Jonnalagadda first started mucking around on his dad’s IBM compatible after school in 1991, and blazed into the digital millennial generation, starting a LiveJournal blog in 2000. A decade later, he was working as a web developer inside a multistory Bangalore office complex called the Carlton Towers, when a cable caught fire, and smoke billowed through the air ducts. While other office workers hurled themselves out the windows in panic (some to their deaths), he and his officemates tied wet towels around their faces, leaned out the window, and Jonnalagadda tweeted out 140-character reports. He survived, and months later opened HasGeek, a tech conference production company in a stucco house a few blocks from the towers, and joined the Bangalore startup boom.

When the telecom regulator’s net neutrality paper dropped, Nikhil Pahwa, the Delhi-based editor of the telecom news site Medianama, was appalled. The paper took on net neutrality, differential pricing, and the licensing of internet companies — all skewed to favor telecoms. “That paper was 118 pages of bad ideas,” Pahwa says. “It was bizarrely bad. We thought that access to the internet was never going to be the same again.” He immediately reached out to his contacts in the digital community to foment some popular opposition, recruiting Jonnalagadda to run the tech arm of a grassroots campaign. The HasGeek team put up the website SaveTheInternet.in, including a call to submit letters to the regulators in favor of net neutrality. Others, like iSPIRT’s Sharma, helped lobby startup founders to sign letters to the regulators, calling his contacts who mostly weren’t hip to net neutrality to convince them, one by one.

But the real 10x push came from a bit of comedy: Inspired by the John Oliver net neutrality sketch during the United States’ own debate on the issue, SaveTheInternet.in asked the Bombay-based satire troupe All India Bakchod with its 1.49 million YouTube subscribers to produce a call-to-action sketch on the subject. After the video hit, everyone from Bollywood stars to parliament members tweeted in support, network effects blossomed, and a million Indians submitted letters in favor of net neutrality to the regulators by the April deadline. “That’s the first time something in India had happened like this — it was all online,” Jonnalagadda says. “It shocked a lot of people. The politicians couldn’t believe how this could happen without people on the ground.”

With multiple agencies in the Indian government still mulling the issues, the regulator in December ordered that Free Basics be halted, asked Indians to submit their opinions, and promised a ruling by February. Facebook launched the billboards, and it was time to invoke the readymade SaveTheInternet.in constituency again.

The Users

A key part of Facebook’s bid for Free Basics is the narrative that it gets the unconnected poor online. Internet.org’s Daniels calls it a “bridge to the internet,” and wrote in an extensive Q&A: “40% of people who start their online journey at Free Basics go on to access the full internet within 30 days.” (The claim has been dismissed by reporters as dubious, and drives opponents crazy because they only have Facebook’s word, not raw data. Facebook declined my request to elaborate.) The petition Facebook circulated on its platform said: “It helps those who can’t afford to pay for data, or who need a little help getting started online.” In his Times of India op-ed, Zuckerberg gives the example of Ganesh, a farmer, who uses Free Basics to look up weather information during monsoon season and commodity prices to get better deals, and now invests in new crops and livestock. The ad never states, but leads one to assume, that Ganesh wasn’t on the web before: “…if people lost access to free basic services they lose access to all the opportunities offered by the Internet today.”

In short, the branding is: Free Basics starts people on a journey to the full internet, and if they don’t have free basic services, they lose the internet.

If only for curiosity’s sake, I thought it worth digging into who the users of Free Basics are. I asked the dozen people I interviewed — for or against Free Basics — if they knew anyone who used it. Only one person did: an NGO worker who uses the anti-domestic violence app My Rights to supplement two-day women’s rights trainings in villages, featured in a Free Basics promo. Of course, only the women who subscribed to Reliance could use the app for free, and the worker had no idea if the women continued to use the app after the workers left.

A Reliance franchise in Bangalore, and an ad on Reliance’s website for Free Basics.

I asked Facebook to put me in touch with Free Basics users. They steered me towards Pavankumar Shende, who they said was a farmer who lives in a small town five hours outside of Mumbai. I was expecting someone who was a lot like the story of Ganesh, maybe accessing the internet for the first time.

