Save the Internet Team welcomes efforts and intentions of individuals and companies to enable connectivity to the billions of Indians.
We strongly believe, like you do Mark, that internet is a great leveller. Everyone should have connectivity, but Mark, everyone should also have the right connectivity and we had to be very vigilant. Given our current economic context where 64 billionaires like you are worth more than half the population on the planet, much of whom live in this country, all of us who live in this society owe it to ourselves to prevent any form of potential rent seeking behaviour further and keep things open and enable a free market for many future successful online companies to startup and thrive.
Would Facebook be where it is today Mark if all the Harvard students already had free access to AOL and you had to pitch Comcast to include theFacebook as a “basic service” for free? Would they all pay just to get it, or would you have had resources to pay Comcast if they wanted to bring in your competition for free themselves. What about those who don’t know any better and haven’t afforded to pay for the internet in the first place? Wouldn’t we be presenting a different internet to them Mark, how would it be a level playing field that the internet already is.
You guys fought a fierce campaign and engaged in powerful lobbying and assimilated a response of 14 million Indians. What chance do we, a few volunteers on the internet stand against that, Mark? We don’t and as things turned out, we don’t have to, so long as the arguments we make and the morals we invoke stand for themselves.
We are not sure how much you were involved and what you were briefed on our arguments and the debate that ensued over the television and social media endlessly in the weeks that ran upto the verdict. Indian television and the people love debates, living upto the quintessential argumentative Indian and they had it in an amount that is unparalleled to any public policy issue in the recent times. Let me take this opportunity to summarise these very arguments and the morals we have been making all along, to you personally.
[Insert the top line bullet points from letter to Modi]
The Constitution of India grants each citizen the Equality of opportunity and upholding the principles of #NetNeutrality is the literal enforcing of the same principle and we are so happy that the current regulator and the administration thought like many of these Indians who came to their own conclusions which was clearly much more sophisticated than “Do you want something free” by seeing through into “why might one someone offer it for free” #NetNeutrality wins, equality of opportunity wins and India wins, Mark.
Anyway, having repeated ourselves endlessly, may we both discuss how might we now go ahead in the endeavour of enabling everyone access and connectivity.
[TODO]
- Mozilla has program 1
- Aircel has free 64 Kbps plan
- Balloons, yea sure why not!
- Free internet to everyone everywhere
Save The Internet wholeheartedly supports any of your efforts in the above mentioned initiatives and connectivity in general. We would be happy to campaign for these programs but you wouldn’t really need us since these initiatives too stand for themselves much like our arguments all this while.