India deserves better than Mark Zuckerberg’s watered-down Internet

[Commentary] Here is the problem with Free Basics: the Internet access on offer is not unrestricted. Facebook and the mobile carriers get to decide what websites people can visit, and Facebook becomes the center of the Internet universe. Users can’t do Google searches and explore the web; they can only go to supported sites and search Facebook. Zuckerberg compares this limited service to libraries and hospitals. But imagine a private corporation being allowed to decide which books your children could read and which videos they could watch — and to monitor everything that they did. Imagine the corporation’s dictating what services your hospital would offer and what treatments it would provide. Would you accept that?

Google is launching Loons in Indonesia and Sri Lanka. It was also supposed to launch them in India, but India’s defense, aviation, and telecommunications ministries raised technical and security concerns and stopped the project. When the telecom providers figure out that with unlimited, inexpensive, Internet access, their cell and data businesses will be decimated, they too will place obstacles in the way of these technologies. This, therefore, is the real battle that Facebook should be fighting. If the goal is to provide everyone with Internet access, Facebook and the Internet-freedom groups that it is fighting should be working together to lobby for a change in government policies — for when the new space-based technologies are ready.

[Vivek Wadhwa is a fellow at Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University]