A majority of Indians who submitted comments to the nation’s telecommunications regulator said they support Facebook Inc’s Free Basics plan that would allow Indians free Internet access.
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said that 1.35 million responses in support of the plan — or 56 percent of all comments — came from Facebook’s @supportfreebasics.in, according to a report on the agency’s review of different pricing for data services. It received another 544,000 responses from @facebookmail.com, with most backing Facebook’s plan, the regulator said.
Comments either supporting or opposing differential pricing were “basically template responses” and “identical in nature,” the regulator on Saturday said on its Web site, without explaining how the views would be used in the review.
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India chairman RS Sharma told The Hindu newspaper in an interview published on Jan. 1 that such responses were “not helpful at all” and did not represent meaningful input.
The regulator has appealed to respondents and Facebook to solicit more detailed opinions.
Facebook chairman Mark Zuckerberg last month made a personal appeal in one of India’s leading newspapers for the government to allow a free Internet service.
Facebook’s proposed Free Basics plan allows customers to access the social network and other services such as education, healthcare and employment listings from their mobile phones without a data plan. Industry groups said the program threatens the principles of Internet neutrality and could change pricing in India for access to different Web sites.
The company is spending billions of dollars on Internet.org, including projects to deliver the Internet to under-served areas using drones, satellites and lasers.
Zuckerberg has said his goal is to bring the Internet to the developing world and alleviate poverty — and not to make money for Facebook or its partners.
To drum up support, Facebook started a “Save Free Basics In India” campaign, asking Indian users to support “digital equality” by filling out a form that was sent as an e-mail to regulators. The Menlo Park, California-based company took out full-page advertisements, including one featuring a smiling Indian farmer and his family — whom the ads said used new techniques to double his crop yield.
Telecom operators including Bharti Airtel Ltd, Vodafone Group PLC’s local unit and Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd — which is controlled by billionaire Mukesh Ambani — also support differential data pricing plans.
The Internet & Mobile Association of India and the National Association of Software and Services Companies opposed differential pricing, saying it violated “principles of net neutrality,” according to a statement on the regulator’s Web site.
The regulator said it received 484,000 comments — out of a total of 2.4 million — from forums such as savetheinternet.com. The regulator set Thursday as the deadline for comments.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained