Ascendant India,digital India: how net neutrality advocates defeated Facebook’s Free Basics

Introduction

On 8 February 2016, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) ruled against ‘differential pricing’ and specifically ‘zero-rating plans’, which allowed mobile phone companies to offer some services free of charge. The regulator’s action banned Facebook’s Free Basics service, which had provided free access to a suite of apps including weather, news, and other services since its launch in February 2015. The decision came after almost a year of protracted public contention online and through traditional media between Facebook and Telecom operators, on one hand, and net neutrality advocates, on the other, organized as a volunteer effort under the banner of ‘Save the Internet’ (STI). STI criticized the service for violating principles of net neutrality, because it only offered access to a ‘walled garden’ of Facebook’s design. They also argued that Free Basics threatened ‘permissionless innovation’ on the web, because it advantaged the Facebook-selected apps over any competitors (STI, 2015e). Facebook maintained that the service was part of its larger effort to ‘connect the unconnected’, and did not conflict with net neutrality because it did not block or throttle any services (Goel and Isaac, 2016).

The resulting regulation echoes the arguments advanced by STI, noting that ‘given that a majority of the population are yet to be connected to the Internet, allowing service providers to define the nature of access would be equivalent to letting TSPs shape the users’ Internet experience’ (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, 2016). STI’s victory was big news in India and internationally. India had been poised to be the largest market for Free Basics (Goel and Issac, 2016). Facebook lobbied strenuously for the service with a public relations campaign that put CEO Mark Zuckerberg front and center, penning an op-ed in the largest Indian newspaper, Times of India, and appearing at various public events (Smiley, 2016). The news coverage of the high-profile reversal for Facebook honed in on the role of STI in the debate, particularly their organizing and mobilizing tactics, which included soliciting over a million emails to the regulator in less than a month and were reminiscent of the net neutrality advocates in the United States. The reporting on the contest coalesced around a narrative of a ‘digital David’, against the tech Goliath (Smiley, 2016).

In this article, I argue that STI’s successes can be attributed to their particular position and composition. As engineers, start-up founders, and other self-professed ‘geeks’, STI embodies what Kelty (2008: 28) has termed a ‘recursive public’, one that is constituted when geeks who share a ‘moral imagination of the technical infrastructure’ come together to preserve their means of association. While Facebook’s argumentation foregrounded the disparities in Internet access in India, and figured Indians as consumers of Internet services, STI engaged in a technopolitics (Hecht, 1998) that emphasized their role and potential as technology creators and leveraged their privileged place in a contemporary India that imagines itself both high tech and global. The current ruling party, Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), and its leader Narendra Modi have been active proponents of a narrative of an ascendant India taking its place on the global stage as a superpower fueled by its technological prowess. Finally, I demonstrate how the framing (Benford and Snow, 2000) and argumentation put forth by STI resonated with that of the BJP-endorsed vision for India, and contributed to their success.

‘Basic’ access for all

Free Basics was a rebranding of Internet.org, which grew out of 0.Facebook, or Facebook Zero, a stripped-down, fast loading, text-only version of Facebook for users in the developing world for whom data could be prohibitively expensive (Kantrowitz, 2016). Originally, Facebook Zero was aimed at increasing the reach of the platform and growing the user base. But by 2013, when Zuckerberg launched Internet.org, it was re-framed as part of a broad social mission (Goel, 2013). Hoffman et al. (2016) have linked this social mission to the evolution of Facebook itself, as it moved from a ‘directory of information’, to a ‘social network’, to a ‘core social infrastructure’ in 2009 that could connect the world

In a white paper, ‘Is Connectivity a Human Right?’, Zuckerberg (2013) announced a new goal of making Internet access available to 5 billion new users. Zuckerberg’s proposal on how to expand Internet access outlined only a marginal role for governments as regulators of the spectrum. The responsibility to secure this right of access rested with the tech and telecom industries. Zuckerberg’s vision was ‘free access to basic internet services in a way that enables everyone with a phone to get on the internet and join the knowledge economy while also enabling the industry to continue growing profits and building out this infrastructure’ (Zuckerberg, 2013). Despite this rhetoric of universal access, at its launch in India, Facebook’s Telecom partner Reliance, promoted it primarily as ‘Free Facebook’, with TV ads featuring young urban Indians holding placards that said ‘I want free Internet’ (Smiley, 2016).

