Reliance’s New AD Pulls an ‘Airtel Zero’, Promotes Net Neutrality Violation

While the hue and cry over Airtel’s controversial ‘Airtel Zero’ was justified, we need to be reminded that there are several other players in the market working on a similar plan.

Here’s why we had a problem with Airtel Zero – it was a new platform that let companies buy data to offer their apps to consumers for free. It allowed users to access these apps without incurring data charges. This was seen as a direct violation of net neutrality as it gave priority access to some apps over others.

Now let’s have a look at Reliance’s ‘Freenet’ service. Freenet is a service jointly launched by Reliance and Facebook in India, which hosts around 20 popular websites, (including AajTak, Facebook, Wikipedia etc) free of charge for Reliance customers.

Notice a difference between the two services? We couldn’t find one either. Check out the ad here: