Facebook ‘Free Basics’ service frozen in Egypt

We have given extra days and appeal to them to frame responses to our questions, giving specific reasons.

“Free Basics is at risk of being banned, slowing progress towards digital equality in India”, said an advertisement published in Mumbai newspapers on Wednesday, urging Internet users to support the initiative.

He further said one approach that could have been taken is to just ignore these responses but as people have taken time out to respond, therefore ignoring the comments is not fair. “Consultation by Trai are not opinion polls, we are not asking if the answer is yes or no because that does not help us”. “Therefore, it has become hard for us to connect these answers to this paper”, Sharma said. “To all those whom we can approach, we will try to reach them”, Sharma said.

Free Basics has launched in 37 countries so far. The Facebook users’ comments (1.4 million out of the total 1.8 million till Thursday) are in a standard language and template and do not answer the queries in the paper.

We have already extended the last date for sending comments by a week to January 7.

Facebook’s Internet.org had partnered with Reliance Communications in February this year to provide free internet access to many websites as part of the initiative.

A debate on net neutrality stirred across the country after Bharti Airtel Ltd, the country’s biggest mobile-phone operator, chose to charge separately for Internet-based calls but withdrew it later after people protested.

Critics say it would put small content-providers and start-ups that don’t participate in it at a disadvantage, they say.

India is the battleground over the right to unrestricted access to Internet, with local startups in the tech industry joining on the front line against the likes of Mark Zuckerberg the founder of Facebook and the plan he has of rolling out free access to Internet for the masses. Mr. Sharma, however, declined to comment specifically on Free Basics, but agreed that that the service uses a differential pricing model.