National authority and public interest in Facebook’s free basics Indian encounter: a case of ‘slowbalisation’?

Abstract

ABSTRACT The term ‘slowbalisation’, coined in 2015 by a Dutch trend watcher and elaborated in an early 2019 issue of The Economist, explains a noticeable slowing down of cross-border movement of capital, goods, money and technology, beginning from the post-recession period following the year 2008. This study expands the conceptual and explanatory scope of this phenomenon beyond the economic by considering other possible factors, political and social, using a recent case – global social media giant Facebook’s unsuccessful attempt to introduce its version of the Internet through a cost-free programme – Free Basics – in India. The Indian regulatory body in this instance, Telecomm Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), prevented the introduction of Free Basics on grounds of protecting net neutrality, and objection to Facebook’s free harvesting of data on millions more of Indians. Grounded theory methodology was employed to analyze news coverage in a leading national daily, The Times of India, and a letter to Mark Zuckerberg written by Indian activists. The grounded theory approach helped identify theoretical constructs that explain the phenomenon of slowbalisation from perspectives that rely less on solely an economic explanation of the phenomenon and delineate other contributing explanations such as regulation and public interest.