In July 2025, Perplexity partnered with Airtel to offer free Pro subscriptions ($200 value) to 360 million Indian users. Recently, Google announced free Gemini Pro access (worth $396) to all 505 million Jio users for 18 months. OpenAI followed immediately, making ChatGPT Go free starting November 4.

This isn’t generosity — it’s the largest data-harvesting operation in history disguised as digital philanthropy. India serves as “a high-pressure testing ground and key source of training data“ — what works here scales globally.

With a billion internet users, India offers what Silicon Valley desperately needs: diverse training data (users generate training data through every query), behavioural patterns from emerging markets, proof their systems work outside Western contexts… The “free” AI service extracts value worth multiples of the subscription cost.

Nick Clegg’s How to Save the Internet, published in September 2025, defends exactly this model. His core argument: the global internet is fragmenting as democracies seek to rein in Big Tech, Silicon Valley pivots to America-first, and authoritarian regimes segregate their populations.

He claims that “many of the charges against them – including that their algorithms polarise, manipulate and harm – are vastly overstated or simply untrue.” His solution: international cooperation preserving Big Tech’s ability to operate across borders without meaningful constraint, what he calls “radical transparency.”

The book warns that “imposing national borders on the internet would undermine its capacity for sharing knowledge, collaboration, education, trade, research.”

I need to be clear here. What Clegg calls “saving the internet” is actually ensuring platforms can operate across borders, harvesting attention and data at global scale, deploying increasingly sophisticated capture mechanisms. Not preventing harm but guaranteeing the machine’s global reach.

Silence on Meta

 In March 2018, The Guardian exposed that Cambridge Analytica had harvested data from 87 million Facebook users without consent. The company lost $120 billion in value overnight. Seven months later, Facebook hired Nick Clegg as “President of Global Affairs.”

Clegg brought perfect credentials. As UK Deputy Prime Minister (2010-2015), he’d mastered defending the indefensible. After pledging to oppose tuition fee increases — his party’s signature promise — he enabled their tripling. The Liberal Democrats lost 49 of 57 seats. His political career ended with personal defeat in Sheffield Hallam.

This pattern — principled rhetoric masking expedient compromise — made him ideal for Meta. He became Zuckerberg’s heat shield, creating the Oversight Board to give the appearance of accountability without sacrificing control.

The book’s defining feature is what’s absent. No mention of Meta’s documented role in Myanmar’s genocide, where Facebook amplified content contributing to 700,000 Rohingya refugees.

Nothing about Frances Haugen’s revelations that Instagram worsens body image for 32 per cent of teenage girls. Silence on Facebook groups generating 650,000 posts attacking election legitimacy before January 6.

In August 2021, Clegg himself forwarded an email to Zuckerberg requesting resources to address teen mental health, noting it was “increasingly urgent” and that the company’s “well-being work is both understaffed and fragmented.” Zuckerberg apparently never responded. This doesn’t appear in the book.

The book appeared shortly after Clegg departed Meta. His replacement, Joel Kaplan, had spent years arguing against content moderation. Within days, Meta ended fact-checking and reversed content policies — demolishing every reform Clegg’s book champions. 

The Business Model

Most revealing is what Clegg considers “saving the internet” — preserving Meta’s ability to operate without meaningful oversight. Not protecting democracy. Not preventing teen suicide. Not stopping genocide. Just ensuring the attention-harvesting machine keeps running globally.

Clegg never acknowledges Meta’s fundamental problem: its business model requires harmful outcomes. The algorithm amplifies outrage because outrage drives engagement. It spreads misinformation because lies travel faster than truth. These aren’t bugs — they’re profit mechanisms.

Meta extracts approximately $200 annually from each North American user’s attention. Users check Instagram 53 times daily, spending 38 days yearly feeding the machine. The “radical transparency” Clegg proposes amounts to disclosure without change — publishing cancer statistics while maintaining nicotine levels.

Real reform would require breaking up the company, banning surveillance advertising, or criminal accountability for documented harms. Clegg mentions none of these.

The Playbook Scales

 The pattern plays out globally. India migrated 1.2 million government email accounts to Zoho, wrapping private monopoly in sovereignty rhetoric.

Foreign AI companies capture the population through telecom partnerships. India’s government champions Zoho for “digital sovereignty” while Silicon Valley champions free AI for “democratisation.” Both narratives obscure identical reality: private platforms capturing critical infrastructure.

The timing tells everything. As Clegg’s book appeared warning about “fragmentation,” Silicon Valley executed the biggest land grab in tech history through Indian telecom oligopolies. Jio and Airtel control 860 million subscribers — partner with them, distribute to most of India overnight. This is “Free Basics” 2.0: Facebook’s 2015 free internet scheme, banned for net neutrality violations, now returning as “free AI.

Meta explicitly stated it will use AI interaction data for targeted advertising. The infrastructure being built through Indian partnerships isn’t for answering questions — it’s for keeping feeds full, attention captured, ads delivered. The free AI today becomes the behavioural prediction engine tomorrow.

What Accountability Requires

Clegg had unprecedented access during Myanmar, January 6, teen mental health crises. He could have explained why Meta chose engagement over safety every time, profit over democracy consistently. Instead, we get elaborate deflection. He acknowledges “challenges” while denying culpability, admits “mistakes” while defending the system that makes them inevitable.

True accountability would mean admitting Meta’s core operation — harvesting attention through behavioural manipulation to sell to advertisers — is fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing. That he wasn’t a reformer but a professional legitimiser hired because he’d proven he could maintain progressive aesthetics while implementing regressive policies.

But that would require leaving Meta, advocating for its breakup, supporting real regulation. Instead, Clegg wrote a book defending the prison he helped build, then left quietly with stock options vested.

The internet doesn’t need saving from fragmentation. It needs saving from Meta’s business model, from monopolies masquerading as sovereignty, from AI slop pretending to be creativity, from billion-user data extraction operations disguised as democratisation, from books like this that make our capture seem reasonable.

Book Details

You can find the book here.

(The reviewer is a product designer and researcher working in the tech sector in Bengaluru)

Published on November 12, 2025