Early on, the debate on zero rating had pitted telecom operators against STI (All India Bakchod (AIB), 2015a). In response to the consultation paper on service differentiation published by TRAI in March 2015, STI had gathered quickly to simplify the 118-page document, provide a template response to the questions posed by paper and a link for email to email TRAI (STI, 2015d). Using their blog, comedy videos, and twitter hashtags like ‘#netneutrality’ and ‘#savetheinternet’ to mobilize public opinion, STI solicited over a million emails and comments to TRAI in less than a month (Kantrowitz, 2016). The Cellular Operators Association of India responded with a hashtag of their own: #sabkainternet (everyone’s Internet) arguing that they were trying to make Internet access more inclusive in India (Lakshman, 2015), foreshadowing the argument Facebook would also employ. India has the second highest number of Internet users in the world at approximately 450 million, 350 million of whom access the Internet through mobile devices. Yet, those numbers only account for a 31% penetration rate of the total national population (Chopra, 2017).

Facebook publicly joined the fray in the wake of the first STI email campaign, and began promoting Internet.org as a ‘step towards digital equality’ (Smiley, 2016). Facebook situated Free Basics within a larger effort to ‘connect the unconnected’, which included other initiatives such as lighter apps that use less data and satellites for increased Internet access (ET NOW, 2015). On a reddit forum, Facebook’s representative Chris Daniels (2015) said, ‘we are doing this because our mission is to make the world more open and connected … In the very long term, it’s true that more people online is better for Facebook, but it will be good for the whole internet ecosystem and for society too’.

Free Basics was purportedly aimed at not just providing the basic utilities, but serving as an ‘on-ramp’ for new users who would supposedly gain awareness about the benefits of the Internet, and begin to pay for access to the whole Internet (ET NOW, 2015). Daniels (2015) claimed that globally ‘50% of people who come online for the first time are paying for the entire internet after just 30 days’. Zuckerberg (2015) claimed that more than 40% of their Indian users had begun to pay for access within 30 days of joining Free Basics, and that ‘for every ten people connected to the Internet, roughly one is lifted out of poverty’. In billboards, print ads, and op-eds, Facebook provided an image of the farmer Ganesh who through Free Basics could look up weather information and commodity prices, or ‘learn new farming techniques that doubled his crop yield’ (Smiley, 2016).

The technological determinism underlying Facebook’s argument has a long history in development efforts. Arturo Escobar (1995) has analyzed the mythological role of technology as an amplifier of material progress within the development discourse from its post-war beginnings:

Technology, it was believed, would not only amplify material progress, it would also confer upon it a sense of direction and significance. In the vast literature on the sociology of modernization, technology was theorized as a sort of moral force that would operate by creating an ethics of innovation, yield, and result. (Escobar, 1995: 36)

This emphasis on technology has been criticized for reducing intractable social challenges of inequity and continuing poverty to technical problems divorced of both history and politics (Ferguson, 1994).

Locating that discourse in India specifically, Chopra (2008) argues that the Nehruvian socialism that marked post-independence India was complemented by a ‘Nehruvian scientificity’. In the shadow of the interreligious strife of the India–Pakistan partition, Nehru’s vision of a secular, socialist, modern Indian state needed science and technology to transcend the provincial divisions of religion and caste. Citing Ashis Nandy’s work on science serving as the ‘reason of the state’, Chopra (2008) demonstrates that major investments in science and technology were the hallmark of centralized planning in the decades following independence.

