One late evening, I got a text from the CEO of a Bangalore based startup, telling me that he’ll see me in Delhi for the Zuckerberg visit. I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I called him up to find out what was going on. Everyone will be there, he told me, for the Internet.org summit, so he expected that I would be there too. Internet.org had been announced in May 2015, and was expected to launch in India.
I mailed Carson Dalton, head of corporate communications at Facebook, and Ankhi Das, head of Public Policy, asking if I could attend and interview Zuckerberg. Carson responded almost immediately saying that I’ll get an invite soon, and he’ll get back regarding the interview the next day if they have slots. A few days later, he called, saying that there will be a press conference. Send me your questions, he said, and we’ll pull one out of a fishbowl. There were going to be many journalists there, so it’s only fair that the selection be random, he indicated. The next day, I sent 2 questions across:
“Doesn’t creating a consumer data pricing differentiation between those companies which are on board at internet.org and those which are not, disadvantage those startups who can’t afford to pay telecom operators for subsidising data? India is a very price sensitive market.
India is a country with multiple languages and scripts, and while Facebook is enabling reading in many of those languages, why hasn’t the company enabled input mechanisms in Indic when someone changes their language interface to, say, hindi?”
Everyone from India’s startup ecosystem was there for the launch, at the Taj Palace hotel in Delhi. There appeared to be a clear separation in the hall: the journalists were on the left side of the stage, while the startup founders were on the right. I waded through the crowds towards the right, and made small talk with some founders.
I remember some banter with Hitesh Oberoi, the now CEO of Info Edge (Naukri), before finding my place in the journalists section, sitting next to Shilpa Kannan, then working with BBC India. Zuckerberg announced Internet.org and walked off stage. As we made our way to the press conference, held at an adjacent room, I heard murmurs of discontent from founders and senior executives of tech firms, some of whom flew to Delhi, and expected to be granted an exclusive audience with Zuckerberg, or at least an interaction as a group.
At the press conference, around 30 of us, journalists, were waiting for Zuckerberg. At least we would get an interaction. He walked in. I don’t clearly remember what he said, but I noticed Carson with a printout in hand, pointing out journalists who would be allowed to ask a question. There was no fishbowl. The questions were, to my mind, insipid: why are you launching free Internet instead of funding toilets? What would you do if you were to start up again? I sat with my laptop open, waiting for my turn, which never came.
As I exited the press conference, I noticed Madhavan Narayanan, then with Hindustan Times, and Kashish Gupta of NDTV, angry with Dalton about not being given an opportunity to ask a question. I wasn’t as perturbed. Sitting at the press conference, I had realised that my turn would never come. I knew what to do.
A few weeks before this, Jeff Bezos was to be in India. I had been sounded-out about an interview with Bezos, and had been preparing for it. Bezos had done the rounds in India, given several interviews to mainstream publications, as I awaited my opportunity for when he visited Delhi. The day before the interview, someone from the PR agency representing Amazon called me up, and suggested that I ask him primarily about how his India trip was, and what kind of food he had tried. The kind of idiotic fluff you would never expect from me. I told them that they shouldn’t be so presumptuous that they can tell me what to ask. A few hours later I got an email saying that Bezos has been called into an important government meeting and won’t be able to do the interview.
Towards the end of the press conference with Zuckerberg, I had a moment of realization: as a journalist, my job is to ask the question, it is theirs to answer. Just because they haven’t chosen to answer my question doesn’t mean the question isn’t important.
Sometimes the questions are more important than the answers.
So instead of writing about what Zuckerberg said at the launch of Internet.org, I wrote about what he didn’t say, and posed the questions publicly:
– Before a telecom operator gets a roster of services to choose from, how would core services be selected for the Internet.org app?
– Under what circumstances are services going to be rejected for Internet.org?
– Who exactly pays telecom operators for free Internet access and how are the rates paid to telcos decided?
– Are the rates that telecom operators being paid for consumer access to Internet.org going to be higher or lower than market rates, and will there be public disclosures, so these can be compared with pay-per-use access rates in each country?
– Why is Facebook (via Internet.org) distorting the market by splitting the Internet into services that are free and paid for consumer access?
It was their problem now.