Facebook launches Internet.org in India Tuesday Feb 10,2015

 

Chris Daniels, Vice-President of internet.org at Facebook along with Gurdeep Singh, Chief Executive Officer, Consumer Business, Reliance Communications and Markku Mäkeläinen, Director, Global Operator Partnerships, Facebook at a press conference in Mumbai on Tuesday Feb 10,2015

Facebook on Tuesday announced a tie-up with Reliance Communications to launch Internet.org in India, bringing to the land of a billion-plus people a service that the social media giant says helps affordable Internet access but whose critics disapprove its restrictiveness. 

India now becomes the sixth destination for Internet.org, a Facebook-led initiative envisaged about a year-and-a-half back with six other founding partners, including Samsung and Qualcomm.

The service has already been launched in Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Colombia and Ghana

Facebook’s 30-year-old founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the development on his social network. He posted, “More than a billion people in India don’t have access to the internet. That means they can’t enjoy the same opportunities many of us take for granted, and the entire world is robbed of their ideas and creativity.” 

The tie-up gives subscribers of the Anil Ambani-led Reliance Communications who have Internet-enabled handsets free access to 38 Websites – a mix of news, music, education, weather and health sites. The list includes Facebook, Wikipedia, and Reliance Astrology. 

The lone search option available is Microsoft’s Bing which can be accessed via an Android app.