Chakravartty (2004) argues that during the 1980s, the logic of self-reliance that shaped Nehruvian economic policies faded. Instead, motivated in part by India’s potential in the nascent software market, a techno-populist discourse emerged under the leadership of Rajiv Gandhi. Linking this to the World Bank–certified discourse of ‘telecom for development’, the previously neglected telecom sector, much maligned for its inefficiencies and corruption, went from being considered a luxury to being recast as integral to national progress:

The techno-populist discourse tried to mobilize the masses promising modernization on behalf of ‘the people’. The new technocrats spoke of the radical potential of communications technologies appealing to non-hierarchical market mechanisms – the village entrepreneur having power over the Brahmin bureaucrat – but the goals of high-tech development were inherently contradictory in India’s disparate information economy. (p. 243)

Although this discourse failed to gain traction at the time, the focus on reforming the telecom sector continued into the next decade. Along with the liberalization reforms of the early 1990s, the Indian government also announced a new telecommunications policy in 1994 that opened telephone service, even basic (local) service, and then mobile telephony to the private sector and foreign investment (Chakravartty, 1999). The reform process had been heavily contested by trade unions and public interest advocates, and simultaneously championed by the neoliberal Washington consensus. Balancing these competing pressures, the resulting policy was supposed to walk the ‘middle path’, allowing in the private sector and foreign investments, but also including universal service obligation, and expansions of rural telephony. It also established TRAI as an independent regulator for the sector, in part to assure private sector entrants of a competitive service environment that would not privilege the state-owned operator that dominated the industry (Chakravartty, 1999).

Kumar and Thomas (2006) find that despite the initial goal of connecting 600,000 villages, in the ensuing decade, Telcos made no significant efforts to expand service to rural areas. They also trace the historical continuity of successive communication technologies proffered as the harbingers of development. Radio in rural India was expected to spur social change and development. TV followed as the medium for promoting science, agriculture and family planning. Faceboook’s intervention as a corporate actor can also be situated within a more recent history of International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD) in India.

Chakravartty (2013) has argued that in the wake of liberalization, and the rise of neoliberal state in India, corporate actors came to acquire a new role as ‘conscientious partners in development’. Corporate actors were ‘vested in public discourse with both a social conscience, and as a corollary, a language of the rights of citizenship against the powerful and assumed ineffective hand of the state’ (Chakravartty, 2013: 170). Zuckerberg was following that script in October 2015, when at a town hall meeting in New Delhi at the Indian Institute of Technology, a leading engineering institution, he said, ‘we all have a moral responsibility to look out for people who don’t have the Internet’ (ET NOW, 2015).

In explaining how corporations came to be the protagonists of Indian economic growth, Chakravartty (2012) cites a popular 2004 book by management guru CK Prahalad. She marks Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits as pivotal in the discursive shift away from state planning and subsidies to market-based mechanisms. Prahalad’s core argument was that by stimulating commerce ‘at the bottom of the pyramid’, corporate actors could spur development and succeed where the sluggish corrupt state had failed. Furthering the logic of neoliberalism, a new rhetoric of ‘Pro-Poor, Pro-Market’ took center stage in India. What this course of development had in common with the state-led enterprise is the centrality of the role of technology. Citing prominent figures in the Indian Information Technology (IT) industry such as Azim Premji and Nandan Nilenkani, Chakravartty (2012: 67) notes, ‘the role of the capitalist as development visionary is nowhere more apparent than in the IT industry’.

As a result, India was the site of a number of ICTD projects led by corporate actors, championed uncritically by national and state governments. In a study of an HP-sponsored e-inclusion development program, Schwittay (2008) found a widespread belief in the power of technological means to transcend divisions that ignored the historical and political structures that begat the inequality. Calling to mind Zuckerberg’s farmer Ganesh, she notes that ICTD projects are ‘invariably based on the idea that the poor’s mere access to ICT, which usually taps into a seemingly innate ability to use the technology with only minimal training, can provide better access to resources and markets, which can then increase incomes’ (Schwittay, 2008: 199).

This vision of techno-centric development negates any distributive role of the state, and instead posits a future where ‘technically sophisticated civil society organizations working on behalf of the majority of Indian citizens holding state institutions accountable – as the only means for the majority of Indians to meet the aspirational goals of modernity’ (Chakravartty, 2012: 67). This notion of technology-fueled development is celebrated not just by Facebook, and successive Indian governments but also by the very opponents of the Free Basics service, STI.

