Manu Joseph hits back at the overheated rhetoric driving the opposition to zero rating. He also mentions the Quartz piece citing Helani’s report from the field in Indonesia.
A lazy, neurotic suspicion of the large corporation is also behind the obtuse alarm over Free Basics. But the very strength of the parallel Internet for the poor is that it is corporate strategy. Mark Zuckerberg has tried his best to give it a humanitarian spin, which may not be wholly a lie, but I do hope the venture is not purely altruistic. (We know what happens when JNU alumni try to save the world.) Facebook, in search of new market segments, would end up doing more good than Internet-altruists. It already has. In response to Internet.org there are now serious corporate and social movements to take the Internet to the poor. Nothing stopped them from achieving this before.
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