Facebook’s Free Basics service suspended in Egypt

After our directive, Reliance Communications (Facebook’s India partner for Free Basics) has put on hold the commercial launch of Free Basics till we finalise our recommendations on the issue.

Responding to a recent TRAI Consultation Paper deceptively titled “Consultation Paper on Differential Pricing”, the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), the largest representative body of internet companies in India, has said that the differential pricing violates not only principles of net neutrality but TRAI’s own stated principles of pricing.

The official added that the permit to offer the service had been granted for two months and that when it expired on Wednesday the Facebook Free Basics program was suspended.

Free Basics against net neutrality?

From that article: “Surprisingly, over the past year there’s been a big debate about this in India”.

The company’s Free Basics service lets people in some countries access Facebook and some other websites without charge.

“India is a test case for a company like Facebook and what happens here will affect the roll out of this service in other smaller countries where perhaps there is not so much awareness at present”, said Mishi Choudhary, a New York-based lawyer who works on technology and Internet advocacy issues. The idea is to provide access to services like Babycenter, which provides health information to mothers, or SmartBusiness, which takes you through the mechanics of starting a business. “More than 1 million people who were previously unconnected had been using the Internet because of these efforts”.

The group of executives in its letter said that differential pricing for access to Internet would lead to just a few players such as Facebook with the Free Basic platform playing the role of gatekeepers.

“Instead of recognizing the fact that Free Basics is opening up the whole internet, they continue to claim – falsely – that this will make the internet more like a walled garden”.

The consultation paper on differential pricing of data services raises concerns over zero-rating tariff models – a practice wherein service providers offer free data to users for select applications and websites.

More than 75 professors have signed up in a joint statement to TRAI calling Free Basics “misleading and flawed”. Since this limits internet access and provides an advantage to the sites which can be accessed for free, activists in India have been opposing this service stating that it is a threat to net neutrality. They also argue that it violates net neutrality rules. The move comes less than a week after Indian regulators asked Reliance Communications, Facebook’s partner in the free internet venture, to stop providing the service, questioning its legality.