Should India's Internet Be Free Of Charge, Or Free Of Control?

The battle to persuade regulators to halt Facebook's introduction to the Internet has been a boisterous one.

Netizens in India derided "Free Basics" as "a digital land grab" and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg a modern-day colonizer. One of Facebook's own board members caused an uproar on social media when he also compared Free Basics to colonialism, and forced Zuckerberg to disown the "deeply upsetting" remark. India's telecom regulators acknowledge that providing free service for the poor is a worthwhile endeavor, and say the government is pursuing options. But they find that discounted pricing including free schemes puts small content providers outside such schemes at a disadvantage, thus creating barriers for entry into a non-level-playing field.

Sadanand Dhume, who writes about the South Asian political economy and society at the American Enterprise Institute, calls the opponents of Free Basics "purists." "What they are looking at is some kind of abstract, pure debate. And what they are not looking at is the reality of India," he says. The reality, Dhume says, is that nearly 1 billion of India's nearly 1.3 billion population have no way to go online.