Net neutrality: shrill voices, zero-rating and revenue envy
TRAI has muddied the waters by appearing to favour the arguments of the telecom service providers in its consultation paper ANUP KUMAR argues that rather than an ‘either-or’ option, a third alternative exists. Pix courtesy: netneutrality.in
After hearing the recent comment about “shrill voices” in the debate over “Net Neutrality” coming from Rahul Khullar, chairperson of TRAI, it seems that this time round the regulatory authority is not happy with the boisterous nature of the democratic debate in the public sphere that treats an expert and a dilettante on the same level.
The Telecom Service Providers (TSPs), i.e. the cellphone companies, are suggesting that “ideal” Net Neutrality is not viable. They had been complaining to TRAI that OTT services are crowding the bandwidth and also cutting into the revenues that would have otherwise come to TSPs from SMS and voice calls.
The TSPs want the OTTs to share the cost and one way to do that is to charge a fee for the use of OTT from either the consumer or the OTT providers.
From the TRAI paper, there appears to be a sort of revenue envy going on between the OTT and TSPs.The argument seems to be fair and suggests that OTTs are free riders, although it is not that simple.
The logical endgame of the TRAI proposal seems to be that the OTT companies or consumers should either pay up for the cost escalation in the network or they could be diverted to slower lanes on the information superhighway of the Internet. However, the problem with this argument is that it breaches a foundational principle behind open access of information via the Internet – Net Neutrality
The Federal Communication Commission (FCC), the telecom regulator in the U.S., stopped the telecom companies from breaching the principle of Net Neutrality by issuing the
Open Internet Order that put in place guidelines on transparency of data traffic management, no blocking of content and no unreasonable discrimination of websites.
“The theory of the wisdom of crowds suggests that the markets have noticed something:
the broadband industry hates net neutrality, but its existence has always had a huge and unnoticed upside. Selling broadband is a great business …”
However, the TRAI Consultation Paper argues that the U.S. case is different and in India we need regulations that address the Indian context. The main thrust of the TRAI paper is that it would not be such a bad thing to cut corners around the principle of Net Neutrality.
Moreover, the TRAI paper has muddied the waters by quoting
The Economist on how Net Neutrality is a “slippery concept” and “difficult to sustain” in view of TSPs’ mandate to ensure efficient traffic management of the flow of data on the Internet.
The TRAI paper suggests that to sort out the issue of the seeming revenue envy and traffic management, some sort of mechanism is required for advertising revenue to be shared between the OTT content and service providers and the TSPs.
Expanding Internet access to the poor around the world and in villages in India is a worthy goal, but let us be frank here.
The TSPs such as Airtel and the OTTs such as Facebook are not doing this for purely altruistic purposes.
We will be fooling ourselves if we accept that there is a free lunch in a free market. For accessing zero-rating services the users will have to allow companies such as
Facebook to show them advertisements and collect usage data. As in the case of free email and social networking services, this is a déjà vu moment and a slippery slope on issues of transparency, open access, privacy and the free press.
Anup Kumar is associate professor in the School of Communication in Cleveland State University.
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Net neutrality: shrill voices, zero-rating and revenue envy