Saving the Internet, through the Internet

STI was a volunteer effort that drew together ‘geeks and enthusiasts from various fields: technology, law, journalism, design, policy’ (STI, 2015a). Many of them were entrepreneurs, identifying themselves as an ‘apolitical’ collective. STI said they were advocating for net neutrality because they wanted ‘the freedom to create, communicate and collaborate with people across the globe and for businesses to combine audio, video and text, and reimagine consumer experience’ (STI, 2015a). STI was loosely organized, collaborating internally across various media from phone calls to private online chat rooms. Many of their members never met in person. Despite their lack of formal structures and limited resources, STI was enormously successful in their efforts (Coca, 2016; Smiley, 2016).

Kelty’s conception of a recursive public is helpful in understanding how and why STI coalesced. Kelty (2008) defines a recursive public as one that is ‘constituted by a shared concern for maintaining the means of association through which they come together as a public’ (p. 28). The means of association here is the Internet, which serves as both the site and subject of the contention. Kelty uses the term ‘geeks’ to describe the members of a recursive public, which is also how STI members defined themselves. According to Kelty (2008: 28), ‘geeks find affinity with one another because they share an abiding moral imagination of the technical infrastructure, the Internet, that has allowed them to develop and maintain this affinity in the first place’.

In April 2015, STI posted the Twitter handles of many of their members, most of whom worked for tech start-ups, were coders or developers, or focused on technology policy in either law or journalism (STI, 2015a). When describing their decision-making process, STI said they aimed ‘for rough consensus and running solutions’ (Save the Internet, 2015a), a phrase strikingly reminiscent of the Internet governance folklore that Kelty (2008: 58) highlights: ‘we reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code’. Central to a recursive public, Kelty argues, is the conceptualization of the Internet as a single entity. Therefore, STI’s objection to fragmenting users’ experience of the Internet through a service like Free Basics harkens back to the maintenance of the moral and technical order to which a recursive public subscribes.

This notion of a recursive public builds on Habermas and Warner’s conceptions of the public sphere and publics, respectively, but also adds Taylor’s work on social imaginaries (Kelty, 2005). As employed here, a social imaginary refers to an imagined moral and social order, one that resists a dichotomy between ideas, on one hand, and material practice on the other. Kelty argues that a recursive public is distinctive because it includes not just the discourse but also the technical infrastructure that underlines, enables, and is in turn reaffirmed by the discourse.

In using technology to constitute and enact political goals, STI engaged in a technopolitics (Hecht, 1998). The overwhelming majority of their agitation was online – YouTube videos, reddit forums, Twitter campaigns, and their own blog. In addition to the regulator and government officials, the targets of their campaigning were Indian tech companies. They compiled a list of Twitter accounts of Indian tech companies and their CEOs, inviting people to tweet support for net neutrality at them directly. Online retailer Flipkart initially defended zero rating plans against charges that they violated net neutrality. They faced a wave of backlash on Twitter with a number of reviewers giving their app poor ratings in the Android and iOS app stores (Reddit, 2015), until the CEO relented and reversed his position (Chandran, 2015). As Hecht (1998) argues, the political effectiveness of their technopolitics was amplified by not just the material affordances of these technologies, but also because it traded on their expert authority.

This moral and technical order that Kelty describes as central to a recursive public values not only openness but also a ‘constantly self-leveling level playing field’. STI’s interest in net neutrality is about the architecture but also about ‘an ethic of justice … Geeks do not wish to compete qua capitalists or entrepreneurs unless they can assure themselves that (qua public actors) that they can compete fairly’ (Kelty, 2008: 10). On the STI blog and in All India Backhod (AIB) videos, they emphasized that an architecture like Free Basics would make it harder for new apps to compete and emerge. AIB videos argued that had an architecture like Free Basics existed earlier and supported a social networking site like Orkut, Facebook would never have emerged (AIB, 2015b). As they argued for a transparent regulatory process, they translated the rhetoric of openness into their tactics as well. STI also transitioned from the proprietary platform of change.org, where the initial petition had been housed, to an open source website, hosting the code on GitHub to allow volunteers to contribute code. The code for that website is now being utilized by other campaigns in India, such as a campaign to reduce pollution in Mumbai (Coca, 2016).

Kelty’s work on recursive publics is physically situated in Boston, Berlin, and Bangalore, as well as online and therefore inherently crosses national borders. That said, he does not directly address the cultural dimension of the ‘global’ in his analysis. When looking at STI in the Indian cultural context, it is impossible to ignore the transnational grammar and tactics employed by its members. In a 19 May open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, which signaled that Facebook was now the opponent for the movement, the signatories assembled by STI included digital rights organizations from countries including the United States, Brazil, Colombia, and South Africa (STI, 2015c).

