India’s telecoms regulator has ordered mobile operator Reliance Communications to stop offering Facebook’s “Free Basics” service to its customers, due to concerns over net neutrality.
Free Basics is a suite of basic internet tools including news, travel, job listings and health services, offered to people in a number of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America through partnership with operators that remove data charges.
Reliance is Facebook’s first partner in India, but the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has now blocked its launch. “We have asked them to stop it and they have given us a compliance report that it has been stopped,” a government source told the Times of India.
Net neutrality is the cause: the question of whether operators – or, indeed, Facebook – should be allowed to decide which online services can be offered without data charges.
“The question has arisen whether a telecom operator should be allowed to have differential pricing for different kinds of content. Unless that question is answered, it will not be appropriate for us to continue to make that happen.”
In a statement published by The Verge, Facebook’s spokesperson said that “we are committed to Free Basics and to working with Reliance and the relevant authorities to help people in India get connected”.
For now, the regulator’s decision is a blow for Facebook in India, a country where it has grand ambitions to get more people online.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Facebook’s headquarters in the US in September, hugging chief executive Mark Zuckerberg at a joint “town hall” event, and talking up the company’s ability to help connect more rural communities in India.
“India at this point needs both physical and digital infrastructure,” said Modi at the event, while Zuckerberg revealed that he had changed his profile picture to include an Indian flag “to support Digital India, the Indian government’s effort to connect rural communities to the internet and give people access to more services online”.
Critics in India have argued that Facebook is not the right entity to decide which online services can be offered for free, as well as pointing out privacy concerns about Indian internet users’ traffic being routed through Facebook’s servers.
Facebook has been fighting back by encouraging Indian users of its service to email the regulator in support of Free Basics.
“Free Basics is in danger in India. A small, vocal group of critics are lobbying to have Free Basics banned on the basis of net neutrality,” claimed a message sent to those users.
“Instead of giving people access to some basic Internet services for free, they demand that people pay equally to access all Internet services, even if that means 1 billion people can’t afford to access any services.”
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