Telecom regulator Trai has received around six lakh comments on its consultation paper over ‘Differential Pricing for Data Services’ — one of the important issues under net neutrality principles. “Till Thursday, Trai received about 5,40,000 comments. These comments have suddenly come and mostly around Facebook’s Free Basics service. Today comments would have crossed six lakh,”…
If you log in to Facebook today, among the many notifications you receive, you might see one exhorting you to ‘Act now to save Free Basics in India’. “Instead of giving people access to some basic Internet services for free, they demand that people pay equally to access all Internet services, even if that means…
On a day when Prime Minister Narendra Modi shared the Digital India stage with a host of telecom bosses, consumer representatives slammed those companies in the meeting of the standing committee on communication and information technology, discussing the net neutrality issue. Seven representatives of the “Save the Internet” campaign — started after a consultation paper…
That a DoT panel has come out in favour of partial regulation of over-the-top services like Skype and Viber is easy to understand. For, no matter what the proponents of the so-called net neutrality may argue, allowing a Skype or a Viber a free ride on networks—that telcos have spent upwards of Rs 750,000 crore…
Paid prioritization in the delivery of content over mobile devices has been found to be against net neutrality by a high-powered government committee, which has also censured Facebook’s controversial internet.org platform as it is seen to “extract value”, ostensibly in the name of public purpose. Paid prioritization includes specialized platforms where telecom operators provide greater…
Amidst the ongoing debate on Net Neutrality, India played host to world-famous Economist and Libertarian Theorist David D Friedman. A staunch advocate of free markets, Mr. Friedman was on a trip to India recently with talks in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. His main field of work has been market anarchist theory. This was also the subject…
The European Union has reached an agreement on Net Neutrality which said that telecom companies and Internet providers in the EU are not allowed to block or throttle online content, applications, or services. The EU agreement also banned paid prioritization of Internet traffic and ruled that all traffic should be treated equally. “These rules will be a…
With barely 24 hours ahead of the big launch of the Digital India week by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, #NetNeutrality activists are once again at it with a campaign to mislead and provoke based on half baked facts. So what is the truth of this so called DoT Panel Report on “Net Neutrality” and the claims…
The telecom department’s much-awaited report on ‘net neutrality’ is said to have recommended disallowing the controversial zero rating plans of telcos while proposing that throttling and any sort of prioritisation of Internet traffic should be banned by the government. “There should be no paid prioritisation which creates discrimination and no degradation of traffic on the…
In his own words, Ravishankar Said, “Report of net neutrality will be out soon. But as I said in the Parliament, I will have to wait TRAI report also. We are expecting that the RBI will give license for payment bank to the Department of Post by August.” We all know about the net neutrality…