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The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. F...

The raging debate on Zero Rated content is, for the most part, taking place in a vacuum of evidence. A successful campaign by activists  ensured that many of the 1.2 million responses sent to TRAI’s proposed net neutrality regulations in April 2015 called for banning internet.org (Facebook’s Zero Rated offering, now called Free Basics).  The fear that the poor who use the free version of the internet offered by Facebook will not use anything else but Facebook has been one of the harms many advocates put forth.  Interestingly, research we conducted well before the ZR phenomena that showed people though Internet=Facebook has been used by both sides of the debate to their advantage.  My position has always been that we don’t know enough, and that we need a lot more evidence about what people really do when they come online through a free (Zero Rated offering) for the first time vs when they come online otherwise (through a “full” internet bundle).  Do they stay within the walled garden? Does their use evolve to become consumers of the “full Internet”? Finally, we have some evidence.  Amba Kak, who recently completed her MSc degree at the University of Oxford looked at how users are responding to “Facebook/ WhatsApp” data packs in India through interviews […]