensive advertising and celebrity endorsements, demonstrated that at least some Indian institutions could resist corporate pressure when procedural legitimacy and expert consensus aligned. The two-year review clause acknowledged uncertainty about long-term effects whilst cementing the immediate prohibition, creating space for evidence-based reassessment without leaving zero-rating in legal limbo.

The international context mattered. Egypt’s ban and Google’s Zambia withdrawal meant India was not isolated in rejecting zero-rating, reducing Facebook’s ability to portray opposition as uniquely Indian parochialism. Chris Daniels’s puzzlement that India reacted differently than markets that “welcomed with open arms” revealed assumptions that regulatory frameworks in developing countries would naturally favour any connectivity expansion, regardless of terms. TRAI’s decision challenged that presumption, asserting that how people get online matters as much as whether they connect at all.