Here’s
something all of us protesting against Airtel Zero must know: In 2013,
search giant Google had struck a deal with telecom major Bharti Airtel
to offer Free Zone, in this case giving people up to one gigabyte per
month of free access to Gmail, Google+, and Google search.
But
almost no one in India had anything to say about it then. There were
the few random critics but nothing even close to the kind of backlash
they are receiving over Airtel Zero.
In essence, both are similar. Then, Google was paying for our access. In Airtel Zero, other companies will pay for our access.
The
only difference is that now social media has sort of goaded us all into
reacting. It has also forced Flipkart to cut its ties with the Airtel
Zero plan — the criticism was getting simply too hot to handle and for a
site that makes all its money online, it simply wasn’t worth it.
We’d
like to think that Airtel will follow suit. But for the moment,
according to an interview on ET Now, they aren’t going anywhere.
“The
whole genesis of this was the launch of our product Airtel Zero. It was
a very simple product. We are making stuff free for customers and we
are getting businesses to pay for it. It is actually an innovative
platform. It’s been done in many parts of the world. It’s an industry
practise. We believe it is a way of getting a billion customers on the
internet,” Vittal told ET Now.
In
fact, the truth is that despite the Flipkart pullout, the fight is far
from over. Rather, in many senses, it is just beginning. TRAI has
released a consultation paper with 20 questions spread across 118 pages
and wants you to send them an e-mail by April 24, 2015. And while it is
important to lobby against any violation of net neutrality that may be
in the offing, it is perhaps even more important that realise that plans
like Airtel Zero have been around for a while; to realise that the
violations were already taking place.
Airtel’s
proposal isn’t anything radically different from what many mobile
carriers are already doing in countries as diverse as Phillippines,
Kenya and more.
In
essence, these deals (we have also had similar deals between Vodafone
and Facebook in India as well) give people free access to text-only
version of ‘essentials’ like Facebook, Gmail, and the first page of
search results under plans like Facebook Zero or Google Free Zone. But
when you click on a link that takes you beyond this walled garden, that
is when the data charges come into the mix.
A lot of us may think of internet.org as a great initiative. But what is it really?
It
is a fight to get people to experience the internet through their sites
first. It is also a fight to get them on to their platform and keep
them there. So much so that the association between the internet and
these sites changes to a point where these sites/services become the
internet themselves.
Susan
Crawford, visiting professor of law at Harvard University and a
co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society,
calls it “a big concern” that Google and Facebook are the ones becoming
the portal to Web content for many newcomers.
“For
poorer people, Internet access will equal Facebook. That’s not the
Internet—that’s being fodder for someone else’s ad-targeting business,”
she says. “That’s entrenching and amplifying existing inequalities and
contributing to poverty of imagination—a crucial limitation on human
life.”
More
than half the people in India are still not online, and while we may
not like to say it — the internet isn’t exactly a priority or even an
essential service for them. They will take to the internet at minimal
cost and if that happens to be a plan like Airtel Zero then so be it.
And
that is the truly dangerous bit. So while we worry and fret over
Flipkart and Airtel, we need to realise that fight doesn’t end there.
Rather it is about the big fish — namely Google and Facebook. And that
really is the battle that all of India’s netizens need to be fighting.
If they can convince TRAI that this will really hurt India in ways that
go beyond the obvious then they can rest easy. They also need to spread
the message that the word ‘free’ can’t really be applied in the true
sense to such plans.
However,
for now, we need to hold back on popping the champagne. Flipkart has
stepped back. Airtel hasn’t. And the TRAI decision is a long way off.
Posted by : Gizmeon
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