Colonialism is a touchy subject in India. For a very long time, there has been debate in the country around the source of their economic growth or lack thereof. So, when Facebook investor Marc Andreessen tweeted last night that “anti-colonialism has been catastrophic” for the country, you can imagine the backlash that he faced.

Advertising

You see, Facebook launched something called Free Basics, which is a program that is meant to provide free, albeit limited, Internet access to people in countries where it is not readily available to them. This Monday, India banned the program, claiming that it violated net neutrality. Andreessen wasn’t thrilled about the ban and pulled a Kanye West, airing it out on Twitter. (Net neutrality seems to inspire gaffe after gaffe, no?)

The argument used by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India in banning the program makes sense, too. By giving Indian people access to certain apps of the company’s choosing, Facebook was essentially shaping the Internet access and use of millions of people, which is everything the company and its commitment to providing connectivity to

people around the globe are supposedly not about. Mark Zuckerberg wrote an op-ed in The Times of India, insisting that Free Basics actually protects net neutrality. Obviously, this situation was a tangled web long before Andreessen barreled through it with the subtlety of a pig at a primary.

It started innocuously enough:

When someone replied and told him it sounded like he was justifying “Internet colonialism,” he responded with the offending tweet, which has since been deleted.

This is where Zuckerberg jumped in. The Facebook founder posted the following message today on the website he created:

I want to respond to Marc Andreessen’s comments about India yesterday. I found the comments deeply upsetting, and they…Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, February 10, 2016

“But to shape the future, we need to understand the past,” is pretty profound, but I guess that’s what Facebook statuses are for. Hopefully, all of this is resolved soon so that the good people of India can have uninhibited access to their friends’ and family members’ profound statuses, too.

Based on the latest tweets coming from Andreessen’s account, a resolution may be on the horizon because it looks like Zuckerberg’s post got to him:

[image via screengrab]

For more from Lindsey, follow her on Twitter.

Tags: Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg