Facebook withdraws Free Basics from India after regulatory debacle
Facebook has withdrawn Free Basics from India, days after the country's telecommunications regulator prohibited the differential pricing of data depending on the content or application that is being accessed.
"Free Basics is no longer available to people in India," a Facebook spokesman wrote Thursday in an email.
The carrier of the service Reliance Communications was planning to offer a chargeable version of Free Basics, according to reports.
The Free Basics service, earlier known as Internet.org, was launched in India in February last year to provide free Internet access to India's poor. The free access was, however, limited at launch to 38 websites, including Facebook and its Messenger service, Bing Search, Dictionary.com, BBC News, Reuters Market Lite for crop and farming information, and local jobs and news sites.
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