Why Americans Should Pay Attention to What Facebook Is Doing in India

[Commentary] The first thing to understand is that Free Basics is Facebook, and Facebook is Free Basics, and they're both basically Internet.org. Free Basics is Facebook's effort to help the billion people of the world who don't have access to the Internet take their first baby steps online. Or, cynically, it's Facebook's effort to suck the next billion people of the world who don't have access to the Internet into Facebook.

Open Internet advocates in India went positively up in arms. I'd wager that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did not expect the backlash to be so decisive. “Who could possibly be against this?” he wrote in an editorial in the Times of India. Well, lots of people, for a number of reasons. First, there is the Western imperialism angle. (Economist news editor Leo Mirani told me Free Basics includes "the sort of things that people in the West think that people in the poor world should have access to.") Most of the backlash, however, was centered not on the gall of a Silicon Valley company galavanting into India with its own prescription for what it sees as a problem, but rather on the implications for the open Internet. Indians know that "some of the Internet" is a poor approximation of the whole Internet. Furthermore, zero rating—making some parts of the Internet free while other parts aren't—chips away at the nature of the open Internet as we know it.