India Bans Facebook’s Free Basics

India telecom regulatory authority TRAI has banned limited free internet access programs and essentially blocked Facebook’s Free Basics in the country.

Social media giant Facebook expressed disappointment and said it will adversely impacts its free Internet platform Free Basics.

Facebook has come under criticism for its Free Basics initiative (previously known as Internet.org), which provides free access to Facebook, wikihow, Wikipedia, BBC News, Bing’s search engine and various other websites.

India has introduced tougher regulations to prevent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from offering differential pricing plans to their customers to provide access to different part of the internet.

Zero-rated internet services means those services that allow people access to some websites and web services without utilizing any of their mobile data allowance. Explaining the ban, TRAI said, “The system and others like it violate the principles of net neutrality”.

In a statement, the TRAI said that “Allowing price differentiation based on the type of content being accessed on the internet, would militate against the very basis on which the internet has developed and transformed the way we connect with one another”. “Internet.org has many initiatives, and we will keep working until everyone has access to the internet” Zuckerberg added.

The ruling hit the free version of Facebook and other services being provided by Mark Zuckerberg’s company.

We know that when people have access to the Internet, they also get access to jobs, education, healthcare and communication.

Much of the debate around net neutrality and differential pricing in India was centred around Facebook’s Free Basics programme.

According to Facebook, the key objective behind the project was “to bring more people online with an open, non-exclusive and free platform”. This is the broad point that we have highlighted in the regulation, TRAI chairman R S Sharma told reporters at a conference. “We care about these people, and that’s why we’re so committed to connecting them”, he said.

But TRAI hasn’t yet suggested what alternatives could be used to provide cheap or free Internet access to the hundreds of millions of mobile users who are unable or unwilling to pay for mobile data.