10 reasons why Internet.org stinks

1. Bottom of the pyramid strategy. Target the poor people from across the developing countries and let internet for them be restricted to Facebook & other affiliated sites. I have friends from Kenya who have already suffered this without even knowing! They are on Facebook but not on Internet; in fact Facebook means Internet to most of them. 65% of Nigerians, and 61% of Indonesians agree with the statement that “Facebook is the Internet”. Wow.
2. Make Facebook the gatekeeper in determining which sites should be available to you.
3. Let Facebook & telecom operators decide which site you should buy from & which site should you use for information & knowledge.
4. Kill the start-ups. Kill any other competition for Facebook whatsoever. ‘Purna Swaraj’ is what the virtual country of ‘Facebook’ demands. Facebook currently has 1.4 billion users worldwide, which means one in every five humans on the planet. It has exhausted the developed countries. And now the biggest market for them is the poor in the developed countries. And their biggest job is done as India is the most lucrative market with almost 1 billion people to be still connected with the internet.
5. Under the hoax of social service & not-for-profit, internet.org aims at restricting internet to a limited set of services as opposed to the openness of the internet. ‘Open Internet’ would soon become a myth.
6. Only the biggest advertisers, PR gurus & Marketing giants will survive the internet bubble and not the ones who actually have quality products/services but are small and cannot pay off the local telecom operators in order to feature in the toll-free sites list. So basically these giant operators would let you use only the services of companies who pay them a whooping amount of money. RIP ‘equality of opportunity’
7. If Facebook really cared about you, it would let you have open access to everything in the internet. But they won’t.
8. If Facebook cared for the poor, it would connect them with much needed rural banking services or farmer educational video series.
9. The biggest fraud is naming the initiative internet.org when it totally defies the existence of Internet. Literally, people would not be on internet, but just on a walled back-yard of Facebook.
10. A project that started as a simple search service now wants to influence the decision making of customers by forcing options for them. Villagers in India only have to opt for Reliance telecom services and if you want to buy/sell used items, there is only OLX.com, every other site is only for the developed countries where internet is open.

Let our trendy asses not fall prey to the herd hoax of tri-colored profile pictures just because almost every other friend of yours is doing the same.

Under the guise of ‘not-for-profit’, I have personally never seen such a remarkable joke being pulled off. The apparent vision of this initiative is ‘to view Facebook as the internet’ instead of what they promote as the mission ‘to connect the unconnected on the Earth’. Facebook is already earning USD 8.65 per person on their network. Now imagine 1 billion new people joining the network from India. And not only joining, using only Facebook in the name of internet.

“The poor do not need Google, they don’t even need basic necessities, they don’t need to educate themselves or actually learn about the openness of internet at all. All they need is Facebook. And Facebook is so freaking big that India is powerless. India cannot connect people on internet on its own, only Facebook can. Digital India means Facebook India. This is India’s giant leap towards becoming a Facebook nation.”

RIP Internet Transparency! RIP Open Internet! RIP Internet Freedom!

This is a straight on-your-face denial of equal opportunities on the internet to the poor by seducing them into the dirty business of lies in the name of charity. As if reaching a compromise & as if dictating to the poor that this is all you can get of the internet, rest is all for the first world countries where there are no shoddier services like internet.org required.

It stays to be accepted that however hard we try to oppose this, ultimately what wins is money & dumb political propaganda. A few years down the line, Google would come & pitch something similar. Next to follow would be Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and what have you. Each country would be known virtually by whose service it promotes. India could have better been a self-made country but unfortunately it will be known as a ‘Facebook country’ just like Kenya, Indonesia & many more. After ‘British Raj’, we are just about ready for another era of domination under ‘Facebook Raj’. ‘Facebook Commonwealth’ would be the new thing. Lol. And if you try to understand, what happened to Indian businesses during the ‘British Raj’ is destined to happen again. Britishers came to India and banned or smartly eliminated indigenous goods or services creating a massive market for British giant organizations.

Lastly, India has been taking leaps & bounds in terms of software & internet technologies recently. We really do not need shrewd commercial potholes with hidden motives like internet.org in the name of ‘free basic’ internet.

‘Jaago Bharat Jaago’. Don’t let Mark lure you into his foul-smelling game worth billions of dollars.

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