It was a terrible week for Facebook in India. India’s telecom regulator dealt the first major blow to the social media giant’s effort to provide low-cost Internet to the poor last Monday — effectively banning its Free Basics application and others like it after months of controversy. Things went downhill from there. Well-known venture capitalist and Facebook board member Marc Andreessen created a stir with an ill-advised tweet that seemed to suggest British colonialism had been good for the country, prompting a public rebuke from CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook remains “huge player driving Internet adoption in India,” Prasanto K. Roy, a tech analyst notes, with an estimated 60 to 70 percent of the 300 million mobile internet users driven to use mobile data for one of two Facebook apps: WhatsApp, the text messaging service owned by the company; or Facebook itself.
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