SOURCE:
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/net-neutrality-internet-web-apps-telecom-companies/1/440876.html
MOTHER OF ALL THE BATTLES FOR
THE FREEDOM OF INTERNET
Whose Internet Is It, Anyway?
By
Ball in Government's Court as
GREEDY SELF CENTRIC INDIAN TELCOS
move to compartmentalise the world wide web
NET NEUTRALITY IS A LITMUS TEST
FOR
THE MODI GOVERNMENT
INTELECT SLAVERY
OR
INTELECT FREEDOM
YOUR FREEDOM
TO
FREE ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE IS UNDER ATTACK
IF INDIAN PUBLIC
LOOSES THE NET NEUTRALITY BATTLE
THAN
BE PREPARED TO FALL
INTO
PREPETUAL INTELECT BONDED SLAVERY
OF
INTELECT RATIONING
Information is the new gold. It is the new oil. Anyone who controls information has access to great wealth and power."
From Killswitch: The Battle to Control the Internet (2015), directed by Ali Akbarzadeh
Neutrality, as a philosophy, is the tendency to not take sides in a conflict. It is different from apathy, ignorance or indifference. It means tolerance regardless of how unusual, unpleasant or even deplorable a perspective might be.
It is this spirit of neutrality that has made the internet The Great Democratiser.
A universe within a universe that offers a chaotic mesh of ideas, throws up countless possibilities, and provides a level-playing field for all-be it a media conglomerate headquartered in Silicon Valley or a tiny start-up in small-town India.
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The raging discussion on net neutrality-the principle that the internet must be free and open, and all information must get equal weightage no matter who is creating it-impacts far more people than just the tech community. Once you look past jargon such as 'gatekeepers', 'data packets' and 'network architecture', you realise that the fundamental questions are two fairly simple ones: who does the internet really belong to-the telecom companies who provide the cables that enable access to it, or the users who fill it with apps, data and information? And, what is the primary role of the internet-is it a tool to pay bills, watch TV shows and keep in touch with friends, or is it a round-the-clock symposium of ideas, opinions and innovations that could redefine the space we inhabit today and the times we will live in tomorrow?
Facebook's Internet.org attracts 8 lakh users in India
Although the discussion on network neutrality is almost a decade old even in India, its various twists and turns have become pronounced over the last few weeks, and are likely to get more angular as the government gets ready to frame a clear policy on it soon. At the heart of the problem lies a push by telecom companies, who also double up as service providers either via broadband or via mobile phones, to strike deals with certain websites and apps to offer them preferential treatment. This can either be in the form of making them part of an exclusive "zero rating" in which no data charges apply, or in the form of ensuring faster browsing speeds for their products, thereby encouraging ( read 'FORCING' ) users to go to these websites and apps more often than other newer products devised by smaller companies. In India, for example, Airtel stirred the pot by offering a zero rating for data transactions on certain websites. Their private club included the biggest e-commerce marketplace Flipkart, just as Internet.org, a similar scheme by Reliance Communications and Facebook, included one of India's biggest travel portals Cleartrip and news portal NDTV.com, but the companies pulled out because of a public backlash once the net neutrality debate went viral.
Leading proponents of neutrality, such as Medianama.com, argue that both these initiatives would effectively split the internet into different zones-free and paid, Indian and foreign, big companies and small start-ups, and into sections monitored by individual service providers.
TRAI won't display emails if you specify it
Net Neutrality vs Net Opportunity
The telecom companies, who all say they want an "open internet", counter net neutrality with a catchy phrase of the own-Net Opportunity. This is the philosophy that internet use must be inventively monetised
( PAY AS U USE THE INTERNET, USAGE FEES SLAVE TO THE WHIMS OF THE TELCOM OPERATOR)
in order to connect remote parts of the country where there is still no access. They suggest that neutrality is stopping them from making enough revenue to effect this expansion. As Rajan Mathews, director general of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) put it in recent interviews: "People espousing net neutrality in India say that everyone who has access to the internet should have access to every website or application, and we are not denying that. What we are asking is, what about the 1 billion people in India who do not have any access;? They too must have access to the internet."
The COAI's 'Sabka Internet' campaign, which talks about a "Digital Bharat" and "affordable internet for all" on a website peppered with heartwarming images of internet usage in rural India, is a subtle distillisation of this anti-neutrality argument. To put it in a poker (and French Revolution) metaphor, the telecom companies are effectively saying, "We see your egalite, and raise you a fraternite."
