Digital protects work. This quote by Nitin Pai, sums up the outcome, “You know that foreigners talking down to Indians and telling them what is good for them is going to backfire.”
This is how India’s citizens rebuffed the Faceback Empire! Not buying into the marketing .. cough propaganda of “If the sun is free … If the air is free … Then why shouldn’t the internet be free?”.
Did Zuck have good intentions? Debatable. Definitely, wrong strategy and tactics! Anyway, a mandatory read for any company thinking about expansion and citizens as well. Read the fine print. Net Neutrality is a human right!
“If you look at the literate population, which is a good proxy for how many people can be online, it’s about 700-800 million,” a Facebook employee who worked on the company’s plans for India told me. “That’s really the opportunity. If you rank countries based on opportunity, India comes out on top, and comes out on top by a big margin.” According to a Facebook executive, the company’s internal analysis projected that more than 30% of the new customers it hoped to add worldwide by 2020 would come from India.
Manzar, who is 48, had spent much of his life working to help Indians get online, and now one of the biggest tech companies in the world had thrown its weight behind his cause. “The power of Facebook as a platform, how it has motivated people to come online, generate content, get even the non-literate to become literate ... I am a great fan,” he said.
But Manzar’s optimism soured when he saw what Internet.org actually looked like: a threadbare platform that only allowed access to 36 bookmarked sites and Facebook, which was naturally the only social network available. There was one weather app, three sites for women’s issues, and the search engine Bing. Facebook’s stripped-down internet was reminiscent of old search engines that listed the early web on one page, when it was small enough to be categorised, like books in a library.
Crucially, Facebook itself would decide which sites were included on the platform. The company had positioned Internet.org as a philanthropic endeavour – backed by Zuckerberg’s lofty pronouncements that “connectivity is a human right” – but retained total control of the platform. “Their pitch about access turned into mobilisation for their own product,” Manzar said.
Manzar had never seen anything like it. He realised that if Internet.org took hold in India, Facebook would be the gatekeeper to the web for hundreds of millions who had no idea what the internet was, or what it could do for them.
Using the personal touch - talking on the phone
In private, Facebook’s efforts began to intensify. Zuckerberg began to make personal calls to Indian internet entrepreneurs to rebuild support for Internet.org. One person he contacted was a former senior executive of NASSCOM, India’s software industry lobby. The senior executive told Zuckerberg that he would support Internet.org – but only if Facebook opened up the platform to any company that wanted to participate. Zuckerberg promised him Facebook would make this change in the future. “Can we have your support now?” the executive recalled Zuckerberg asking. “We’ll make it a feature in Internet.org 2.0.”
“I said, ‘Zuck, what are you talking about?’ In my view, it’s like the British coming in and saying, ‘While everything’s OK, we’ll come in and help you with your tax collection – and this is the percentage we’ll take.’ It’s incredible.”, Vijay Shekhar Sharma
trying to rally the FB troops
But Facebook panicked. The company saw the regulator’s public questions as an existential threat, and within a week, Facebook’s marketing and policy teams launched a scorched-earth campaign to rally support.
Every user in India who logged into Facebook was greeted with a special message from Facebook, which said: “Free Basics is a first step to connecting 1 billion Indians to the opportunities online. But without your support, it could be banned in a matter of weeks.” Below the message, a large purple button invited users to click and “send email” to the regulator. If this was not intrusive enough, many users complained that even if they declined to send the message, merely lingering on the page caused Facebook to send all their friends a notification indicating they had written to the regulator. Online, outrage at the heavy-handed tactics erupted. “FB just listed an uncle’s account as having signed up to support Free Basics,” one user tweeted. “He passed away two years ago.”
Facebook had succeeded, overwhelmingly, in making the larger ruling on net neutrality about itself. As Pahwa told me: “Facebook came and shoved its ass in our faces.”
On Twitter, supporters of net neutrality began to protest against companies that had partnered with Facebook. Before long, four websites withdrew their participation, and tweeted support for net neutrality on their way out.
