Changing your facebook profile picture to the new attractive tricolour seems like a great move to show your support to Prime Ministers digital India program. As soon as Prime Minister Narendra Modi changed his profile picture, thousands of Indians followed suit. I too wanted to do that when NextBigWhat came up with a report on an investigation done by it.
The Investigation
It was the eye opening investigation done by NextBigWhat shows that it is not all well. The 45 minutes Townhall meeting was a history in itself where Modi answered a number of questions with emotional ups and downs and even breaking down while answering a question about his mother. Make in India, and taking India from an eight trillion dollar economy to a 20 trillion dollar one was discussed.
All this seemed so spectacular that we Indians began following suit as soon as we saw our own Prime Minister and the great Zuckerberg change their Profile pics to the tricolour one. However NextBigWhat says to read between the lines in Zuckerberg’s post that read, ?I changed my profile picture to support Digital India, the Indian government’s effort to connect rural communities to the internet and give people access to more services online.”
This move is reported by NextBigWhat as a clever move by Zacky to combine Digital India and his connect rural communities to the internet through the internet.org, which is a very controversial project.
The Cntroversy
The controversy here is Internet.org is a zero cost app based services that is being planned to provide to Facebook users across 19 developing countries, that includes India too.
The hidden truth here is that this free access that is going to be provided by Facebook will be available only through the 50 selected partners of Facebook, in India the chosen partner is Reliance. Reliance would provide 30 free sites to the users, so you will be limited only to these sites thereby nullifying net neutrality.
Indians, as usually, overwhelmed by patriotism are changing the profile pics thereby supporting Facebook’s sneaky input for Internet.org or the so called ‘free ‘Internet’ that can potentially kill all the freedoms you once enjoyed on the web and subsequently, the startup ecosystem.
When you change your profile the code seems to point towards supporting Internet.org. It would naturally increase the 17 millions-the number that Facebook announced was the initial support to internet.org. so with so many profile pic changes you are saying ,?YES? to internet.org and ?NO? to net neutrality.
Is that what you really want?