STI drew deliberately from the international conversation around net neutrality. Beginning with their name selection and choice of hashtag, both of which echoed the net neutrality movement in the United States, STI identified effective tactics employed elsewhere and incorporated them into their repertoire. Noting John Oliver’s contribution to the net neutrality movement in the United States, STI recruited online comedy troupe AIB, to produce a series of videos explaining the issue and building popular support for the campaign (Coca, 2016). AIB created three videos over the course of 2015, released on 11 April, 13 August, and 24 December, all critical junctures in the debate. Each video served to garner a fresh wave of support for the organization’s email campaigns to TRAI (AIB, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c)

AIB videos conspicuously referenced American figures and images, including President Obama, Lehman Brothers, and the US Dollar, over the Indian Rupee. At the same time, the videos included references to 1980s Bollywood tropes, Hindi colloquialisms, and culturally specific mockery of Indian bureaucratic officialdom (AIB, 2015a). The imagined audience of the AIB videos can be seen as Indian ‘digital natives’, for whom the digital is part of the story of globalizing India, but also part of the story of localizing India (Thomas, 2012).

Fernandes (2006), in her study of the representational practices around the liberalizing middle class in India, offers linguistic identity as a lens to understand the above phenomena. She notes that programs targeted specifically at the middle class are in a hybrid language of ‘Hinglish’, which requires fluency in both Hindi and English. The fluency in English, and by extension, Western cultural references, marks an individual as the new middle class, where these linguistic skills are necessary for access to the new economy and skilled jobs. The fluency in Hindi, on the other hand, marks an authentic Indian identity that has not lost touch with its roots:

Language, in this case, shapes the definition of the interior space of the identity of this social group with a sense of external differentiation – language in this context is not merely a transparent medium for the expression of a predefined class identity. Rather, the distinctiveness of this middle class identity is constituted by language. (Fernandes, 2006: 69)

STI’s transnational vocabulary underlines the fact that recursive publics may be global in their reach, but are hardly open to just anyone. In addition to the requisite technical skill, the class divisions also serve as a barrier. As Hecht (1998) argues for the case of French technologists, their political power could not be separated from their material power. The ranks of STI form the elite in India, an elite that has come to be seen as commonplace. Although high-tech workers make up roughly 2% of the working population, as compared to 70% in the agricultural sector, for instance, they hold a central place in the imagining of a ‘New India’ (Thomas, 2012).

A number of scholars have analyzed how Indian IT workers came to hold such a privileged place, and how they continue to represent an aspirational class. Fernandes (2006: 88) suggests that the economic policies of liberalization in the 1990s were accompanied by a significant shift in national political culture that made high-tech workers ‘a potent symbol of India’s success in the global economy’. Thomas (2012) argues that the liberalization in the mid-1990s of the telecommunication and tech sectors in India, which moved India away from a planned economy controlled by a bureaucratic state, was the pivotal shift in the rise of the digital in India. He points to the Software Technology Parks, the Special Economic Zones, and the myriad of tax incentives that fueled the growth of the software industry in India.

Upadhya (2004) demonstrates how new financial regulations in 1995 permitted the entry of foreign venture capital in India, allowing a transnational capitalist class to emerge, closely linked to the Indian-origin business community in the Silicon Valley. The development of IT in India is linked to both the venture and social capital of the American tech sector. Of the 637 high-tech start-ups in Silicon Valley between 1990 and 1998, 8% were led by people of Indian origin. The success of individuals such as Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) and Vinod Khosla (Sun Microsystems), and their significant wealth accumulation during the tech boom, inspired many of the startups in India and the Unites States (Upadhya, 2004).

Upadhya (2009) has shown that central to the narrative of triumph in the IT industry was the trope of the middle-class success story. She references the story of NR Narayana Murthy, founder of Infosys, who came to symbolize a post-liberalization India where the middle class could rise on the strength of their own entrepreneurial steam. This narrative emphasizes that the IT success stories such as Murthy were not from traditional Indian business families where entrepreneurship was inherited, but rather a result of the ‘middle class values’ of honesty, hard work, and austerity.

