In February 2016, MIT Technology Review reported that the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (or TRAI) prohibited the “Free Basics” plan of Facebook which was designed to grant free cellular data to people for certain online service. Accordingly, this plan allowed people connect to sites like Facebook and Wikipedia without consuming their data allowances.
Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg’s plan has violated the principle of net neutrality. The interfering scheme that allows data available and free of charge for specific sites is unfair competition, especially to Indian domestic companies. On the other hand, such plan also violates the very keystone principle of how Internet was born and developed: free of charge and freedom for everybody. If someone has to pay to show their ideas on some sites and not on the others, it goes against the foundation of the Internet.
The regulator, however, provided an alternative to Facebook, given that its initial purpose was really to expand the online access to all sites, not just Facebook, Wikipedia, or any Facebook affiliated services. This direction might be hard for Facebook, which obviously has no control over the access to other sites, but might lead to an unexpected growth in Internet access in countries in India. Particularly, supposed that Facebook managed to come up with a new plan that satisfies such criterion, it might be under the form of a collaborated organization which comprises of several “giants” like Google, Facebook, or Yahoo. Such organization would, therefore, grant the access to almost all online services available in India, and perhaps, if established, in other developing countries which are starving for cellular data, like Vietnam, as well. Hopefully, the Internet would become free (at least for a while).
The only question is, when will that be true?
[gravityform id=”2″ title=”true” description=”true”]