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Business News/ Politics / Policy/  Trai’s order on net neutrality wins media approval in India and abroad
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Trai’s order on net neutrality wins media approval in India and abroad

India has joined a select few countries that have protected net neutrality and barred zero-rating services

Photo: BloombergPremium
Photo: Bloomberg

New Delhi: Thanks to the regulations issued by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) barring differential pricing of data based on content, India has joined a select few countries that have protected net neutrality and barred zero-rating services.

What makes this “victory" surprising was the complete asymmetry of the two sides involved. On one side was Facebook, a company whose market cap is greater than the GDPs of 144 countries, allied with a bunch of big telecom companies (telcos). They had already won easy victories for their platform in a number of countries, and felt India would be no exception. They had an ad campaign that estimates put at 400 crore. On the other side was a motley group of free software and Internet activists, with unlikely allies such as comedy group AIB, a bunch of start-ups, and some political figures and formations.

A Mint editorial welcomed Trai’s step. The order, rightfully, puts a spoke in the wheels of arguments and economic models in favour of splitting the Internet (thereby creating “our" Internet and “their" Internet), recognises that the Internet is a public good, and delegitimizes efforts to treat various types of content differently on the Internet. In a country where concentration of power and wealth have traditionally been driven by information asymmetry, and where, thanks to technology, a sunshine legislation, and a media explosion, the benefits of doing away with such asymmetry were becoming obvious, the Trai order is welcome.

Trai’s 8 February ruling, however, won’t be the last word on the net neutrality debate in India. Facebook and telecom operators are expected to challenge the ruling in a higher court of law or before the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT), according to The Guardian.

Firstpost runs the readers through key regulations to show how websites, apps and services that were accused of violating net neutrality principles will be affected by the Differential Tariff Regulations.

Trai has clearly indicated that the public interest is served by its network neutrality regulations. It has even taken a lead by completely prohibiting zero-rated services that the US telecom regulator Federal Communications Commission permitted on a case-by-case basis. However, as appreciation flows in from abroad for Trai becoming a world leader in network neutrality regulations, moderation is important, given the certainty of a legal challenge by telecom companies.

At the heart of the matter is a 11-month tussle. Writes an activist in The Wire, “What we’re telling our government is this: On our airwaves, make sure that every mobile carrier in India offers every person in India the full internet and not just some small corner of it chosen by Facebook. That’s it. No special Facebook landgrab on government property, our wireless spectrum. What Facebook is saying is this: allow the mobile companies using government-owned bandwidth to offer just Facebook and Facebook-chosen sites and nothing else, and let them grab the land or users they want."

The move effectively bans a Facebook program called Free Basics, a suite of lightweight versions of popular sites—including, of course, Facebook—that don’t eat up data the way visiting other mobile sites does. The idea is to give people an affordable way to get online, but it has long been criticized by advocates for net neutrality as a way of giving an unfair advantage to certain websites. If you offer only a certain group of websites for free, the argument goes, doesn’t that give an unfair advantage to those sites? You don’t have to actively block or throttle your competitors to destroy them, reports the Atlantic.

India’s decision demonstrates that the implications of net neutrality (or not) are playing out in the real world and have the potential to affect billions of people. The decision also has profound business implications for Facebook, says the article, adds the Atlantic report.

But what India’s decision means for zero rating globally, however, remains unclear. Jeffrey Eisenach, co-chair of the Communications, Media and Internet Practice at NERA Economic Consulting, argued in an analysis in December—at Facebook’s request—that the practice was good for India. Far from being an anti-competitive practice, he wrote, differential pricing “allows Internet services to be extended to a larger user base, thereby exploiting both supply- and demand-side economies of scale and scope and setting in motion a ‘virtuous cycle’ from which all market participants benefit."

In his view, the Trai ruling reflected an activist definition of net neutrality, a concept that he described as notoriously difficult to pin down. In the US, the debate revolves around concerns that Internet service providers (ISPs) will charge companies more for faster traffic—a practice Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley chiefs staunchly oppose. In India, however, the debate has taken aim at programs that offer Internet service for free.

A Wall Street Journal opinion piece finds the suspicion that Free Basics would harm Indians baseless. “Free Basics would have helped develop an online market in a country with an Internet penetration rate of about 27%, one of the lowest in Asia. Some 40% of Indians who used Free Basics went on to pay for regular Internet access, according to Facebook. It wouldn’t have been long before competitors entered the market for free and low-cost Internet service," it said.

The larger question that remains, however, is what are the rights and duties of platform monopolies towards their users? With Google and Facebook emerging bigger than many nation states, this is the key question for the Internet in the future, according to an opinion piece in The Hindu quoted earlier.

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Published: 10 Feb 2016, 12:39 PM IST
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