The division of telecommunication favoured net neutrality by saying that it will help to serve the overall goal of “digital India.” While on the other hand, Mark Zuckerberg felt the need to go offensive when his ‘zero rating’ services were opposed by the land which invented it at the first place.
Net neutrality is supposed to provide free connection to several websites for people who cannot afford. The concept sounded so good that even Zuckerberg could not stop himself from investing in it. Zero rating is supposed to give free access to several websites and those websites pay for the cost of this service to the service provider, in this case, Airtel and internet.org.
Although, it sounds good to have free internet after the minister Ravi Shankar provided free internet just for three days but there is a lot more to this concept. It is obvious that the free internet service will be availed mostly by poor and it will only provide access to specific websites which paid to be there. It means that a poor newbie internet user will be provided with websites, information and data with the will of advertisers. His mind and thoughts will be controlled by providing a controlled set of information to him and these websites will also increase their prices to fulfil their cost of being on free internet.
Even after Zuckerberg’s plea to be socially responsible by providing this free internet service, it is thought to be racism for people who cannot afford the internet. Nikhil Pahwa was the first to respond to Zuckerberg by saying that zero services have not done anything good to the poor people all around the world as it is supposed to exploit them in order to make them your customers. The irony is that this entire exploitation monster is hidden behind the good face of charity.
Indian leaders rejected the charity from Zuckerberg and Airtel because Arvind Kejriwal, from New Dehli, and Odisha’s Naveen Patnaik have talked against these two. These two represent a big chunk of Indian people as they got supported by around 60 million Indians.
They said that “Underprivileged deserves much more than what is available, nobody should decide what exactly their requirements are.” It is because you take their right for making their own decisions and try to choose what is best for them.
Although the ruling party BJP is talking in support of this concept by holding on to provision on non discriminatory internet but this concept needs time to generate support.
