New Delhi: Facebook has not responded to the Indian telecom regulator’s call for the social media website to reach out to its users, who supported its Free Basics service through the social network’s platform, so as to advice them to send comments to the specific questions raised in the consultation paper on differential pricing, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) said in a statement on Tuesday.

Trai, which put up the consultation paper on differential pricing on 9 December last year asked four specific questions broadly on whether telecom operators should be allowed to offer different services at different price points and models that can be implemented to achieve that. This initiated Facebook’s aggressive campaign to promote Free Basics, which aims to offer people who do not have an Internet connection free access to a handful of websites and a range of services through mobile phones.

As a result, it was criticised by net neutrality activists who said such a move would violate the core principle of net neutrality—that everyone should have unrestricted access to the Internet and it should not be regulated by a company. The move gave rise to online campaigns #SavetheInternet and #SayNotoFreeBasics.

However, most of the response emails that Trai received on its second consultation paper with regard to net neutrality supported either Free Basics or net neutrality without giving appropriate answers to the questions.

Because of this, Trai extended the deadline for comments on its consultation paper to 7 January from 31 December. The telecom regulator wrote to Facebook on 1 January asking it to reach out to all 544,000 users who had sent Trai a mail via the domain name facebookmail.com as well as the one million users who had sent responses through @supportfreebasics.in by giving a missed call to pre-defined number.

Facebook, in a letter dated 6 January, responded that it has already reached out to the users who sent mail through Facebook asking them to specifically answer the four questions that Trai raised in the consultation paper. However, the social networking firm said, it would not be able to reach out to the people who responded via a missed call, as it did not have their email addresses.

A day later, the regulator in a letter to Facebook said it was unable to make out whether the company has communicated the Trai’s message to all users who earlier sent their responses through the platform provided by the company. The letter also expressed “disappointment" and said the world’s largest social networking platform “was expected to find ways to communicate Trai’s message to such users (those who responded via missed calls) as well". In the same letter, Trai again requested Facebook to confirm whether Facebook has communicated Trai’s message to the users and the manner in which the same was conveyed.

“Facebook has not responded to Trai’s letter dated 7 January till date," said the regulatory authority in the statement.

A Facebook spokesperson said that “Facebook will respond to Trai’s letter," but declined to say when.

According to Trai’s data, it received about 2.4 million responses from stakeholders on the consultation paper, of which 1.8 million were through Facebook’s platforms supporting Free Basics, as against Facebook’s claims of more than 11 million people sending emails supporting digital equality and Free Basics.

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