If you’re Facebook friends with the social network’s CEO, you can “like” the picture he posted of the Taj Mahal.
Zuckerberg is in India this week to discuss his Internet.org project, an initiative he launched in 2013 that aims to open up the internet to roughly four billion people who don’t have access. The program was launched in India in February.
Facebook partnered with Indian cellphone carrier Reliance Communications to provide afree package of internet services. Critics, however, claim it’s mostly a way to introduce people to Facebook. Internet.org’s services are “deliberately stripped down to minimize data use and the cost to the phone company,” the New York Times writes.
With all of this going on, we asked Nikhil Pahwa to tell us a bit about Internet.org in India and what’s happening with the country’s battle over net neutrality (the principle that providers should enable access to all content online, no matter what the source is). Pahwa is the founder and editor of news website MediaNama. He’s also the co-founder of Savetheinternet.in, an advocacy group that focuses on internet freedom in India.
What’s going with Internet.org in India and why has it received criticism?
Nikhil Pahwa: Reliance Communications has been promoting Internet.org as “FreeNet,” confusing people into thinking it is free internet, even though it is a handful of sites selected by Facebook and its partner telecom operator. The problem is that people end up believing that Facebook is the internet, which happened in Indonesia.
We’re worried that the next billion users won’t get access to the diverse and open web that many of us have grown up with, impacting competition, access to knowledge, and innovation on the internet. Net neutrality is important, otherwise we’ll have two classes of citizens: those who use Facebook and its partners, and those who get access to the open web.
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