Facebook is aggressively marketing its Free Basics service in India and even Mark Zuckerburg, the CEO of Facebook has came out in open to convince the public and get their support but the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) faculty doesn’t seems to be impressed at all with this Free Basics service concept. They released a joint statement opposing the Free Basics service and called it as “misleading and flawed”.
The statement issued by faculty of Premiere Technology Institute which has branches in some cities of India, has rejected the thought of Facebook as they are against giving the control to a private entity – to describe the meaning of basics for internet users of India, to keep a control on the cost and to have right to see the personal matter which is created and used by the Indian internet user.
The statement reads, “Free Basics is a lethal combination which will lead to total lack of freedom on how Indians can use their own public utility – the internet. The proposal is such a lethal combination, having several deep flaws, beneath the veil of altruism wrapped around it in TV and other media advertisements.”
They have urged the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) to take the matter into its hands and stop the launching of Free Basics in India.
Reads the statement which was signed by the 42 professors, “We urge that the Trai should support Net neutrality in its strongest form, and thoroughly reject Facebook’s Free Basics proposal.”
Their agony over the fact that a foreign firm will make decisions about what basic digital services will be used by Indians, can be understood with this statement, “The sheer absurdity of this is too obvious to point out”.
To explain their view point in a simpler manner, they tried to explain using an example of chocolate, they said, “Suppose a chocolate company wishes to provide ‘free basic food’ for all Indians, but retains control of what constitutes ‘basic’ food – this would clearly be absurd. Further, if the same company defines its own brand of ‘toffee’ as a ‘basic’ food, it would be doubly absurd and its motives highly questionable.”
As per them the second problem with this Free Basics service is that the Facebook will be able to see all the personal matter of the apps of the users, they said, “The second major flaw in the model, is that Facebook would be able to decrypt the contents of the ‘basic’ apps on its servers. This flaw is not visible to the lay person as it’s a technical detail, but it has deep and disturbing implication.”
And in the last, they stated that Free Basics is actually not free, its cost will be recovered by Facebook and its partner, Reliance Communication, through “non-free services”.
They put forth this argument, “The term ‘free’ in ‘Free Basics’ is a marketing gimmick. If you see an ad which says ‘buy a bottle of hair oil, get a comb free’, you know that the cost of the comb is added somewhere. If something comes for free, its cost has to appear somewhere else. Telecom operators will have to recover the cost of ‘Free Basic’ apps from the non-free services (otherwise, why not make everything free?). So effectively, whatever Facebook does not consider ‘basic’ will cost more.”
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