Because it's the opposite of net neutrality. It's picking winners and losers. If Facebook is free, but you have to pay for local home grown Indian social networking sites, well then how will those businesses ever compete?
Personally, I'm torn. I'm all for free access to Wikipedia. The problem is, not all of the world's knowledge exists there, so you therefor are only giving people a taste of knowledge.
With Facebook and Google, you are choosing the silos for people, and making it very very difficult for competitors. And without competition, localized monopolies tend to stagnate, which ultimately hurts consumers.
I see the argument for competition, but I don't think that freedom is as important as the freedom of communication and education.
Imagine someone in the slums of India (there are tens of millions in these conditions) wanting to learn more about irrigation. Is it more important that they have no limited internet for the sake for competition, or limited internet?
Fair enough. But consider the fact that there ARE alternative solutions and internet.org is not the most optimal.
Why not give X megabytes/month data to the user for free and let HIM chose what the "essential internet services" for HIM are? Internet.org is a non-profit so it would be completely fine giving it for free. But even if they wanted to recover their costs, they could do it in a neutral manner - by ads.
Even with your premise accepted, there are better solutions. Internet.org's current model makes sense only when you consider the ulterior motives as well.
Neither is important if they have offline-cached copies of Wikipedia (all the content of which is readily available for download and made available under a CC-BY-SA / GNU GFDL dual-license), which can then be distributed on optical media, thumb drives, or some other relatively-inexpensive data distribution medium.
This is something that's totally compatible with net neutrality while providing the same benefits you're advocating.
Old PCs are actually much cheaper nowadays than even the cheapest smartphones of equivalent computing power, and typically include more than enough storage space for the entirety of Wikipedia. One shared PC in a community would solve that problem right quick.
Even without that, thumb drives are usable with smartphones via OTG cables.
Funny thing is, people could probably use Wikipedia to fulfil all the functions that Facebook fulfils for users (not the function it fulfils for Facebook/advertisers).
I could see pages used as public group walls, profile pages as personal walls, "discuss"-pages as discussion. Only thing missing is "private" chat/pages -- but a browser-plugin with support for OTR/GPG (encrypt to many recipients...) could fix that, and be way more secure/private than Facebook...
Personally, I'm torn. I'm all for free access to Wikipedia. The problem is, not all of the world's knowledge exists there, so you therefor are only giving people a taste of knowledge.
With Facebook and Google, you are choosing the silos for people, and making it very very difficult for competitors. And without competition, localized monopolies tend to stagnate, which ultimately hurts consumers.