Facebook wins the battle of comments in India, but the war goes on

Mark Zuckerberg on stage at Facebook’s F8 Developers Conference 2015. Photo credit: Maurizio Pesce

80 percent of the 2.4 million responses to a consultation paper (PDF) from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) support Facebook’s Free Basics, a free internet service limited to a few websites. TRAI says almost all of these are templated responses from two sources: 1.35 million from @supportfreebasics.in and 0.55 million from @facebookmail.

TRAI had invited comments from the public and all stakeholders on its consultation paper. The last day for submission of responses was January 7.

The regulator clarifies that its consultation paper was on “differential pricing for data services” in general, and not on Facebook’s Free Basics in particular. However, most of the responses are templated ones in support of a specific product “without addressing the questions raised in the consultation paper.”

The question of public good

Photo credit: McKay Savage

The main issue in contention here is whether Free Basics and other such schemes are in the larger public good or do more harm by violating the fundamental principles of net neutrality. Activists have argued that Free Basics and “zero rating” – where internet service providers exempt end users on data charges for specific apps – will destroy the level playing field provided to innovators by the internet, which is a public utility.

TRAI received nearly half a million responses from forums such as Save The Internet. Although these addressed specific questions in the consultation paper, they too were mostly templated with many sets of identical replies.

Facebook unleashed an email and ad campaign to generate favorable responses to TRAI, on which it is reported to have spent over US$50 million. Clearly, the activist forums were no match for Facebook in this battle of comments.

But the larger war over net neutrality is far from over.

Decision before month-end

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TRAI chairman R S Sharma pointed out in an interview to The Hindu a week ago that templated “[templated] responses are not helpful at all [because] consultation papers are not opinion polls.” What TRAI needed were meaningful inputs to form its policy on differential pricing for data services, which is expected to be out by month-end.

India’s telecom minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, who is also a lawyer, was ambivalent when asked for his take on the response to the TRAI consultation paper. “I have told Parliament that internet is the finest creation of the human mind. It must remain as a privilege and not become monopoly of the rich […] We [the government] respect the freedom of social media and have a larger commitment to non-discriminatory access.”