India's ban on Facebook's Free Basics has provoked a range of responses, from CEO Mark Zuckerberg's disappointed reaction to World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee's supportive tweet for net neutrality.

Today, Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Facebook board member Marc Andreessen jumped into the discussion with tweets comparing Free Basics to colonialism and suggesting that Indians were heading for economic disaster by banning it.

Responding to India's telecom regulator's recent prohibitory order on differential pricing for data, Andressen began by calling the ban on Free Basics "morally wrong", and went on to tweet that "anti-colonialism" had been "economically catastrophic for Indian people for decades."

Denying world's poorest free partial Internet connectivity when today they have none, for ideological reasons, strikes me as morally wrong. — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) February 10, 2016

The tweet was soon deleted by Andreessen, but was widely shared on Twitter and sparked off online protests. Several Twitter users questioned Andreessen's ill-informed perspective and said it explained why Facebook's Free Basics strategy of offering limited Internet access went wrong in India.

#icymi a message for India from a director on the board of Facebook. [@pmarca’s tweet now deleted] pic.twitter.com/8cfsszVEOB — Prasanto K Roy (@prasanto) February 10, 2016

Watching Silicon Valley crash into India's net neutrality debate is reminder of why the FB campaign went wrong here in the first place — Nicholas Dawes (@NicDawes) February 10, 2016

FB's 'free' Internet for India not so free - a walled garden where FB decides which app could be free. @pmarca https://t.co/GOGTgMmU9P — Vikram Chachra (@lemonandice) February 10, 2016

Hey @pmarca: Your $45mn Free Basics campaign didn’t work…so how about spending another $45mn actually giving free internet to India’s poor? — Prasanto K Roy (@prasanto) February 10, 2016

Now @facebook Board Director @pmarca suggests being colonized was good for India & we should've let Fb do so:) pic.twitter.com/kq7ZsNTQGl — Mahesh Murthy (@maheshmurthy) February 10, 2016

Andreessen later tried to clarify his statement, but it was too late.