Telcos should not be allowed to play the role of gatekeepers to the Internet and the government should ensure Net neutrality principles are upheld, Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on Friday. Chandrasekhar, who interacted with start-up entrepreneurs and young professionals here, said telcos remain the biggest threat to Net neutrality and thus, start-ups. “One…
Telecom service providers and net neutrality activists stuck to their stands at an open session hosted by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on differential pricing on Thursday. “With this, SaveTheInternet.in team has enough ammunition to show TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) that Facebook did not inform users”, said Kiran Jonnalagadda, CEO of HasGeek,…
Citizen and media censure of Free Basics, Facebook’s subsidised internet platform, has been one of the more heartening developments in the country over the past few weeks. There seems to be a fairly universal view that net neutrality, which forms the basis for opposing Free Basics in its present form, is relevant for internet users…
India’s telecom regulator has strongly criticised Facebook over its campaign to drum up support for its Free Basics internet plan in India. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said a poll prompting people to support the plan was “crudely majoritarian and orchestrated”. It had earlier asked the mobile network that partnered with Facebook to…
from the we-see-what-you-did-there dept For much of the last year now, Facebook has been under fire in India for its “Free Basics” zero rating campaign, which exempts Facebook-approved content from carrier usage caps, purportedly to the benefit of the nation’s poor. Critics however have argued that Facebook’s just trying to corner developing ad markets under…
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has tried every trick in the box to bring ‘Free’ Basics to India. Some of our sources had revealed that he had been making personal calls to India to pitch the new initiative. Now, a report by BusinessInsider reveals that Paytm Founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma was among the many founders that Mark…
Judgement day is approaching for the fate of net neutrality in India. As Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) gears up to frame the net neutrality rules, telecom operators have favoured differential pricing for data services. Nearly 80% replies to the regulator’s consultation process follow the Facebook ‘templates’ for its controversy-ridden Free Basics platform. Net…
The final day of submission of comments to the telecom regulator turned out to be quite uneventful compared to the month-long high-decibel social media campaign that ensued to disallow Facebook’s Free Basics entry into India. But the volunteer-led groups said that this was not the end of the road for them or for the larger…
Net neutrality is a principle that promises equality for all packets of data over the internet. The topic has spurred wide public debate and credit for this goes to Trai, which has set high standards for public consultations. In August 2014, faced with growing demands by telecom companies for separately charging users and internet companies…
We list developments around Net Neutrality which we missed from the last week of December and early January chronologically: 27 December 2015: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is aiming to solve issues with Net Neutrality* in the country by early this year (2016), reports ET. TRAI will evaluate issues part by part and…