New Delhi: The social network giant Facebook has roped in RCom (Reliance Communications) to offer some free services in India through its Internet.org app. Now it plans to tie up with more Indian telecom operators and state governments to extend this service to a larger audience.
The company desire to partner with more state governments besides Andhra Pradesh to offer basic e-governance and m-governance services.
In an interview with Economic Times, Chris Daniels, vice-president, products for Internet.org said, "The mission of Internet.org is to connect everyone and our goal is to accelerate the process of connecting the unconnected — that is to connect two-thirds of the world population. And India provides a big opportunity, with its population and the number of unconnected people. As many as a quarter of the world's offline population is in India."
He also suggested that the app will help not only India but the world at large scale as when people get onto the Internet, they generate ideas and they can access job opportunities.
"It is not an exclusive relationship with Reliance Communications and we can launch with other operators as well going forward," Daniels said.
The app will offer access to more than three dozen services ranging from news, maternal health, travel, local jobs, sports, communication, and local government information.
Internet.org is launched in six states (Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Kerala, and Telangana), but Facebook plans to roll it out in the rest of the country in the next few months.
This kind of a tie-up - between an operator and an app provider - is at the centre of net neutrality in India and the world. The regulator in India is in fact looking closely at such tie-ups.
"Internet.org is pro-access to Internet. Net neutrality is pro-access as well, which means the two are, philosophically, well aligned, and both want to provide easy access to the Internet for all. We in fact focus more on removing the barriers to the Internet — such as affordability," he said.
Facebook have already taken it to some parts of the world, such as Columbia and Ghana and plans to roll out this initiative in other geographies and offer basic services for free.
"Countries that have a lot of unconnected people include India, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Brazil and Nigeria and they provide a big opportunity, " he added.
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