How to Make The Internet Free In Developing Countries

When most Americans
hear the term “net
neutrality,” their eyes
begin to glaze over,
confusion sets in, and an
almost instant boredom
takes over. But in an
emerging market like
India, net neutrality
means everything.
Take Priya, a 22-year-
old woman who lives in
Bangalore, India. Like many of us here in the U.S.,
her Android smartphone (which cost $90) is never
far from reach. Like me, she accesses Facebook on
her way to work, connecting with her friends to plan
their weekly group dinner. And like you, she plods
through a dozen other apps to watch sports, read
the news, or enjoy pictures of her family.
But, unlike people in the West who have the luxury
of paying a flat fee to get unlimited Internet on their
phone, or have Wi-Fi hotspots to hop on, Priya’s
biggest challenge is figuring out which of these
apps she can use, and for how long. Priya, like the
other 90 percent of mobile subscribers in India, is
on an expensive pay-as-you go data plan.
One of the main barriers to connectivity in India is
that the pure out-of-pocket cost of data can be
crippling. Those making minimum wage would need
to work 17 hours just to afford a 500MB mobile
data plan; it can cost up to three hours of work to
pay for just a single hour of connectivity. (In
comparison, in the U.S., the cost for unlimited data
per month on some carriers is just a little over
three hours of minimum wage work.)
This is why companies like Facebook, with its
Internet.org platform, and Airtel Zero, are
attempting to bridge this cost gap for customers in
India and other developing countries with free
access to apps. Though their motivations are noble,
there are limitations to their models that challenge
net neutrality — don’t let your eyes glaze over here
— the principle that the Internet should contain free
and equal content.
The debate over net neutrality in India and other
developing countries is much more complicated
than it is in the United States. The fight for
maintaining net neutrality in the U.S., for example,
has recently been tied to Comcast’s attempt to
control the speed at which people can stream
content from Netflix or other streaming services. In
this instance, it means your movie might load a little
slower.
In India, it’s not a question of speed, where one app
or a movie might load a little slower than another
(which raises its own massive ethical issues in the
U.S.), but it’s a question of access altogether. By
using platforms like Internet.org or Airtel Zero,
some of the Internet is offered, and some is not.
Low data versions of apps are offered, for example,
and some are off the list altogether.
But people like Priya want to do more than just
browse Wikipedia and talk to their friends on
Facebook — they want to watch a video on YouTube
and download a new local app for file sharing. They
want the entire Internet experience, not a sliver of
it. (Whether one app is slower than another is pretty
low on the priority list.)
Internet.org and Airtel Zero say their mission is to
bring the Internet to those who would otherwise not
have access to it, which is certainly altruistic. Yet
while their services are giving many people their
first opportunity to get online, it’s not without
implications.
For example, Internet.org is open to any third-party
apps as long as they don’t consume a ton of data
and the app developers meet Facebook’s guidelines
for participation . And Airtel Zero allows people to
use approved apps for free, with normal data
charges applied to all other apps.
The backlash in recent weeks for both of these
efforts has been the argument that such situations
will deter someone from using smaller, local apps
because the cost is just too great. Why use a new
budding startup’s social platform at a price, when
you can use Facebook for free? This means that
the environment for an open and fair Internet that
treats all content the same does not exist.
The tricky thing with bringing the Internet to the next
billion is that someone has to pay for those pipes
and wires and drones to transport the bits to these
developing countries. It’s not going to be the Indian
government. And if it’s Facebook, Google or a large
operator like Airtel, there’s obviously going to be a
financial incentive for them tied in with their
altruistic efforts.
So this leads to the question, what other solutions
are there?
The best way to bring free and open Internet to
markets like India is with an ad-supported model.
This is the way most media works today, and goes
back to the beginning of television and radio. When
TV and radio first came out, free consumption of
those mediums by consumers was made possible
by advertisers. (If you look around this webpage,
you’ll see that is still true today for most media.)
So, what if advertisers made it possible to access
apps and online content for free without walls or
restrictions?
Mozilla’s partnership with Grameenphone in
Bangladesh, and with Orange in multiple African
countries, are both examples of joint efforts to
provide non-tiered access to the open Internet
through advertising.
The idea with Grameenphone in Bangladesh is that
users can receive 20MB of unrestricted data per
day after watching a short ad in the phone’s
marketplace. With Orange, consumers in specific
parts of Africa who buy a Mozilla smartphone get
unlimited free Internet for a set period of time
bundled along with their phone purchase. Both
efforts are geared toward the goal of drumming up
sales for Mozilla’s phones, in return for subsidizing
free unrestricted Internet access.
Another example in India was a very
successful campaign from Pepsi
with FreeCharge (a startup that was
recently acquired by Snapdeal in the largest buyout
so far in the Indian consumer Internet sector)
where free Internet was offered in return for
purchasing soda. It worked like this: you bought a
bottle of Pepsi, typed the code inside the cap into
your phone, and you got ten rupees worth of free
connectivity. FreeCharge didn’t restrict what you
could see or access with those ten rupees; that
was up to the consumer.
Right now $219 billion is being spent on advertising
in emerging markets, but over 90 percent is spent
on traditional ad models, like billboards and
television ads. Surely there are enough hungry
brands out there that will pay to get in front of these
newly connected populations (and offset data costs
for accessing the Internet) if the tech community
builds the platforms for them to do so. And then, just
like free ad-supported cable television, or free ad-
supported radio, I truly believe that advertising can
be the gateway to the Internet, rather than the
gatekeeper.