The cynic in me (which is all of me) doesn't think it's an accident that it keeps getting portrayed this way. Same with a Bloomberg article the other day.
When this first launched in India a couple months ago, the realization of what was going on really hit me. I was already opposed to it for net neutrality reasons, but in practice the program just rolled out Facebook and a few apps without data charges to everyone, not just the unconnected, which was extra flagrant. I wrote this: https://medium.com/@firasd/facebook-s-internet-org-free-basi...
1) When Free Basics launched India, the problems with it turned out to be even worse than I expected. I wrote about how the local marketing (‘Free Facebook’) and Zuck’s post (‘farmers getting weather information’) had completely different messaging.
2) I pointed to another article that dove into these issues about who actually uses Free Basics.
3) The reporter who wrote the article this HN thread is about (“How India Pierced…”) couldn’t find a single person who was introduced to the internet through Free Basics.