INDIA HAS GOT TWO GOVERNMENTS "DILLI SARKAR" & "BCCI" IF MODI SCUMBLES THAN INDIA WILL HAVE THIRD GOVERNMENT
COAI KI SARKAR
( Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) ki Sarkar)
However, the argument of the telecom companies, made by citing the Rs 1.1 lakh crore spent to purchase spectrum in March and the hit to voice and SMS revenues being caused by OTT (over-the-top) services such as Skype and WhatsApp, isn't flying with everyone. The genesis of the latest controversy lies in a March 27 "consultation paper" released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) -that made a series of recommendations. Along with suggesting that any company using voice or messaging should buy a licence from the government even if it was operating from abroad, TRAI recommended that internet companies register with service providers to ensure smooth delivery to users. Going by these recommendations, a telecom company such as Airtel could sign a deal with an OTT app such as WhatsApp, offering it for free while throttling a competitor such as BlackBerry Messenger or smaller apps such as Kik Messenger. Since this was a consultation paper, TRAI asked for views from internet users across India by April 24. Over the course of that month, they received comments from 1.1 millon people ask- ing them to preserve net neutrality by neither licensing OTT services nor giving telecom companies the right to charge different prices for different Web-based services.
What stood out in the TRAI's consultation paper was how different it was to the views the regulator had held in the past. In a 2006 paper, TRAI Review of Internet Services, for example, it had categorically said that net neutrality must be protected because it is this principle that has "allowed many companies (application service providers, content providers etc) to launch, grow, and innovate".
The regulator had also sounded a warning: "Internet access providers may (one day) use their market power to discriminate against competing applications and/or contents. The issue of net neutrality in the long term can threaten the popularity of the public internet-based telephony and similar other applications as all the intermediate internet providers may start asking commercial agreements in absence of which they may refuse to carry the content and provide desired quality of service." Incidentally, the TRAI chairman at the time, Nripendra Misra, is now principal secretary to Prime Minister
Narendra Modi.
Supporters of net neutrality suggest that the change of heart has come because of pressure from telecom companies. TRAI denies the allegation. But neutrality supporters, led by a group of artists, professionals and entrepreneurs who have come together to start the Save The Internet campaign, allege that telecom companies are pushing for changes even though they are growing at a healthy rate and the reduction in voice and text revenues has been more than made up by increased data usage (see graphic). They also point out that the three leading telecom companies, Airtel, Vodafone and Idea, have added between 7 and 11.5 million 3G internet connections in the last four quarters alone. India is expected to have in excess of 354 million inter- net users by June 2015 with 213 mil- lion of these also using their phones to go online.
Government Under Pressure ( read BLACK MAIL )
The stakes have now become higher than just protecting neutrality as it exists at the moment.
Net neutrality supporters want more than status quo.
Even as the telecom companies are asking for the freedom to monetise, these groups are asking for the exact opposite-strict guidelines or laws that make it mandatory for service providers to uphold net neutrality.
While TRAI is a regulator with legal powers that allow supervision of tariffs and "quality of service", binding guidelines are usually framed by the Department of Tele communications (DoT), which gives operating licences to telecom companies. The ball, therefore, is in the government's court, and its attempt to strike a fine balance between the telecom lobby and public out-cry has met only limited success so far.
In a May 21 meeting of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology, headed by BJP MP 
Anurag Thakur, the government met with opposition from the ruling party's veteran leader L.K. Advani. At the meeting, where representatives of service providers Airtel, Vodafone and Idea were invited to present their case, Advani sided with Trinamool Congress MP Derek O'Brien and Congress MP KVP Ramachandra Rao, who insisted that consumer forums and OTT service providers should be invited first. "Delhi is hot. But deliberations at Parliamentary Committee meetings just got even hotter," O'Brien tweeted soon after the meeting. O'Brien, who had first raised the issue through a 'calling attention' in the Rajya Sabha told INDIA TODAY: "We don't want to fight the telecom companies, but we have to take care of consumer interests." Even in Parliament, Congress Vice President 
Rahul Gandhi has pushed for a law to protect net neutrality, linking it with his tirade against corporate favours by what he describes as a "suit-boot ki sarkar". Though the government has been talking about sup- porting an open internet, its stand on the various nuances of net neutrality is not quite clear. Sources in the telecom ministry say they are still waiting for reports from the standing committee, TRAI and DoT, along with keeping their ear peeled for public opinion, before taking a firmer stand. Telecom Minister 
Ravi Shankar Prasad, how-ever, has been quoted as saying that "various ways to implement net neutrality, such as introducing clauses in the licensing conditions" are not out of the question.
Incredibly though, it is the internet's power as a 'DEMOCRATISER ' that is turning out to be the biggest hurdle for the telecom companies. It was a 23-page summary of the TRAI's 118-page consultation paper made by Save The Internet that high-lighted issues which would have otherwise got overlooked. And it was All India Bakchod, the comedy collective, that simplified the problem through a pro-neutrality skit that went viral online and pushed users to flood the TRAI with emails. A bit like how John Oliver had turned the debate in the United States after a pro-neutrality segment on his show Last Week Tonight last June. In his show, Oliver had famously said: "They shouldn't call it 'Protecting Net Neutrality'; they should call it 'Stopping Cable Company F*ckery'."
So can the Web remain a platform where every opinion, no matter how disagreeable, and every piece of information, no matter how unpleasant, gets equal play and equal band- width?
Chances are that the internet itself will ensure that it does.
Follow the writer on Twitter @_kunal_pradhan
