The debate around Net Neutrality has been going around like wildfire. In India, the uproar kicked off when Flipkart started talking with Airtel about Airtel Zero (splitting India’s Internet into many Internets). The debate took a u-turn when Flipkart backed out of the deal and stood by net neutrality. They released a statement saying, “We at Flipkart have always strongly believed in the concept of net neutrality, for we exist because of the Internet.”
Alongside, Sachin Bansal, co-founder of Flipkart openly spoke about other giants like Facebook that have been violating net neutrality in India with initiatives like Internet.org. Cleartrip, one of the partners for Internet.org backed out of it today. In this light, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg opened himself up for an hour to an open Q&A and of course the topic of Internet.org came along. Josh Constine, a writer at Techcrunch asked Mark about Net Neutrality and Internet.org. Here’s what Mark had to say:
This thread was picked up on Reddit and the discussion that has ensued can be followed here. There are two sides to Internet.org:
-> The Internet.org initiative has a motive of spreading awareness about the internet and taking it to more and more people. This seems like a social cause but underneath it, there’s a bigger repercussion.
-> As one of the comments on the Reddit thread says, “I read a very interesting study on the penetration of FB in developing countries (Thailand and Indonesia). One of the blinding insights from the research was, many who had access to FB because of such free data packs, did not even know they were on the internet. All they knew was Facebook and not the web. This specifically defeats the purpose of making people aware of the internet.” (millions of Facebook users don’t know they’re using the internet)
Cleartrip’s backing out of the Internet.org is also an implication of the same dilemma. The debate rages on and it’ll be interesting to see how the rules shape up. Mark is going to conduct more Q&A’s on his Facebook page and here are some other takeaways from his first open Q&A.
Follow @pranesh_prakash, @jackerhack and @nixxin to learn more and stay abreast to the topic of net neutrality. Here’s a video we made for a better understanding of what it means:
Disclaimer: Internet.org is an advertiser on YourStory. Facebook and Reliance Communications have partnered to bring Internet.org to India.