New Delhi: The wildfire that is raging on the Internet over Airtel’s free internet platform Zero has spread to the similar platform internet.org, offered by Facebook in partnership with Reliance Communications in India.
This forced Cleartrip and NDTV to pull out of internet.org, respecting people’s outcry against the preferential treatment for some on such platforms.This comes a day after Flipkart walked out of Airtel Zero following an uproar against ecommerce portal for going against net neutrality.
RCom had partnered with Facebook’s internet.org in India to offer around three dozen websites free of cost to users on Reliance’s network. Cleartrip was one among those three dozen websites, which also include some English and regional media houses.
The travel portal, however, claimed that there was no revenue arrangement between it and internet.org or any of its participants. “We were neither paid anything, nor did we pay anything to participate.”Recalling how it joined the open platform, Clear-trip said that Facebook had reached out it a few weeks back, and asked the company to join inte-rnet.org for delivering affordable products to undeserved people.
Cleartrip pointed out that what started off with providing a simple search service has “us now concerned with influencing customer decision-making by forcing options on them, something that is against our core DNA.” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, however, rejected criticism that internet.org was against the concept of Net neutrality.
“For people, who are not on the Internet though, having some connectivity and some ability to share is always much better than having no ability to connect and share at all. That’s why programmes like Internet.org are important and can co-exist with net neutrality regulations,” he said.
