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Mark Zuckerberg is taking intense fire in India over an initiative that his organization Internet.org launched, to provide limited Internet access to the masses. He seems genuine in his desire to bring digital equality to the world: in an op-ed for The Times of India, he defended this initiative, called Free Basics, citing the example of a farmer named Ganesh, who would be able to find weather information and prepare for monsoons, look up commodity prices to get better deals, and invest in new crops and livestock.
Zuckerberg is on the defensive
because he doesn’t understand the culture and values of Indians. He doesn’t realize that Ganesh cherishes the
freedom that India gained from its British colonizers in 1947 and doesn’t want
a handout from a Western company. Ganesh may be poor, but he doesn’t want
anyone to dictate what sites he can visit, what movies he may watch, or what
applications he can download.
Like a billion other Indians,
Ganesh can afford a mobile that lets him call and text anyone, anywhere. He is
saving up for a beautiful new smartphone, just like the ones he sees other
people using, which costs around $40. He
would rather spend 50 cents a month for 100 megabytes of unrestricted data
access than compromise his freedom and dignity.
Zuckerberg is right about the
benefits of Internet access: it will enable village artisans to access global
markets; farmers to learn about weather and commodity prices; and laborers and
maids to find work through sharing-economy applications. With unrestricted Internet access, they will
have access to same ocean of knowledge as we do and become our equals online.
And here is the problem with
Free Basics: the Internet access on offer is not unrestricted. Facebook and the
mobile carriers get to decide what websites people can visit, and Facebook
becomes the center of the Internet universe. Users can’t do Google searches and
explore the web; they can only go to supported sites and search Facebook.
Zuckerberg compares this
limited service to libraries and hospitals. But imagine a private corporation
being allowed to decide which books your children could read and which videos
they could watch — and to monitor everything that they did. Imagine the
corporation’s dictating what services your hospital would offer and what treatments
it would provide. Would you accept that?
The debate centres on the
concept of net neutrality — whether a mobile carrier should be allowed to favour
which websites a person visits. This is not an Indian issue; we are fighting
these battles in the United States. The Federal Communications Commission
enacted rules in March 2015 to require broadband providers to treat all data
equally rather than provide preference to some sites. A federal appeals court
is challenging these rules at the behest of the telecommunications industry.
Google has the same
motivations as Facebook — to bring billions more people online. But it is pursuing a more sensible strategy:
it is setting up fast and free WiFi Internet access points at 400 railroad
stations all over India. These are located in most central locations and
frequented by tens of millions of people. Facebook could one-up Google by
setting up access points at thousands of schools, libraries, and villages. This
“no strings attached” approach would earn it gratitude — and signups — rather
than resentment.
The ultimate solution,
unrestricted Internet for everyone, is, however, something that Facebook,
Google and others are already working on providing, via drones, balloons, and
microsatellites.
With its Aquila Unmanned
Aircraft and laser technologies, Facebook has demonstrated the ability to
deliver data at a rate of tens of gigabits per second to a target the size of a
coin — from 10 miles away. This is 10 times faster than existing land-based
technologies. With interconnected
drones, it will, within two or three years, most likely be able to provide
Internet access to the most remote regions of the world.
Google is further ahead in its
efforts. It has already piloted a technology in Brazil, Australia and New Zealand
to beam Internet data from the sky. Google’s balloons, called Loons, are
essentially floating cell towers that can relay a signal to a mobile device on
the ground. Loons fly twice as high as commercial aircraft and navigate by
taking advantage of wind patterns in the stratosphere.
And then there are low-orbit
microsatellites, which Oneweb, SpaceX, and now Samsung are building. These beam
Internet signals by laser to ground stations. In June, Oneweb announced that it
had raised $500 million to develop and launch several hundred satellites that
will provide global broadband coverage.
Google is launching Loons in
Indonesia and Sri Lanka. It was also supposed to launch them in India, but
India’s defense, aviation, and telecommunications ministries raised technical
and security concerns and stopped the project. When the telecom providers
figure out that with unlimited, inexpensive, Internet access, their cell and
data businesses will be decimated, they too will place obstacles in the way of
these technologies.
This, therefore, is the real
battle that Facebook should be fighting. If the goal is to provide everyone
with Internet access, Facebook and the Internet-freedom groups that it is
fighting should be working together to lobby for a change in government
policies — for when the new space-based technologies are ready.
Here is an interview I(Vivek Wadhwa) did with Cory Johnson and Carol
Massar of Bloomberg TV about the advances of 2015 including how the developing
world is coming on line—and Free Basics.