Chakravartty (2001) demonstrates that the success of these figures exemplified the success of the Indian community abroad, while the celebration of this entrepreneurial process at home also marked a rupture from the socialist past of the nation, while still allowing for an inherently Indian identity, made especially relevant through the ‘translocal’ medium of the Internet. Updated for more contemporary references, AIB’s videos referenced Indian Americans, namely, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, as cultural touchstones of aspiration (AIB, 2015a). In her study of the ‘returning software professional’, Radhakrishnan (2011) notes the discursive shift from the narrative of ‘brain drain’ to ‘brain circulation’, which allows these IT workers to be active participants in India’s new development trajectory, while maintaining their international ties. As Chakravartty (2012) succinctly puts it, ‘Indians did not have to remain abroad to be modern’ (p. 68).

The software industry played a powerful structural and discursive role in the production of this new middle class. As a result, even though only a small proportion of Indians have access to the Internet, the promise of an Internet-powered economic resurgence is palpable across public culture, particularly in urban spaces. Thomas (2012) makes the case that the information industry in India is now sacrosanct, and technological determinism represents the ruling ideology. ‘India Inc. is key to the country’s identity as a global power-house’ (Thomas, 2012). Upadhya (2009) agrees that the representation around the IT industry suggests that its significance for India is ‘as much ideological and cultural as it is economic or social’ (p. 80).

Technocultural nationalism

This ideology of high tech and global India has found currency across the Indian political landscape, but nowhere has it been more prevalent and preeminent than in the narratives of the current ruling party, the BJP. Fernandes (2000) shows that the BJP’s celebration of India’s highly skewed information economy can be linked to the party’s globalized middle-class base of support both in India and abroad.

Jaffrelot and Therwath (2007) have demonstrated the importance of the Indian diaspora to the political successes of the BJP. They highlight the international outreach of the right-wing Hindu nationalists, collectively known as the Sangh Parivar, who drew upon a Hindu identity to rally political support abroad to promote majoritarian politics in India. In 1996, the year they won enough seats to briefly form the government, the political arm of the Sangh Parivar, the BJP, gave pride of place to non-resident Indians in their election manifesto (Jaffrelot and Therwath, 2007). Prominent BJP leaders, including the current Prime Minister Modi who was then a party apparatchik for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), traveled to the United States to raise funds from wealthy Indians, and called upon them to act as ambassadors for the Indian nation (Variyar, 2014).

Chopra (2008) argues that this Hindu nationalism became the socially conservative cultural complement to the economic policies of neoliberalism, combining to form a technocultural nationalism that accepted neoliberal endorsements of free trade and open markets, but also subscribed to a Hindu ethos, pledging loyalty to the Hindu majority over commitment to individual political or civil rights. The endorsement of technology in national progress that began with Nehru continued unabated, but scientificity was ‘reclaimed as an essentially Hindu quality that is ideal for a globalized, economically and technologically interconnected world’ (Chopra, 2008: 147). The nomos of technocultural nationalism, as Chopra (2008) describes it, is ‘a culturally distinct and strong Hindu civilization that is simultaneously a technologically and economically power state in the globalized world’ (p. 161). The Internet serves as a power symbol of both globalization and a technologically-adept India and becomes ‘central to the production and expression of technocultural nationalism’ (Chopra, 2008: 162).

A watershed moment in the BJP’s construction of the narrative of India’s high-tech global successes was the ‘India Shining’ campaign that ran in advance of the 2004 election (Fernandes, 2006). These print and TV ads permeated the Indian media landscape projecting an image of a prosperous, rising middle class signified by mobile phones, shopping malls, and technology parks. Although at the time the campaign was unsuccessful in securing BJP’s victory, potentially due to low turnout among middle class voters, the mantra of India Shining has since resonated within India and abroad. The BJP has successfully constructed a vision for the future of India that trades on a combination of a homogenized privileged Indian immigrant community, the high-tech entrepreneurs in India and abroad, and a new middle class aspiring to both.

