India's telcoms regulator says it will ignore Facebook's astroturf army

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Good for the Indian telecoms regulator. It is time someone stood up to Facebook.

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It sounds like they would have perhaps gotten more mileage out of just taking legit responses and putting them into the response template.

A little effort goes a long way.

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The pseudo-conspiracy response to that is: there were no valid arguments to be made, so they just filled the word count with FUD.

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The tone of the regulator seems more than just mildly annoyed. I kind of expected this, because TRAI even in their last round of consultations had specifically called out Internet.org as obnoxious. It appears that Zuckerberg’s little hug with Modi prompted a second consultation paper specifically tailored for him, which the babus at TRAI would have rather not done in the first place. FB seems to have used a back door to create a chance for themselves, which they then blew with their high-handed astroturfing.

Several people including me wrote in to TRAI to complain about this misleading campaign of FB’s. I think this had its effect.

However, TRAI is still thinking about whether zero rating can be done “safely” - they’re just ignoring FB’s spam while doing it. We still have a long way to go.

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