Free Basics by Facebook:
Since the topic has raged serious debates all over the nation, let us get over the ambiguity by clearing up the smoke around this issue.
What Facebook feels about Free Basics?
Free Basics makes the internet accessible to more people by providing them access to a range of free basic services like news, maternal health, travel, local jobs, sports, communication, and local government information.
To date, we’ve been able to offer these services to a billion people across Asia, Africa and Latin America. By introducing people to the benefits of the internet through these services, we hope to bring more people online and help improve their lives.
Free Basics is part of the Internet.org by Facebook initiative
Click here to know more about free basics from Facebook’s perspective (Quiet deceiving though)
What Free Basics really is?
Facebook is actually trying to gain monopoly over the internet community through internet.org and their so-called net neutrality. Websites under internet.org will be available to all the users for free and all other websites will be charged/accessible through a paid data plan. By doing this, they are not extending a favor to poor or underprivileged classes of the society but are restricting the freedom to access all the websites on par.
Though this internet.org and net neutrality was started almost an year ago, it was halted because of the serious concerns raised against this, by million users signing a petition to TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India). But now, Facebook again brought this same thing up by giving a name makeover to the term Net Neutrality, calling it Digital Equality. Even the app internet.org is not available with the same name/URL anymore in India, as it has been changed to freebasics.com
Though Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have tried their best to bring out positive vibes by extending so-called free internet to everyone, but everybody knew what Facebook and internet.org is really up to.
If Facebook is doing this for a noble cause, then what is the need for such humongous publicity campaigns? why should they need such wide range of advertisements on YouTube’s homepage, on daily newspapers and on TVs? Adding to these, there are irritating notifications on Facebook, saying that ‘N’ number of your friends have signed this petition.
Facebook has stooped to really extreme lows, trying to get more users sign up for Free Basics. People who signed against free basics and those who are still reading the terms were marked as supporting free basics. Also, Facebook has tried to use the accounts of inactive users as supporting free basics. Not one, not two but many such instances have been reported.
Now it is in our hands to stop Facebook from winning this stoop-shit monopoly game to protect itself and its allies from competitors. Sign your petition and send a mail to TRAI, saying NO to free basics on Save the Internet before December 30th
Read more about this issue and response at Save the Internet Blog
The response provides alternatives to zero-rating platform and says, “There are several ways other than zero-rating and differential pricing to bring internet access to millions of Indians who hitherto cannot access internet due to high data costs… Here it is important to note that some telecom service providers and Facebook have misled people to believe that there is no other way but to resort to differential pricing and zero rating to expand internet access…”
Your choice would save the future generations from the restricted and monopolized access to internet
