Top professors from IIT, BITS join fight against Facebook’s Free Basics

Free Basics satire on Reddit

This is not an issue of elite Indians able to pay for the Internet versus poor Indians, as Facebook is trying to portray. It is an issue of whether all Indians want to surrender their digital freedom to Facebook.

That’s how scores of professors from the top science and tech educational institutions in India are describing Facebook’s Free Basics scheme. Sixty-four of them have signed a joint statement sent to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) urging it to protect net neutrality and reject the “flawed” proposal.

The statement lifts the “veil of altruism” that Facebook has put on Free Basics, a free internet service limited to certain websites. It points out three fundamental flaws:

1. Facebook will decide what is a “basic service.” It has an interface for services to submit themselves for approval to Facebook. So a corporation headquartered in the US will decide for Indians what “basic services” they need the most, starting with Facebook.

2. Facebook will be able to decrypt the content of all the free basic apps on its servers. In other words, the health records of Indians on a health app or even their bank details in a fintech app will be accessible to Facebook. This opens up huge scope for misuse.

3. Facebook will determine what content costs on the internet. If telecom operators make some apps free for users, they will recover costs from other apps and services. The professors use an analogy to explain why Free Basics is not really “free” – “If you see an ad which says ‘buy a bottle of hair oil, get a comb free,’ you know that the cost of the comb is added somewhere.”

Tech entrepreneurs expose what’s at stake

A poster made by the net neutrality campaigners in India.

The professors from IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology), BITS (Birla Institute of Technology & Science) Pilani, IISc (Indian Institute of Science), and TIFR (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research) are the latest influential group to counter the media and ad blitz Facebook has unleashed. Facebook is trying to persuade Indians to support Free Basics through petitions to TRAI, which will take a call on whether it is in the public good.

The tech entrepreneur community has been campaigning for months against the Facebook scheme which Mark Zuckerberg initially launched as Internet.org with much fanfare in February this year in India. “Imagine a world where everyone had access to education and healthcare information. A world where farmers could look up information to improve their crop yields, and students could consult Wikipedia to help out with their homework,” declared the Facebook honcho to cheers.

This soon turned to jeers as the implications sank in. Net neutrality activists began to point out that Facebook and its partner telco Reliance, owned by biz tycoon Anil Ambani, would become de facto gatekeepers of the internet. They would decide which apps are better for Indians, violating a core architectural principle of the internet which is to provide a level playing field to all innovators. The internet has been a catalyst for innovation, entrepreneurship, and freedom of expression in India over the past couple of decades. The startup ecosystem in particular owes its growth to the access it gets to India’s vast market through the internet.

The internet is a public utility. Telecom operators are licensed by the government to provide access to it at regulated charges, with the proviso that the basic social and economic objectives of a digital India are met. The fear over Free Basics is that it gives Facebook control over this access, by allowing it to choose who gets access to what, how fast, and for how much.

In the name of the poor