TRAI gets 24 lakh comments on net neutrality paper

“Rather than create digital equality as your petition claims, Facebook’s Free Basics program risks exacerbating digital inequality”.

While telecom firms, including Reliance Communications which had put its Free Basics offering on hold, asked the regulator to let market forces prevail in order to expand connectivity, larger industry groupings were split down the middle on the idea. In addition, the concern that has been repeatedly raised is that providing free open access across the board would lead to misuse of the facility and lead to high usage of services like photos, videos, entertainment (common use cases in social networks) etc. and such usage will not only impact the use of essential services but also have negative social consequences to a population that would be new to the internet.

The back-and-forth highlights the complexity of providing Internet access, now considered a human-rights issue.

Internet rights and advocacy groups have written an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg criticising Facebook’s Free Basics program for undermining the principles of net neutrality. The result has been a battle of words over the last month between Facebook and critics of the service, which is already available in 36 countries. “Facebook’s Free Basics program risks exacerbating digital inequality”, the letter said, adding that “At most, the world’s poorest people get partial access to the internet”.

Nasscom said issues concerning differential pricing for data services need careful consideration due to their possible impact on net neutrality.

“Those who aren’t connected want affordable, innovative new opportunities to come online”, a Facebook spokesperson in an emailed statement Thursday. Those telecom companies, which are most adamantly against strict net neutrality rules, are challenging the USA regulations in court. But Free Basics has encountered a great deal of global attention lately, and one must consider that Egypt’s rocky relationship with American social media companies is also at play here. On a follow on question asking if the Central/State Government should provide free internet access covering essential/useful citizen services, 78% said an affirmative Yes. While libraries “don’t contain every book”, he wrote, “they still provide a world of good”.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India on Friday said it had received 24 lakh responses to its consultation paper on differential pricing for data services.

Free Basics allows poor mobile phone users to access pared-down versions of certain apps and sites, including Facebook and Wikipedia, as well as health and education information, without paying for the data they consume.