In the wake of liberalization, a new kind of state actor emerged, one that borrowed corporate trappings to signal a transformation away from the sluggish bureaucracy of a stagnant India. As the three-time ‘CEO Chief Minister’ of the state of Gujarat, Modi deployed a brand of high-tech populism and became the face of India’s rising aggressive capitalism (Bobbio, 2013). He established the Vibrant Gujarat summit to encourage private and foreign investment in the state, a strategy central to Modi’s ‘Gujarat Model’ of development (Bobbio, 2013). Jaffrelot (2015) argues that Gujarat’s political economy has traditionally featured a close relationship between the capitalist class and a business-friendly state government and Modi’s governments continued those policies. Nevertheless, the Gujarat model captured the popular attention in India, in part due to Modi’s media savvy.

In the 2014 national election, Modi was able to present Gujarat’s economic record during his tenure as Chief Minister as the model of economic development that could be applied to all of India (Torri, 2015). The BJP ran a presidential style campaign, putting Modi and his promise of #achhedin (‘good days are coming’) front and center. The #achhedin is also a signal of both Modi’s social media savvy and his campaign’s embrace of technology (Kaur, 2015). As of this writing, Modi has nearly 34 million followers on Twitter and over 42 million ‘likes’ on Facebook. For the first time in 30 years, a single party won an absolute majority in India.

Since taking office, Modi has announced a major national program each year that further emphasizes the centrality of the IT sector in India’s growth (Najar, 2015). In 2014, he announced the ‘Make in India’ campaign to draw multinationals and foreign investors, especially in high-tech manufacturing, to India with promises of reduced bureaucracy and improved infrastructure (Bradsher, 2015). In July 2015, as the net neutrality battle was being waged, Modi launched the Digital India campaign that seeks to transform India into a ‘digitally empowered society and a knowledge economy’ (PM’s Remarks at the launch of Digital India week, 2015). In September 2015, Modi visited Silicon Valley to promote the campaign, visiting Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, and courting investment from major tech companies such as Microsoft and Google (Rajan, 2015).

In January 2016, Modi announced the Start Up India program to improve financing and other incentives for start-up ventures in India, including a 3-year tax exemption and reductions in patent fees (Sidhartha, 2016). In a speech leading up to program launch, he extolled young Indians to become entrepreneurs, saying, ‘we want to enable start-ups to make India No. 1 in this field. Stand up India, Start up India’ (Rajya Sabha, 2015).

Ascendant India, digital India

It is within the above discursive and political environment that STI made its successful claims for state regulation. Social movement literature on framing is valuable in illustrating the reasons for their success. Benford and Snow (2000) have defined actors in social movements as ‘signifying agents’ who construct meaning for constituents in order to influence action. They borrow Irving Goffman’s work on frames and Stuart Hall’s concept of ‘politics of signification’ to argue that frames perform an interpretive function making events meaningful, but also guiding action. The core framing tasks are diagnostic, developing a common understanding of the problem of how Free Basics undermined net neutrality and harmed Indian development; prognostic, what the solution could be, namely TRAI regulations; and motivational framing, a call to arms by emailing or submitting comments to the regulator.

The central thrust of STI’s arguments to the government actors was not the exclusion of the unconnected Indians from the whole Internet on a platform like Free Basics. That argument was only ever a rejoinder to Facebook’s campaign centered around ‘digital equality’. STI’s primary framing was that Free Basics and differential pricing plans were inimical to India’s fledgling start-up ecosystem. Where Facebook was thinking of growing a consumer base, STI was arguing on behalf of creators and future creators. They urged TRAI to consider that Chennai based Zoho competes with Google Docs. ‘Imagine if it cost more to access Zoho than Google Docs, because of a collusive agreement between Google and Airtel’ (Medianama Comments to TRAI, 2015).

The success of the collective action framing by STI is rooted in the resonance of the proffered frame. Benford and Snow (2000) identify two factors that impact the degree of frame resonance: credibility and its relative salience. The credibility of a frame requires consistency, and contradictions are detrimental to the resonance of a frame. They provide the example of mobilization of Chinese citizens in 1989, where student activists in their framings and behavior were consistent, as compared to disjuncture between the state elites’ claims and actual policies.

