Greed always find a way
In 2014 Facebook came to India with internet.org. Mark Zuckerberg claimed that internet access is a basic right and proposed a platform that provided just that to the people who don’t want to pay for data. The catch was that access was only to a handful of services, and behind this facade of philanthropy, Facebook wanted to monopolize the internet. Fortunately for us, the facade was too weak to hold up, and the net neutrality brigade managed to win. The platform never took off in India.
Now Mark is back, and this time he has taken another means to achieve the same goal — by buying a stake in Jio. This time around, no one seems to notice, no one seems to care. By controlling Jio, Facebook can still do most of the things it could have done with free basic or internet.org — he can slow down competitive platforms and industries and companies that don’t advertise on Facebook but curiously, we don’t see it like that this time around.