14 DAY TRIAL // With all the media coverage surrounding India’s withdrawal from the Internet.org project, people were highly expectant of what Facebook’s CEO had to say about the whole issue.
As always, Zuckerberg has addressed the situation in a lengthy Facebook post, which starts by recounting one emotional event that he experienced during one of his visits to India.
He told the story about how happy he was when he managed to bring Internet to the students from a small village and how he believed that, with the aid of that powerful tool, one of those kids would one day change the world.
“It is always better to have some access than none at all”
He also reveals the fact that he disagrees with what the Indian companies have revealed to be the reason behind their decision to pull out of the program, namely that it violates the net neutrality rules.
“We fully support net neutrality. We want to keep the internet open. Net neutrality ensures network operators don’t discriminate by limiting access to services you want to use,” he says.
Indian publications, on the other hand, were not in the least impressed by Zuckerberg’s response and accused him of wanting to disconcert people with his program. “Zuckerberg’s ambitious project to confuse hundreds of millions of emerging market users into thinking that Facebook and the Internet are one and the same,” Hindustan Times retorted.
In other words, they claim that what lies behind his initiative to provide Internet access to all the people who are currently living without it is just a sneaky scheme to expand Facebook. The publication also underlines the fact that, for most people from poorer countries, the Internet does not exist, but Facebook does, with some even claiming that they had used Facebook before even having Internet access.
Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg declared for the Wall Street Journal that “People will walk into phone stores and say I want Facebook. People actually confuse Facebook and the internet in some places.” Apparently, many Facebook users are completely unaware of the fact that they are using the Internet.
When asked by one of its followers why only some services provided by the Internet.org project are free and why they have to pay for others, Mark Zuckerberg replied that it would be way too expensive to offer all of them for free and that it could lead to mobile operators going out of business.