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The 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday (January 2, 2025) ruled against the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) second attempt to enforce net neutrality, the idea that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equally by telephone and Internet companies. service providers (ISPs).
The backlash highlights India’s divergent approach to the issue over the past decade and recent attempts by telecom companies to find a place within India’s neutral approach to extract payments from major technology platforms.
What is net neutrality and why is it important?
Absolute neutrality seems straightforward, but the United States and India’s wars were started by — and driven by — completely different motives. US technology companies such as Netflix have shunned attempts by telcos and ISPs to extract payments from them to expand the bandwidth they have made available on their services to meet demand. Digital rights advocates, who sided with tech companies on the issue, fear the broader implications of allowing Internet providers to establish “fast lanes” and “slow lanes,” shorthand for a battle that quickly gained momentum and resulted in the Obama administration’s first FCC. decision on this matter.
India’s experience has been different. In 2014, before Reliance Industries Limited’s Jio entered the market and made mobile data cheaper, Bharti Airtel Ltd tried to charge higher data rates for internet calling on apps like Viber (WhatsApp had not yet introduced calling), which caused a systematic movement, but in the end it increased. against the practice of discriminatory data pricing. At the time, Facebook entered the debate with a large marketing budget to protect its Free Basics service, which aimed to provide certain Internet services to users without a data plan. The discriminatory data price war became zero-rating, the specific practice of exempting certain data from charges.
A telco double-dip effort that threatens Net neutrality
Net neutrality advocates won. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) respectively banned discriminatory data rates in 2016 and made net neutrality part of the Consolidated License (in 2018) that all telcos and ISPs must comply with. As a result, telcos have not been allowed for ten years to sell prices similar to WhatsApp-only packs, or to slow down or speed up certain internet services compared to others.
“The Internet must remain a permissionless platform,” RS Sharma, who oversaw the net neutrality debate as TRAI chairman in the late 2010s, said in a phone interview on Friday. “The basic issue is that there should be total isolation, isolation in the sense that you cannot be the gatekeeper” of Internet data like a telecom operator or an ISP, said Dr. Sharma.
In the US, Obama-era regulations were rolled back by the FCC under President Trump in his first term, an effort led by then-chairman Ajit Pai. Under the next Biden administration, the rules were reimposed by Mr. Pai’s successor, Jessica Rosenworcel.
The return of the Net neutrality debate in India
Over the past two years, Indian telcos have pushed a demand that was trivial in 2014 – when mobile internet traffic was ignored – but has been front and center in the US: forcing the big internet companies to pay for the traffic they generate. use internet provider networks. Telcos call this a network usage fee, a requirement that has alarmed net neutrality advocates.
Dr. Sharma argued that this was a “useless” debate. “Ultimately, they (telcos and ISPs) sell bandwidth, and they charge for bandwidth. If they want to, they can raise the price of bandwidth, but they can’t raise the price of bandwidth only in certain companies,” he said.
The Union government has so far not shown that it will entertain the demand, and a senior DoT official said that “no such proposal” was under consideration last May, months of campaigning by telcos on the issue. On the other hand, the victory of the advocates of neutrality was not completely hampered. Years after the concept was enshrined in telecom licenses in 2018, TRAI recommended the creation of a multi-stakeholder body to advise on the issue. In 2022, the Ministry of Communications rejected the proposal, citing measures to combat the spread of COVID-19.
Published – January 04, 2025 01:01 pm IST