India’s telecommunications regulator has just banned the practice of zero rating, where operators charge different tariffs for different data services. That means mobile carriers can no longer charge for normal mobile data usage but exempt certain services from counting towards the data limit.
Crucially, Facebook’s Free Basics service, which gives people free access to a limited set of services through special partnerships with local mobile carriers, is now effectively dead in India. For the operators, the whole point of Free Basics is to get people used to the Internet, then encourage them to buy a data plan so they can see what people are linking to from the free services.