Facebook likely will continue to try partnering with local mobile companies to provide a low cost Internet service.
It was a terrible week for Facebook in India.
India's telecom regulator dealt the first major blow to the social media giant's effort to provide low-cost Internet to the poor last Monday - effectively banning its Free Basics application and others like it after months of controversy.
Things went downhill from there. Well-known venture capitalist and Facebook board member Marc Andreessen created a stir with an ill-advised tweet that seemed to suggest British colonialism had been good for the country, prompting a public rebuke from CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Facebook India's Managing Director Kirthiga Reddy announced Friday she would be stepping down and moving back to the United States, a "bittersweet moment," she said in a post.
India remains an important frontier for Facebook - with more than 130 million subscribers, second only to the United States, and a vast potential user base of nearly 1 billion mobile telephone users.
So what is next for the company?
Reddy's departure is the first sign of what's to come, analysts say. Expect a bigger shuffle going forward.
"Facebook is in the early stage of a global maturity curve that others such as Microsoft, Google have gone through," said Prasanto K. Roy, a tech analyst. One lesson "is to have a strong, empowered country leadership that understands and connects to government officials, bureaucrats if not political leaders. Facebook has failed miserably there, and can't afford to do that again."
Facebook remains "huge player driving Internet adoption in India," Roy notes, with an estimated 60 to 70 percent of the 300 million mobile internet users driven to use mobile data for one of two Facebook apps: WhatsApp, the text messaging service owned by the company; or Facebook itself.
Roy predicts Facebook likely will continue to try partnering with local mobile companies to provide a low cost Internet service that does not violate the ruling announced Monday by India's Telecom Regulatory Authority set on Monday.
In forbidding "discriminatory tariffs for data services," the regulator essentially said that providers can't charge different prices for data services based on content. For all practical purposes, it amounted to a ban on Free Basics - now in use by 19 million people in 38 countries in the developing world - and programs like it that limit the online services available to users at no charge.
Facebook already tried to retool the Free Basics application after it debuted to a flurry of criticism in India last year. It was launched as part of Zuckerberg's overall effort Internet.org and was then retooled in September as the Free Basics platform, with expanded number of health, education and economic services.
Many in the tech and start-up community, as well as an organized movement called Savetheinternet.in, had opposed Facebook's effort, which gave users free access to a bare-bones version of Facebook as well as weather, job and other listings.
Critics said it violated the principle of net neutrality, which holds that all Internet providers should treat all online services the same way - meaning no extra charges or slower data speeds for certain types of content.
Zuckerberg, for his part, said in a post last week that Facebook remains "committed to keep working to break down barriers to connectivity in India and around the world." Mike Buckley, Facebook's vice president for global communications, did not return telephone calls or emails requesting comment.
For the time being, the company will continue a different initiative called Express Wi-Fi, which attempts to provide low-cost wireless service and currently runs on a few dozen hotspots in the state of Uttarakhand, according to the company.
"Connecting India is an important goal we won't give up on," Zuckerberg said in Facebook post last Monday, noting that 1 billion people in the country still don't have access to the Internet.
© 2016 The Washington Post
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