<div><strong>Mala Bhargava</strong></div><div> </div><div>If the students of IIT Delhi have recovered from their star-struck state, perhaps they could give the “funnier” questions put to Mark Zuckerberg at his Q&A there some serious thought.</div><div> </div><div>One that drew quite a few laughs and delighted applause was the question that sounded too obvious to have been asked – so much so that it seemed staged. Why are you showing so much interest in India.</div><div> </div><div>Answer Honestly.</div><div> </div><div>Easy answer, and Zuckerberg jumped in like he was just waiting, which he definitely was. The smiling Facebook CEO desperately wants all one billion of those poor guys in the outback who haven’t discovered the internet yet and who won’t know the difference between the internet and Facebook. Heck, even Zuckerberg is confusing the two, as he tries hard to defend and push his pet project, Internet.org, now called Free Basics, ironically the name fitting much better what it’s all about.</div><div> </div><div>Those who can’t afford the expensive connectivity the rest thrive on today are being offered free access, all of it controlled by Facebook.</div><div> </div><div>To those people, the internet will actually become Facebook. They will be too bedazzled to know the difference as Facebook begins to serve more and more of their needs.</div><div> </div><div>Forget the newbies, those of us on the internet for years are finding Facebook pulling in everything into its universe – video, search, news, photography, messaging, calling, and more and more each day.</div><div> </div><div>Facebook is so obviously swallowing up the internet that even the person considered its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, is horrified, warning everyone to say no to internet.org.</div><div> </div><div>But Mark Zuckerberg has been a whiz at making Facebook sound like a massive altruistic movement to connect the people of the world. And he makes internet.org or Free Basics sound like extending a helping hand to those who don’t have access to the internet and can’t better their lives without it. Zuckerberg also incessantly repeats that Facebook is a big supporter of Net Neutrality, making it sound like it’s Facebook and its users against the establishment and greedy companies.</div><div> </div><div>What goes unmentioned is the massive data that Facebook knows and is collecting on each of its users, a commodity it collects with equal greed and which it puts to good use benefiting itself. Not only does Facebook throw advertising at you threaded through its DNA and “personalised” to yours, but it has cosy research labs figuring out how you behave online and tweaking it to suit itself. Every so often, a Facebook study is uncovered that shows the extent to which the platform can control how you think and feel.</div><div> </div><div>So students can give over feeling awe struck and honoured at the Zuck’s visit. He’s not taking his eye off of India anytime soon – and that’s what should worry us.</div>
