Facebook’s Free Basic initiative has come under severe criticism in India as it is based on a zero-rating model. TRAI has also asked Reliance Communication, Facebook’s partner in India for Free Basics, to put the service on hold till the authority considers all the details and terms and conditions of the service.

According to Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chairman of Facebook, “To connect a billion people, India must choose facts over fiction” He goes on saying that in every society, there are certain basic services that are so important for people’s wellbeing that we expect everyone to be able to access them freely. In the 21st century, everyone also deserves access to the tools and information that can help them to achieve all those other public services, and all their fundamental social and economic rights. That’s why everyone also deserves access to free basic internet services.

Whereas academicians from India’s premier institutes IITs and IISc have slammed Facebook’s Free Basics initiative, terming it “flawed” and “misleading”. In a joint statement issued, around 50 faculty members from IITs (Bombay, Delhi, Kharagpur, Madras, Patna) and IISc Bengaluru have denounced the proposal dubbing it a “lethal combination that will lead to total lack of freedom on how Indians can use the internet”.Facebook will have access to all your apps’ contents.

“Another flaw is that the term ‘free’ in ‘free basics’ is a marketing gimmick.”

Online space are now saturated with a Rs. 100 crore campaign proclaiming that Internet connectivity for the Indian poor is a gift from Facebook which a few churlish net neutrality fundamentalists are opposing. In its campaign, Facebook is also using the generic phrase “free, basic Internet” interchangeably with “Free Basics”, the name it has given its private, proprietary platform. This is in blatant violation of Indian rules on advertising, which forbid generic words being used for brands and products. This is from a company which, in spite of having 125 million Indian subscribers, refuses to be sued in India, claiming to be an American company and therefore outside the purview of Indian law. Nor does it pay any tax in India.

Evgeny Morozov, one of the most insightful commentators on technology, has written extensively on how Silicon Valley seeks to subvert the state, promising to give the people connectivity, transport and other facilities, if we only hand over our data to them. Instead of people demanding that the state provide access to various services — from drinking water to transport and communications — people are being led to believe that a few capitalists from Silicon Valley will provide all these services. We will have Internet connectivity instead of education, and Uber will provide private taxis, instead of public transport. To paraphrase Marie Antoinette, let the people have cake instead of bread. This is the Internet monopolies’ agenda of hidden and mass-scale privatisation of public services.

This name free basics is far less misleading than Internet.org, because the collection of sites that Facebook partners with are not the Internet, but we’ll have to see if Reliance Communications stops advertising Internet.org as “FreeNet”. This also doesn’t change the fact that the service still violates Net Neutrality, and has other issues:

Supports Net Neutrality in the US, violates it in India: Facebook has signed the Internet Association’s amicus curiae brief supporting the FCC, stating “The open architecture of the Internet creates an innovation-without-permission ecosystem. Consumers (and consumers alone) decide the winners and losers on the open Internet.”