Free Internet service for over 3 million Egyptians shut down

Neither Etisalat nor Egyptian officials could immediately be reached for comment. In the past few days, the social networking giant had unleashed an Ad blitzkrieg on “Free Basics”, which the company claims will help millions of poor people to connect to some sites, including Facebook, for free.

Zuckerberg continues by offering an anecdote of a farmer named Ganesh, who uses the free internet service to check weather updates and commodity prices. However, users are not allowed to access many services such as YouTube, Gmail, Google or Twitter.

“Free Basics and its peer telecom operator models are not open, plural or diverse, and can be harmful for India’s democracy”, Nikhil Pahwa, net neutrality campaigner, said in a published statement. He also added that if people lose access to free internet services, they would simply lose access to the opportunities offered by the World Wide Web.

Zuckerberg made his appeal after the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India asked Facebook’s partner, Reliance Communications, to stop providing the service until its legality could be determined.

Facebook has never even advertised its own core product in India this heavily. Anything offered in the name of the “Internet” which isn’t the “full Internet”, isn’t really free and public, he said.

However, the entire concept has been flagged in some circles as a violation of net neutrality in that Facebook and its partners act as the arbiter of content accessible through the service-commonly known as a walled garden. So Facebook has launched a lavish campaign to canvass support for Free Basics, putting out expensive full-page double-spread adverts in leading Indian newspapers and putting up billboards in cities. Several Indian conglomerates, including the owners of the Times of India, backed out of signing on to Internet.org following the backlash.

A joint statement from 50 faculty members of India’s premier institutes denounced the initiative and urged TRAI to reject it, even as the telecom regulator extended the deadline for comments on the net neutrality issue. Getting to the next 6 billion people in the world is proving far tougher. It is hard to see how permitting Free Basics violates that responsibility.

“We haven’t got a problem with free Internet as long as it’s open to all. A large number of them, shocked at realizing what they were conned into doing have since said no”.

To draw an analogy, suppose a chocolate company wishes to provide “free basic food” for all Indians, but retains control of what constitutes “basic” food-this would clearly be absurd. Facebook is in critical need for its next one billion as its growth slows down in the United States, but stooping down to such desperate measures to gain market-share is unacceptable. “A public consultation is not about who has more members, it is about who has more sensible opinions… we are hoping the regulator will do their job properly”, said Kiran Jonnalagadda, a volunteer at savetheinternet.in in Bangalore.

It is offered in 36 countries and Facebook says it believes more than 15 million people have been brought online who would otherwise not be using the net.

But there have been criticism that this is against the whole idea of net neutrality, by which all data on the internet are to be treated equally.

He also claims one in every 10 people that join the Internet are lifted out of poverty, though he doesn’t cite a source for this information.