Net Neutrality – An Indian Perspective

Net Neutrality means that the Government and Internet service providers should consider the Internet as an open network and should not implement discriminatory protocols and charges as per the content, application, vendor or other parameters.

As per definition the Internet is open and supports free speech.

Countries like the US, Chile, Netherlands and Brazil have already adopted Net Neutrality with Chile being the first to implement the principle followed by Netherlands and Brazil.

Of late discussions on the topic of net neutrality gained a huge momentum.

The debate was triggered due to instances of violations of net neutrality in India demonstrated by Facebook’s Internet.org,Aircel‘s Wikipedia Zero, Aircel’s free access to Facebook and WhatsApp, Airtel’s free access to Google, and Reliance‘s free access to Twitter.

This compelled the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the independent regulator of the telecommunications business in India to dive into the matter.

While the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) guidelines for the Unified Access Service license promote net neutrality, they are not enforced. Even the Information Technology Act, 2000 does not prohibit companies from throttling their service in accordance with their business interests.

TRAI believes that this is due to the lack of specific “law governing rules”. To ensure that India doesn’t face such issues in the future, TRAI and the government are looking to clearly define the do’s and don’ts.

As a proactive measure, the TRAI published a well laid out consultation paper on Regulatory Framework for Over-the-top (OTT) services in March 2015 and encouraged the public to comment freely on the same. The consultation paper was condemned by various politicians and internet users for being one sided and having confusing statements.

In reaction, by 24 April 2015, over a million emails had been sent to TRAI in support of net neutrality.

On 27 April 2015 TRAI announced the names and emails of more than a million people who commented on the “Regulatory Framework for OTT services” in a public report which ended in negative reactions from both those who submitted those comments to the internet activist groups like the Anonymous.

As a repercussion TRAI’s official website,trai.gov.in was taken down by the Anonymous group using DDOS attack which was tactfully denied by the officials in the name of website unavailability due to high traffic volume.

The Department of Telecom prepared a team of six officials to form framework for the government policy on ‘net neutrality’ along with recommendations of the telecom regulator.

The appointed panel has submitted the report to Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and the final version will be made public soon, maybe a week.


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