Zuckerberg Woos India to Save Internet.org: Your Top Headlines for Wednesday

Mark Zuckerberg is going all out to win Indians over to Internet.org. Facebook’s CEO has figured out that the global backlash against his internet partnership in developing markets is actually rooted in India’s fight for net neutrality. Zuckerberg, therefore, is focusing on winning over Indian entrepreneurs and tech executives to Internet.org. While on the one hand, the CEO is talking to key Indian startup founders to convince them of the benefits, on the other, Facebook is in talks with the government to pay to subsidize data access for Indian consumers, who are facing the highest data costs in the world.

 Rahul Yadav’s AMA on Reddit didn’t quite go as you would expect. If you went in looking for drama, curse words and controversy, well, that didn’t really happen. What we did get was some candid remarks, his side of the story with Sequoia and some trolling of restaurant review app Zomato and Ola Cabs. Read more here and here. The entire AMA can be accessed here.

 The battle between offline and online retailers has now reached the courts. And the government is caught in the middle. The Retailers Association of India, which represents the brick and mortar stores, has sued the government, demanding similar rules for both kinds of players, specifically for foreign investment. While foreign direct investment in online retail is banned by the government, foreign companies can operate marketplaces here. FDI in offline retail comes with a host of riders, that the companies say deters investors.

 The government is trying hard to free up the country’s gold assets by offering a variety of sops to Indians encouraging them to deposit their gold with banks. To start with, tax on interest earned from gold will be waived. The objective is to encourage Indians to treat their gold, estimated at 20,000 tonnes, as any financial asset, rather than hoarding them at home as a guard against inflation. There were expectations that the gold monetization plan will also tap the biggest temples, which hold most of the gold, usually donated by worshippers, to monetize them. This is not the first time this proposal has been mooted, but mindsets are changing so we can hope for some progress.

 HT Media wants to catch digital innovators young. The publisher of Hindustan Times and Mint newspapers has launched a startup accelerator for digital media and advertising companies and has roped in Marcus Brauchli, a former WSJ and Washington Post editor turned media investor, as partner. The Indian media company is trying hard to play catch up to rival Times Internet, which is involved in a host of digital startups in food, real estate, jobs and content. The times are a changing for digital media.

It's that time of the year again. After the budget session of Parliament, the finance ministry has drawn up a list of government-owned companies in which it wants to sell shares to raise money. This year there are 25 companies in the list, but with the stock market in doldrums, it remains to be seen whether all or some of these make it to market and what the response will be.

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