The Silicon Raj

A COUPLE years ago, when net neutrality (the principle that internet service providers must treat all websites equally) was threatened by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Facebook stood firmly in its defense. Google, Netflix, Amazon, Twitter, and other high-tech giants took the same stand. Companies that make their money providing content or mining data from web users need net neutrality in order to function.

This February, India’s equivalent of the FCC, their Telecom Regulatory Authority, had to decide an important net neutrality test case there. A huge, U.S.-based multinational came into the Indian market offering an internet connection that limited users to the parent company’s own site and a severely limited menu of other pre-selected sites. This company spent millions on an advertising campaign against the principle of net neutrality in India. But finally Indian regulators stood firm and net neutrality was upheld.

The strange twist here is this: The U.S.-based Goliath fighting net neutrality in India was Facebook.

An obvious conclusion here would be that Facebook thinks net neutrality is only good for rich countries. Indians must be too poor, too ill-educated, maybe even too brown to handle the freedom and responsibility that comes with an open internet. That impression was confirmed when a member of Facebook’s board of directors, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, went on Twitter to proclaim: “Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?”

That left the pretty clear implication that the Indians had been better off under British rule. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stepped in to apologize, and his apology was undoubtedly sincere. But here’s an even stranger twist to this story. The product that the Indian regulators rejected was actually a well-intentioned attempt by Facebook to begin bringing the internet, or part of it anyhow, to some of the poorest people on earth.

The product is called Free Basics, and it is being offered in 37 low-income countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It allows people who own a smartphone to connect to Facebook and a limited menu of information and education sites without accruing any data charges on their phone bills. True, it makes Facebook the portal to the web for the world’s huddled masses instead of, say, Google. After all, Zuckerberg really does believe that what’s good for Facebook is good for humanity. But Free Basics also reflects Zuckerberg’s view that the main thing holding the global poor back from the internet is data charges.

In a paper titled “Is Connectivity a Human Right?” Zuckerberg supports this point with the sole example of a U.S. iPhone user who may pay $500 for a phone but then $2,000 in data charges. However, according to Indian-American tech entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa, writing at TechCrunch, “What Zuckerberg and his U.S. team didn’t understand was that in India ... 100MB of data—which is more than a Free Basics user will consume in a month—costs much less than a dollar.”

Smart phones and tablets are also much cheaper in India than here, but that cost is still the average Indian’s biggest obstacle to connectivity. And, as Wadhwa put it, “When the poor save up to buy these [devices], they want to be able to surf the web as Western users do ... they don’t want to be limited to visiting the health and education sites that Facebook directs them to.”

So what’s the bottom line here? How about this: The well-meaning 21st century colonialist may come in a T-shirt and a hoodie instead of khakis and a pith helmet, and he may preach global connectivity instead of Christian civilization. But he still can’t imagine his way into the lives of the poor majority, or begin to comprehend why they might see him as an exploiter instead of a savior.