Welcome to the tech policy podcast, your source for policy rants and raves from

Tech Freedom, your Washington, D.C. advocate for the freedom to tinker and innovate.

I'm Evan Schwarstrave, your host. On today's show, India shuts the door on free basics, a program offered by Facebook

in the developing world where a stripped down version of the internet is free.

And the purpose of the program is to get people introduced to the internet, to get them online,

to see the value.

But it also raised a lot of concerns

about net neutrality and discrimination and joining me in our dc studio to discuss this is supreme

leader of north korea and president of tech freedom baron soka baron thank you for joining me

it's funny i've been retweeting a lot from the North Korean news service on Twitter. Great

satire account. Highly recommend it. Well, I'm glad someone's reading that. I'm sure there's a

valuable information in that feed. It's a satire account, Evan. It's what we like to call funny.

We'll see. We'll see about that. So, Barron, we've got a complete ban on zero rating effective in six months. So Facebook is just simply going to shut down the program. And in the decision, the telecom regulator of India, TRAI, we'll call it try for this program. They said, quote, a suitable regulatory framework for India, therefore, must necessarily be based on our country-specific factors. The need to equitably increase internet usage and penetration, foster competition, allow startups to flourish and uphold the law of the land. In a nutshell, Baron, what's wrong with the Indian decision? Well, they just didn't

try very hard. They completely ignored, number one, the benefits of zero rating programs,

specifically for adoption and deployment, the very thing that they claim to be most concerned

about. Number two, they wildly exaggerate any costs of the program.

There's not a lot of evidence that that has happened in other countries.

But number three, to the extent that there might actually be a problem with the program like this,

the regulator ignored other middle ground solutions that could have addressed those problems

without completely banning the program.

So let's talk about some of those benefits up front. Facebook's data, according to their data,

50% of people who participate in the free stripped-down version of the internet then want the

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