Net Neutrality no more?

TRAI’s decision to do away with net neutrality will give power to service providers to charge consumers more for availing services of apps and websites which have been available for free use. Ayub Dawood voices his opinion

Net neutrality is the practice of treating all websites equally irrespective of the kind of content that the website is giving to consumers. There is no distinction as to who is uploading or downloading what kind of data, as all the websites are given equal bandwidth and are charged the same.

Recently, there has been uproar in the Indian telecom market, with TRAI, which by far had not introduced any law related to net neutrality, coming out clean with their plan to allow Indian service providers to attach different values for different websites. This means that instead of using platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook and Google for free, the consumers will have to pay extra charges as decided by the service providers. This practice, which is clearly aimed at allowing service providers to make more profits and giving preference to platforms that partner with them, will eventually lead to hefty sums being extorted from consumers and is unfair. With such a rule in place our internet packs will be like the packages that are selected while subscribing to DTH providers. This scenario is already leading to providers flouting business ethics (such as Bharti Airtel, which is open to partnering with apps to provide consumers with free access). But, the decision isn’t final yet as TRAI is conducting a consultation process, as per which consumers and other providers can respond with answers to twenty questions on TRAI’s official e-mail by 24 April. The responses and comments will be taken into account while taking a final decision regarding India’s net neutrality regulation.

So save yourself (and other oblivious internet users) by sending maximum mails in support of net neutrality to advqos@trai.gov.in, while it’s still free and accessible.