Archive: Mark Zuckerberg's India Visit and the Internet.org Summit

From the TI archives — originally published October 2014.

Mark Zuckerberg was in India on October 9–10, 2014, to address the Internet.org summit in New Delhi — and to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had just returned from his own celebrated US visit.

Internet.org, launched by Zuckerberg in August 2013, was his big connectivity bet: a coalition of mobile-device and chip companies — Samsung, Nokia, Qualcomm, Ericsson, MediaTek, and Opera — aimed at making the internet affordable for the 5 billion people then offline. Facebook's own numbers put two-thirds of the world without internet access. The stated goal: a "knowledge economy" where connectivity isn't a luxury.

Zuckerberg's India trip was part of a parade of tech CEOs visiting the country that season — Sheryl Sandberg and Jeff Bezos had made similar pilgrimages in the preceding months. The Modi meeting carried symbolism: the world's largest democracy's new leader, a prolific social-media user himself, sitting down with the world's largest social network.

The visit was well-received, but Internet.org's India story ended in controversy: its zero-rating platform, Free Basics, was seen as violating net neutrality, and India's telecom regulator banned it in 2016. The 2014 optimism about connecting the next billion collided with a harder question — who gets to decide what the internet looks like for them.