Net Neutrality in India

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What is Net Neutrality ?

Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or mode of communication.   - Wiki


Where Does India Stand in Net Neutrality ?

As of DEC 2014, There are no laws enforcing net neutrality in India.


Typical Example of Net Neutrality Violation :

AIRTEL:  Differential rates for VOIP calls like Skype over cellular data 


"All Special Tariff Vouchers (STVs) for data services (through which customer can avail discounted rate) shall only be valid for internet browsing and will exclude VoIP. To avail VoIP services, customer would need to purchase a separate STV for VoIP."

Source - Airtel Webpage


AIRCEL:  Differential rates for Facebook and WhatsApp against the  base tariff of 10p/10KB


"If you're new to Aircel, then you can get to enjoy free Facebook and WhatsApp for 60 days. (Up to 100MB/month,post which, data on Facebook will be charged at 2paise/10KB)"

Source - Aircel Webpage


Why is this happening ?


Radio frequency spectrum has become a scarce resource. The 2G spectrum scam and the following spectrum auction ended up the cellular companies paying a high premium to get the spectrum and cellular companies are losing a large chunk of their SMS and Call revenues to companies like whatsapp, skype and others. With call rates in India said to be the lowest among the world, diminishing profit margin will certainly result in poor quality and slow rate of technological adaptation which will eventually put the smaller players out of business, hence the Cellular companies are fighting with Differential rates for contents to keep up their profit.

But this is bad, because 

- We already pay for the DATA and what we do should be none of their concern.

- What cellular providers are doing is slicing up the Internet into types of services, and charging for those separately. Today its for VOIP, facebook, whatsApp and soon it will extend to gmail, youtube and others.

- Also there is a privacy issue Instead of having a dump pipe, cellular providers will start doing do deep packet inspection to check what we are doing online. 

- Chance of Discrimination and Favoritism for various online services like bing over google , Amazon over flipkart and so on.

- While the Profit due to SMS and call has declined, Profit from Data has contributed to growth in cellular companies revenue.

In the not near Future : 

Google and Facebook has many initiatives going on like Google fiber, project loon and Internet drones by which they can have their own internet infrastructure and also can extend Internet access everywhere.



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