Much ado about net neutrality

In the last week or so there has been much hullabaloo over net neutrality. Everybody started going gaga about it when the issue was brought under the spotlight by a bunch of stand-up comedians, who run a popular channel on YouTube by the name All India Bakchod (AIB), put up a video on how telecom providers were vying to rake in some moolah by segregating websites into different categories and charging separately for each category.

The video was extensively shared on Facebook and retweeted on Twitter by the general populace and celebrities alike with one demand: #SaveTheInternet. Ever since watching the video every Tom, Dick and Harry has an expert opinion on “how the telecom industry is filled with a bunch of looteras”.

But what exactly is net neutrality and why is it necessary?It is more or less equal rights for all sites, meaning that all sites should be treated equally, which again means that no telecom operator should tweak the speed of any website by a few notches by being partial to another. Treated equally? Partiality? Are websites even discriminated in the first place? The answer is yes. According to AIB’s video, telecom majors are all for virtual space discrimination and have even submitted a proposal to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) for the same.

So why are telecom operators against net neutrality? Telecos are pissed off that the extensive use of apps such as WhatsApp and Viber have left their revenues from SMS and video calling services biting dust. So, they want to charge differently for different sites. One price for browsing the latest videos on YouTube, another price for Instagramming a selfie that you just clicked, another price for WhatsApping an important piece of text to your friend.

By having particular companies investing in their service, telecom providers will offer the investing company’s site to a user for free and will charge the user when they try to access a site that hasn’t invested in the service provider. This is basically a win-win situation for telecom providers as they make money from both the company-end and the user-end. This also affects new start-ups as telecom operators slow down the speed of the start-up site and the user ultimately gets fed up of trying to access the said site and opts for an alternative instead.

The milk price conundrum

Tech guru Kiruba Shankar puts down the concept of net neutrality in laymen terms. “Say, a milkman is charging Rs 40 per litre. He goes on to say that the milk must be used only for making tea or coffee. If you want to use the milk to make milkshake you must pay Rs 100 per litre. That is absurd. That is exactly what will happen if there isn’t net neutrality. Telecos should be concerned about providing the internet service, not what the user does with it,” Shankar points out.

“The internet is the only medium that is completely democratic,” says Shankar. “What the telecos want to do is put a leash on it. Kill democracy. Airtel Zero and Internet.org may sound beneficial to both the customer and the marketer, but they actually aren’t. While the big players in the market might benefit from it, small, medium enterprises will not stand a chance to compete should telecos take control of which site can be browsed free of cost and which site can’t,” he can’t.

Mark Zuckerberg, who had come up with internet.org in back in 2013, recently declared that he was all for net neutrality.A mass cyber exodus is currently underway, as many Indian media and technology groups like NDTV and Cleartrip are backing out from the Facebook-backed initiative, Internet.org, in support of net neutrality.Recent developments also saw that e-retailing major Flipkart backed out of Airtel Zero, a platform that would offer sites of the investing companies to users for free.

By:E Sai Kishore