Facebook board member offends India. Facebook recoils - CNET

Marc Andreessen needs to tweet a billion apologies.

The prominent Silicon Valley investor and Facebook board member took to Twitter Wednesday to apologizes for a series of offensive tweets he posted the night before.

The short missives touched a nerve because they appeared to reference India's colonial history. The world's second-most populous country, with more than a billion people, was a British colony until 1947.

Here's the backstory: On Monday, India's Telecom Regulatory Authority blocked Facebook's Free Basics, which seeks to bring a limited number of Inteet sites and services for free to areas of the world where online access is unavailable or virtually nonexistent.

The decision was part of a ruling on Net neutrality, the principle of equal access to all types of content and services on the Inteet. Facebook, the country concluded, was violating those ideals by picking which services were accessible for free.