India Telecom Regulator Pooh-Poohs Facebook's Orchestrated Lobbying Campaign

theodp writes: After India's telecom regulator asked a local company to temporarily stop Facebook's Free Basics service amid questions about whether it violates net neutrality, Facebook launched a controversial lobbying campaign, encouraging FB users to write to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), which oversees the country's Internet policy, urging the service be preserved. As of Jan. 7, the deadline for accepting comments, the regulator said it had received nearly two million comments from accounts affiliated with the site, including the domain names "@supportfreebasics.in" and "@facebookmail."

But many of these comments, the regulator said in a statement, are "basically template responses and the content are identical in nature." TRAI's we-ain't-buying-it response to the orchestrated flood of millions of comments (from both sides) differs markedly from the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security, which recently told the Court (PDF) it couldn't possibly comply with a Judge's six-month deadline to address issues with the OPT STEM Extension Program because it was overwhelmed by "the approximately 50,500 comments" (about what the average Slashdot reader reviews in a day!) from individuals urged on by the White House and other organizations. By the way, among the comments received by DHS was one from NAFSA — the lobbying powerhouse that represents 3,500 colleges and universities — calling for DHS to have OPT extensions expanded to include all fields of study (PDF).

Comments

What da F?

[110010001000]

Has theodp finally gone off the deep end? I know he hates Indians and H1B's, but there is no point in this diatribe.

Facebook was trolling for comments

[Anonymous Coward]

If I remember correctly this was a full page desktop ad that came up and weepingly asked for me to click the send button so the poor babbies in india could get free "internet access".

I ctrl-a/x'ed the form, put in my own verbage about Fuckerberg and his bitch mother and sent that instead.

Re:Don't be so quick to take sides.

[grcumb]

Easy - because the alternative IS nothing.

No, it's fucking not. I live in a Least Developed Country and spent a decade assisting it in making region-leading progress in technology. Last year, the UN gave our country an award for its advances. Our Universal Access Policy dictates that 98% of the population will have access to 21/12Mbps bandwidth by the beginning of 2018.

These things are possible when a country actually bucks the lobbyists and industry reps and sets some real goals.

So unless you have some actual real-world insight into this, perhaps you could quit reiterating the same tired point that's just been debunked. 'Is so!' isn't much of an argument, you know.

This is not about free internet for anyone. This is about affordable access to the internet—all of it. Even poor people have money, and they value the internet and the ability to communicate widely. They will pay for the service if it's only offered fairly and affordably.

You say, 'companies don't want to do X' as if that were sufficient reason not to do X. But a country allows a telco a partial monopoly in exchange for a contribution to the public welfare. That includes providing affordable fucking internet to the people of the country.

It astonishes me how people buy the telco line without even questioning it for one second. If you had read the article I linked to, you'd know that telco revenues doubled in the last ten years in the developing world, but services have not grown nearly fast enough to keep up with the developed world. Contrast that with the developed world, where revenues are pretty much flat, but bandwidth use and residential broadband penetration are flying off the top of the X axis on the chart.

Do not try to tell me that telcos can't turn a profit making affordable internet available to most of the developed world. I know that's false, because I'm watching it happen here.

HTH HAND