Mark Zuckerberg has been very gracious by making basic Facebook services available to more users through Inernet.org. The project aims to provide free but limited Facebook to a wider demographic of users.
In the previous week, India Times reported that India telecom regulating body has approached Reliance, a Facebook wireless carrier partner, asking to discontinue Internet.org for the reason that it changes the pricing system of their service.
In response to India's move against Facebook's initiative, Zuckerberg, who is on paternity leave, was not able to hold in his annoyance and wrote his thoughts about India's move against net neutrality. The Facebook CEO believes that everyone should be given equal access to the internet and the Internet.org initiative was a way to grant access to some people in countries like India who cannot afford even basic connection.
While defending Internet.org's vision of free access to basic internet services, Zuckerberg openly criticized India's resistance to the benefits of a free and accessible internet. "Who could possibly be against this?" says the young CEO, "Surprisingly, over the last year there's been a big debate about this in India."
Net neutrality activists call Internet.org's free internet service as a "walled-garden." Internet.org does not give a user free access to the entire web but only gives access to limited, Facebook handpicked websites. But Zuckerberg proceeds to explain that the availabily of a free limited internet is better than having nothing He also points out the gateway effect of free facebook to users eventually subscribing to paid internet while claiming that half of the people who come online for the first time using Internet.org decide to pay for full internet access within 30 days.
Despite Zuckerberg's attempts to market his vision of sharing a free Facebook and some websites to the less privileged members of the community, net neutrality activist are also skeptical about the CEOs real intention since Facebook's walled garden could very well determine the sites and services that will succeed in India.
