text: Free Basics: Corporate Freedom To Privatise India's Basic Economy
  As the TRAI decides the fate of Free Basics, Mark Zuckerberg is in India with Rs 100 crore, in pocket change, for advertising. Facebook's Free Basics is a repackaged internet.org, or in other words, a system where Facebook decides what parts of the internet are important to users.
  Reliance, Facebook's Indian partner in the Free Basics venture, is an Indian mega-corporation with interests in telecom, energy, food, retail, infrastructure and, of course, land. Reliance obtained land for its rural cell phone towers from the government of India and grabbed land from farmers for SEZ's through violence and deceit. As a result and at no cost, Reliance has a huge rural, semi-urban and suburban user base – especially farmers. Although Free Basics has been banned (for the time being), Reliance continues to offer the service across its networks.
  95% of the cotton in India is Monsanto's proprietary Bt Cotton. This year, in regions from Punjab to Karnataka, 80% of this Bt crop failed – that's 76% of Bt Cotton farmers with no crop left at harvest time. If they had a choice, they would switch. But what resembles a choice between cotton seeds is the same Bt Cotton seed, marketed by different companies under different names, purchased in desperation as farmers try combination after combination of seeds, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides—all of which have chemical names designed to make you feel inadequate—until you have no 'choices' left but to take your own life.
  Free Basics will limit what the internet is to a vast majority of India. Already at its outset Free Basics has said it won't allow video content on the basis that it will interfere with the telecom companies' services (read: profits) – despite the TRAI's own recommendation that video content is more accessible to different parts of the population.
  The right to food is the right to choose what we want to eat; to know what is in our food (#LabelGMOsNow) and to choose nourishing, tasty food – not the few packaged goods that corporations want us to consume.
  The right to the internet is the right to choose what spaces and media we access; to choose spaces that enrich us – not what companies think should be our 'basics'.
  In the ultimate Orwellian doublespeak, "free" for Zuckerberg means "privatised", a far cry from privacy – a word Zuckerberg does not believe in. And like corporate-written "free" trade agreements, Free Basics is anything but free for citizens. It is an enclosure of the commons, which are 'commons' because they guarantee access to the commoner, whether it be seed, water, information or internet. What Monsanto's IPRs are to seed, Free Basics is to information.