A data-driven argument on why Marc Andreessen is wrong about Free Basics

[Commentary] Facebook board member Marc Andreessen recently tweeted, “Denying world's poorest free partial Internet connectivity when today they have none, for ideological reasons, strikes me as morally wrong.” This reaction was a surprise because it resorts to a moralistic line of argument rather than one that is based on data or any sort of empirical evidence. So what do the facts say?

Well, for starters, Free Basics is not some hypothetical proposal that can be judged only in theory — in India itself, it has been running for over a year! Given that Free Basics has already has a decent run, any argument that posits that it is beneficial in some meaningful manner should have been clearly demonstrable by now. Although India added 100 million Internet users in the last year, approximately 1 million use Facebook’s Free Basic. If Free Basics was even remotely the silver bullet that Marc and his acolytes claim it to be, it is difficult to dispute that this number should have already been higher by an order of magnitude. And the target audience of Free Basics was not India’s poorest who have never come online but far more so, students and millennials to whom the hook was about surfing for free.

[Sumanth Raghavendra is an entrepreneur at pitchdeck.io]