When I called him with a Hindi translator on the line, I found out Shende was a 28-year-old farm surveyor who earns 10,000 rupees a month (about US $150). Free Basics was not what got him on the internet for the first time, he said: he’d been surfing the web and had a Facebook account for five years, paying 100 to 200 rupees a month for prepaid data packs, or two percent of his earnings. Several months ago, he got a notification on his phone that he could get Facebook for free with Internet.org. He started using free data for Facebook and some of the other Free Basics offerings like BBC and a tech news site, and to check AccuWeather for forecasts he could pass onto his father, who farms rice. The two to three hours he spends online each day has remained consistent pre- and post-Free Basics, but his monthly data bill has dropped to about 50 rupees a month. He still goes off-platform for Google searches (“Google is Google,” he says).

In short, Free Basics isn’t what got him on either the internet or Facebook. It was a discount. And one that Reliance eats — since, according to Facebook, Reliance absorbs the cost of free data. I contacted two of his teenage friends who also use Free Basics and heard the same story: they’d already been on the internet and Facebook for three to five years, though they switched to Reliance in order to get the discount.

While hopelessly anecdotal, their stories aren’t entirely in line with Facebook’s narrative. They are in line, however, with Reliance’s advertising for Free Basics. On an analyst call last year, Reliance said the main reason they offered the program was to get their WhatsApp users onto the “actual internet.” The ads — paid for by both Reliance and Facebook— are far from the pictures of the farmers and village schoolgirls used on Facebook’s website. The recent ads don’t mention the words “Free Basics.” Instead, the ads play down the supposed charity aspect and tout its sexiest offering: “Free Facebook” and “Enjoy Facebook without data pack.” Video commercials feature middle class, urban 20-somethings on a hayride and eating take-out in a hip apartment, followed by a street protest with young folks holding candles and demanding “I Want Free Internet.” In one IRL guerrilla advertising stunt, motorcyclists zoomed around a city holding posters reading “Free Facebook.”

Marketing for Free Basics or outlaw rally

The marketing has been working. A Reliance franchisee in a middle class shopping district in Bangalore told me that customers regularly come in asking for “Free Facebook.” At his store, he estimates they’re about 50 percent broke students that go in and out of being able to afford new data packs, and 50 percent low-income adults.

I contacted Facebook about Shende’s story. A rep softened the “internet journey” phrasing to a subtler one of lowering barriers to the internet overall: “The goal of Free Basics is to bring down the affordability and awareness barriers that are preventing people from accessing online services, particularly people who are new to the internet or beginners (not necessarily first-time users)… For instance, they could have used it once but couldn’t afford to buy another data plan, or tried it but didn’t know what services to use, so they didn’t keep going back. So Free Basics focuses on making it more affordable for people to use data (by offering it for free), and awareness (giving people access to services that they might not have known about.).”

The truth remains that for at least three guys in the state of Maharashtra, Free Basics is basically a coupon. And they — like the rural Indian women interviewed by a newspaper — would like Google included, please.

Leaving Babajob’s office in mid-January, I hailed an Ola Cab to the HasGeek headquarters to see how the movement was going. On the way, I called up Jonnalagadda to give the young driver directions in the regional language of Kannada; though the driver ran the Ola app on a smartphone, he, along with tons of other drivers I rode with in India, didn’t know how to operate the GPS. I was reminded of my talk a day prior with Prathibha Sastry, a startup fixer who anecdotally surveyed internet use across rural India in a road trip project known as Digital Desh Drive. Sastry met me at a cafe at a sleek mall still decorated with Christmas wreathes in downtown Bangalore, and chatted between business calls and tweeting promos for a live Twitter Q & A with a tech-friendly government official.

While interviewing shop owners on Digital Desh, Sastry found most were on the internet — including a fisherman who sent pics of his catch to the wholesalers while still on his boat via WhatsApp. Some “borrowed” the neighboring merchants’ wifi or hot-spotted off coworkers’ phones. Internet access wasn’t the biggest gap she saw, digital literacy was. “Conduct digital literacy classes,” Sastry says, because people still want a human to show them how things work.

