Facebook launched its Free basics programme in India in February 2015, promising to give millions of people free access to the internet. The offer sounded irresistible - but New Delhi-based media entrepreneur Nikhil Pahwa thought it too good to be true. And he was right: the social network's programme gave free access not to the whole web, but only to certain, pre-selected sites.
"If there are 100 or 1,000 sites on Free Basics, then most people would not go outside that system to explore the open web," says Pahwa, 35. "It limits competition and undermines the web neutrality."
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Pahwa had formed Save the Internet two months earlier, after internet and mobile provider Bharti Airtel decided to charge customers more for making voice over IP phone calls - made through services such as Skype and WhatsApp - than for internet browsing. "It was about preventing anyone - large corporates, small service providers or government - controlling what you and I get to access," he says. So when Facebook launched Free Basics, later called Internet.org, Pahwa saw this as an extension of the same battle. "Facebook was playing kingmaker," he says.
Save the Internet, now known as the Internet Freedom Foundation, waded through complex consultations on web law and produced explainers, policy suggestions and a website that let anyone email the regulator. "We simplified the 118-page regulatory consultation paper into 24 pages," says Pahwa. "I had MPs tell me they read my version, not the regulators'." His initial target for the petition was 15,000 signatures, which he says he hit in three hours; over the next 12 days, more than one million people sent submissions. "We realised through this entire process that people care about internet access and restrictions being placed on them."
In February 2016, the Indian telco regulator ruled in the protesters' favour and banned all telecoms providers, including Facebook, from offering "discriminatory tariffs for data services". For Pahwa, the owner of news website MediaNama, victory was sweet - but the fight was far from over. Now he is turning his attention to defending open-web principles in other countries.
"There needs to be one internet for the whole world," he says. "All should get access to the same internet as I do in India. The space that unites us all is the internet."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
