“It’s okay, we knew this would happen,” said Ganesh softly to the caller before disconnecting the call. His MLA election campaign could barely connect with 5 percent of what his richer opponent could, because he didn’t have the money to pay the gatekeepers — the Internet giants and telecom companies — to make his message reach voters “free”.

He opened the door to his store room and looked sadly at the dust-covered framed photo of his family in the store. “Support Ganesh. Support Digital Equality.”

It had been nine years since the gatekeepers won.

Once Facebook won, it became an arms race. Google, Amazon and Alibaba launched their own Free Basics equivalents. Then within six months, the leading four telecom operators had their own too.

For the next year the gatekeepers unleashed a carpet bombing-style advertising campaign targeting every Indian with roughly the message: “Are you still paying to access the Internet? Go Free.”

15 percent. That was the going rate demanded by the telco gatekeepers in order to brand a company’s traffic “free”. The other gatekeepers, the Internet giants, were to be paid in data and ads.

He remembered a few cases of innovative startups that had attained early success quite rapidly by enrolling into “free” platforms. A few found themselves suddenly unavailable due to “suspected abuse” or “technical issues”. The weeks it took for these issues to be resolved all but destroyed their early momentum. Meanwhile others found their secret sauce replicated as competing offerings by their gatekeepers. One even took its gatekeeper to court, alleging the latter had spied on its users in order to create its own competing offering. It lost the case, predictably.

A few idealistic Internet companies tried to fight the tide, talking about the value of their products and why they were worth paying data charges to access. They were fighting a losing battle though, such was the power of “free”.

Some of the better funded Indian startups managed to insure themselves for a few years by paying the gatekeepers. The smaller ones died out without much noise.

The venture capital started drying up too once investors realized the cost of paying gatekeepers in order to merely reach an addressable market was uneconomical. The ‘big seven’ — four US and three Chinese companies — had deep pockets no one could match, in addition to the advantage of a habituated consumer base.

The Indian Internet was now a proxy battle between US and Chinese Internet giants.

Meanwhile telecom operators no longer advertised cheap data rates or high bandwidth. Instead, each one touted the size of its own “free” platform.

“Upto 65 percent of your Internet usage is FREE!”

“Largest FREE Internet among all operators!”

“You’ll never stumble on a PAID site with us!”

As their “free” tiers became larger and more lucrative, their paid bandwidth caps became smaller and pricing more opaque.

Ganesh switched on the news. It was the channel owned by his telecom operator. The good independent ones had died out, unable to afford the “reverse carriage fees” demanded by ISPs. 4 out of the top 7 channels were owned or controlled by the gatekeepers.

He changed to a different channel, only to be confronted with a message: “Hi Ganesh, you are going to be billed extra for watching this channel. Do you want to continue?”

Ganesh switched off the TV.