Still, there was one certain service of which all Indians I talked to were aware. The same driver who wanted human instructions was amused when I snapped a photo out the window of a Reliance “Free Facebook” ad on a bus stop. Between my English and his Kannada, “Facebook” was one of our few common words.

After much block circling, he dropped me off at the HasGeek house on a leafy residential street. Jonnalagadda was in full campaign mode, monitoring and tweeting out news stories, following the fervent back-and-forth between regulators and Facebook over the company’s online petition. Yet Jonnalagadda says that this time, much of the opposition work was done by Facebook’s ubiquitous ad campaign itself. “Indians don’t trust whitewash advertising. We have history of tainted companies trying to fix their image with ads,” specifically after India’s economy liberalized in the ’90s and companies tried to smooth over scandals with over-the-top newspaper ad blitzes, he says. “This was like a game of judo, letting the opponent stumble on their own might.”

Last week, Jonnalagadda flew to Delhi for the third time in the past year to speak in favor of net neutrality at a town hall before the regulators. While there, discussions started among the SaveTheInternet.in advocates about how differential pricing would jeopardize the Start Up India initiative launched by Prime Minister Modi just the previous weekend, announcing tax and compliance exemptions for tech companies.

By last weekend, Jonnalagadda and his team released one final Hail Mary letter to Modi on SaveTheInternet.in’s site, stating exactly that: “What we decide in the next few weeks will have lasting effects; it will shape the trajectory of our future,” they wrote. They asked Modi to issue a statement and make sure the Indian government protected net neutrality. In two days, more than 2,000 people signed, including 800 startup founders.

With a mega-powered spotlight shining on the usually insider-y regulatory process and Modi himself, the opponents made it as difficult as possible for the government to allow differential pricing. “They traditionally take a middle ground approach and try to please both sides,” says Pahwa, of the regulator’s rulings. “I think what we’ve done so far is at least give us a chance to shift the middle ground closer to our point of view. We’re clawing back space bit by bit, day by day…The carriers weren’t expecting this: they’d always had an easy ride.”

It appears they won’t this time. Over the weekend, the Times of India published a scoop from “top sources,” reporting that the regulator would ban offering free or discounted services — including Facebook, Twitter or WhatsApp — or the carrier’s own music or messenger services at a discounted price. Such services create “a distortion in the way internet is accessed by the masses,” an unnamed source told the newspaper, and “are against the concept of digital democracy.” CNBC Moneycontrol reported, also from anonymous sources, that regulators is likely to allow discounts if the entire internet is included in the deal, not just specific sites.

SaveTheInternet.in advocates are holding their breath. Even if the ruling goes their way, “We fully expect the telcos to fight it,” Jonnalagadda says. “We anticipate having to fight it again.”

And in the weeks leading up to the decision, Facebook had already started its reckoning. In mid-January, Internet.org’s Daniels told me that if they couldn’t go ahead with Free Basics, they would focus on its other initiatives to connect India — wifi hotspots, internet-delivering drones.

“Whatever the outcome, we’ll work with the community here to bring more people online to make the world more open and connected,” he said.

He seemed like a guy who’d been considering Plan B.

Photo of covered billboard by Philippe Calia. All others by author.

More Reading on Free Basics:

If you want to get down to the nitty gritty of this debate, check out Indian venture capitalist Mahesh Murthy in a blistering back-and-forth with Internet.org VP Chris Daniels.

Meanwhile on Medium, Rohin Dharmakumar writes about the potential for “platform abuse” if tech companies poke their own users to support political causes, as well as some speculative fiction about Ganesh the farmer’s fate in a post-Free Basics 2025. (On an equally quirky note, Jon Auerbach writes a script of Zuck and the Simpsons discussing Free Basics.)

Umang Galaiya argues in this piece that Free Basics should be given a chance: “Once these people in rural areas discover what kind of power Internet has, I’m sure they will pay to access all the amazing parts that aren’t included in Free Basics.” Ashish Dua also chimes in with support, saying in this post that “there’s no such thing as free lunch.”

Dr. Vandana Shiva warns about philanthrocapitalism of tech tycoons, who make key decisions that shape the developing world.

Read everything the Mediumverse has to say about Free Basics here.