What Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma told Mark Zuckerberg on net neutrality: Report

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has tried every trick in the box to bring ‘Free’ Basics to India. Some of our sources had revealed that he had been making personal calls to India to pitch the new initiative. Now, a report by BusinessInsider reveals that Paytm Founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma was among the many founders that Mark Zuckerberg spoke to over a phone call. Sharma told the news site that Zuckerberg tried telling him to talk less over the topic. “He was trying to tell me that I should talk less about this thing. I said that what you do not know is that these telecom operators want to block everybody who is making them loose their business. They have their own messenger apps, music streaming apps which are paid for services. They want to do these businesses,” Sharma said.

“He said that he understands what I was saying. Then asked me if I can just route it towards the telcos and support the telecom operators,” Sharma further told the news site.

Vijay Shekhar has been very vocal about criticising Free Basics, known to be against net neutrality in India.

India is an important ‘market’ for Facebook and there are reasons why it wants to bring billions of people online. To achieve this, the company is ‘investing’ a huge amount on the campaign with SMSes in Hindi, front-page ads, missed call campaigns and so on. It is accused of misleading people in spporting Free basics, which is nothing but rebranded Internet.org that violates net neutrality.

In the past, many Free Internet activists took to Twitter opposing the move. Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma had earlier attacked Facebook’s campaign.

https://twitter.com/vijayshekhar/status/679147401433759744

While the debate over Free Basics and net neutrality is entering an interesting phase in India, reports suggest that Egypt has decided to shut down Facebook’s controversial free internet service.