Internet.org: some internet access is better than none?
Facebook continues to expand internet.org, its free connectivity initiative for poor countries that allows access to just certain services via zero-rating, and that will now be offering users in India its free basics application through Reliance Networks, the country’s fourth-biggest operator with more than 110 million subscribers.
At present, Internet.org is already available in 30 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, although it has had the biggest uptake in India. Criticism, which has led the Times of India Group, Flipkart, Cleartrip, Newshunt, and NDTV to pull out in protest at what they say is a breach of internet neutrality, given that the service only provides access to a small number of pages, which in India’s case are Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Wikipedia, BBC News, Bing, Dictionary.com and local news services.
Responding to the protests, Mark Zuckerberg has replied by saying that some internet access is better than no internet access, inviting other operators to join the scheme. Free basics provides access to pages it has chosen, which has led some critics to say that it creates the false illusion among people with limited knowledge or experience of the internet to believes that Facebook is the same thing as the internet.
It’s hard to know what to make of the matter. As for the “better some internet than no internet” is the argument that Facebook is deciding which bits of the internet people can see: in this case many millions of people, what’s more the bits Facebook is allowing people to see is editorialized via algorithms that can easily be manipulated. A number of countries around the world, among them Chile, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Canada, have already banned zero-rating, while German, Austria, and Norway have made clear that it constitutes a breach of internet neutrality.
What’s more, as more than one critic of Facebook’s initiative has pointed out, providing free basics (when users have no say in which basics are going to be free) in the hope that somebody in the developing world will start the next Wikipedia or Facebook is unrealistic to say the least, given that the founders of those two services had access to the entire internet, rather than a few restricted pages.
Perhaps it would be helpful to imagine what would happen if a country were to allow its citizens access to just one page authorized by the government. Would we tell each other that access to this page was better than no internet access at all? Or would we criticize it on the grounds it was little short of thought control? The fact that Facebook doesn’t have any such hidden agenda doesn’t automatically make it a good idea.
My view is that while providing internet access to people in developing countries is certainly a worthy idea, the problem is that it provides access to a couple of internet pages, and not the internet. Internet.org could influence users. It is more likely to end up being a platform for advertising, creating an ecosystem that has nothing to do with the original idea of the internet.
Independently of whether internet.org is of greater benefit to the poor in developing countries or the companies whose pages are included, it is, as things stand, clear evidence of the dangers we face when we start to accept the idea that internet neutrality is not beyond question.
(En español, aquí)