STI was successful in puncturing Facebook’s argument and tactics for Free Basics. STI highlighted the fact that Facebook had included pleas to Indian Facebook users to support Free Basics but had misrepresented the text leaving many to think they were supporting net neutrality, not Free Basics (STI, 2015b). STI also adopted the tactic of offering point, and counter-point refutations of Facebook’s arguments, successfully chipping away at their believability (STI, 2015f). As the epitome of young rising India, the members of STI themselves enjoyed the credibility as frame articulators that amplified the resonance of their framings.

STI also employed ‘frame alignment processes’ to link their interests and interpretive frames with those of the government’s. Frame extension is a tactic to expand the frame to include issues and concerns important to potential adherents. In sample texts/e-mails that STI provided for people to send emails to TRAI, they obliquely referenced the 2G corruption scandal under BJP’s rival Congress government. Phrases such as ‘no license-permit raj for the web’ were cues to disavow the stagnant economy of pre-liberalization India (Pahwa, 2015). But most significantly, it was the open letter to the Prime Minster from the ‘Indian start up fraternity’, signed by over 500 start-ups, that not only directly referenced the new programming launched by Modi but also located themselves within the BJP’s narrative of success:

We wish to start by congratulating you for the excitement around your government’s initiatives, particularly programmes like Digital India and Startup India, and on improving the ease of doing business. It is our hope that these programmes act as stepping stones to a future where India can lead the world as a creator and innovator, with all of our citizens having access to the opportunities made possible via the open Internet. (STI, 2016)

Trading on their own salience to the Indian social imaginary and that of the newly launched programs to the Modi government, STI secured a policy victory in the most unprecedented manner in India’s history. Their own avowedly apolitical stance aided them in this effort. They did not need to espouse the nationalist politics of the BJP, but rather were able to find common ground around the centrality of technology and technologists. In fact, the unshakeable faith in technology to deliver individuals from poverty and spur growth for a nation was common to all three central actors here. That bedrock formulation remains uncontested in the overwhelming commentary and coverage of the debate. Instead, the exhaustive reporting focused on the extraordinary manner of the contention and speculated about what it foretold about the future of policy making in India.

Looking ahead

Ten days after the TRAI decision became public, Nikhil Pahwa, a key figure from STI, spoke at a Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) University event. He said that in the past, regulations had often been passed in India without public participation and citizen voice, but heartened by STI’s success he felt that tide had finally turned and Internet policy ‘would never again be made in a vacuum’ (Helft, 2016). Pahwa could have been referencing the 1994 Telecom Policy, which was crafted over 3 years in closed-door consultations (Chakravartty, 1999). Similar to the Free Basics debate, the telecom reform process in the early 1990s was also heavily contested, although the battle then pitted trade unions and public interest advocates against the technical policy experts, who strove to protect their ideal technical solution from political interference.

Here the popular contention led by STI embraced its technopolitics, making the technical policy prescription the very subject of contention. Hecht (1998) demonstrates how and why technologists in post-war France located themselves and their work in the discourse about the future of France. ‘National identity discourse constructs a bridge between a mythologized past and a coveted future’ (Hecht, 1998: 12). STI similarly defined a relationship between technology and national identity as the basis for their political strategy.

In August 2016, STI re-launched as the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF). In a nod to its origins, IFF will continue its work on net neutrality and issues related to innovation, but its scope has expanded to include freedom of expression and censorship, as well as online privacy and encryption (IFF, 2016). With their mission, to ‘defend freedom of speech, privacy and our digital commons’, they join the ranks of international digital rights organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now, and European Digital Rights.

However, despite Pahwa’s optimism, with the shift in mission, STI is also shifting to a far more challenging terrain. The near consensus around technology and technologists gives way to far greater contestation around what speech should be allowed and what privacy can or should entail. India’s credentials as a liberal democracy with respect to free speech rights have never been completely secure but have become particularly suspect under the Modi government (Prabhu, 2017). Although the Indian Supreme Court recently affirmed a ‘fundamental right to privacy’, its implications for India’s biometric identity system remain unclear (Mahapatra, 2017). Divorced from the unifying frame of an India rising on the strength of its technological prowess, STI will face greater challenges in advocating a broader mission of speech and privacy rights online.