Indian Regulator Temporarily Suspends Facebook’s Free Basics
I hope this turns into a more permanent decision. Indians need to keep sending emails to TRAI. Indian government should be worried about handing over private details of Indians to the NSA on a silver platter. But even without that risk, Free Basics can evolve into something disastrous for Indian startup scene and jobs&#x2F;innovation.<p>Lets look at two extreme scenarios.<p>-&gt;India without net neutrality: Everyone has free Facebook. &quot;Free basics&quot; didn&#x27;t help in advancing electrification of the country but it did provide free facebook&#x2F;wikipedia to everyone. So 30% of the country is still in dark. But 50% of the rest of India doesn&#x27;t pay for internet and it thinks there is no need to because that is ALL the internet has to offer. A young founder launches a new education app to teach reading&#x2F;writing to poor villagers. But she first needs to get a &#x27;license&#x27; from facebook. Facebook doesn&#x27;t think it is a good idea for its users to &#x27;waste&#x27; time on other services instead of watching ads on FB, so it declines. Startups don&#x27;t receive as much funding because of the &#x27;licensing&#x27; issues and there aren&#x27;t as many Indian tech companies as there could&#x27;ve been. News is censored by Facebook and Facebook can now influence Indian politics. 100,000 fewer jobs were created because the Indian tech scene didn&#x27;t take off.<p>-&gt;India with net neutrality: 50% of the country cannot pay for internet. They still don&#x27;t have access to internet. They use other forms of communication to get their daily, unfiltered news. The startup scene in India is growing at its natural pace and the culture has become more innovative. In another 10-15 years everyone will have internet. 100&#x27;s of thousands of poor were lifted out of poverty due to tech jobs in India.<p>One is a short term &#x27;fix&#x27; which ruins the future. Another is a little bit harder but provides for a better future.