So you are simultaneously saying that the cut throat competition of the telco sector is keeping the data and call rates at global lows (a good thing), and saying that we need not have the same competition when the infrastructure for rural India is built out? If competition acts the way it normally does, someone is certainly going to figure out how to connect rural India in an economically viable way and profit immensely.

Or the mathematics won't pan out, and the company dies. And the government will probably step in to fill the breach. And it will probably do an awful job (remember the mathematics never panned out?)

Both of these are good outcomes. Compare this to handing over the control of such vital infrastructure to a megacorp which has a consistent track record of violating the trust of everyone - the users (random privacy rule changes), the advertisers (fake video views), those they acquire (e.g. the comedy show called WhatsApp ads), the jurisdictions they operate in (arbitrary censorship of content to make sure they kowtow to the public flavor du jour) and last but not least the legal system (claiming that they cannot/will not infer a WhatsApp user profile based on FB user profile knowing the pitifully tiny effect of the punitive damages).

With such a track record, it is a surprise that they even have the temerity to still approach governments around the world to propose FreeBasics.

See the point is you don't have the right to impose your preferences on somebody else(here, rural Indians). Concretely, a rural Indian might be okay with privacy violations as long as they believe this benefit outweighs that. They if given a chance might enter into voluntary transaction with FreeBasics, you should not get to stop voluntary interactions.

Why do you get a say on what their preferences are?

Well said. To be honest, I was one of those robots (influence by social media) who posted and pushed net neutrality a lot on social media. Now my stance is more free market oriented (libertarian).

I think the socialist vs democracy revolution which happened last century is happening with libertarian vs democratic ideas now. You will not see it until it hits it's peak but it's well underway.

So in other words rural India was saved from becoming the robot slaves of social media activists by those very same activists?