DoT report rekindles fire over Net Neutrality

Reactions to the government panel's report on Net Neutrality range from stunned to amused, and most are wondering whether it has given in to the pressure from the telecom giants.

Nikhil Pahwa, a volunteer of savetheinternet.com and editor of MediaNama, said that while the department of telecom (DoT) committee has taken a middle path, it has deviated from the main objective of coming out with a regulation for saving the Net Neutrality to saving telecom companies' (telcos) revenues.

"What was supposed to be a regulation for protection of Net Neutrality has turned out to be more a regulation for protection of telcos' revenues. Curiously, the panel even states it so in the report and we are opposed to any such move," he said.

G Krishna Kumar, a Bengaluru-based telecom executive, is also quite amused by the submission of the panel to the telcos' demand.

"It is quite amusing that even after the uproar created due to Airtel Zero, it has been given an okay by DoT panel stating that Trai (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) would take a decision on a case-by-case basis," he quipped.

Airtel Zero is a platform developed by Bharti Airtel that will charge app developers for data while consumers will get free access to it. Many believe it goes against the tenet of Net Neutrality as it will discriminate between apps.

At the same time, both Pahwa and Krishna Kumar believe that the panel's suggestions have some positives too. One of them being no licence required by over the top players (OTTs) for instant messaging services in the domestic market.

Pahwa, however, feels that institution of carriage fee for internet usage under Airtel Zero-like platform would be a disadvantage for start-ups and could compel them to set up their businesses elsewhere in the world.

According to him, the DoT committee's report was a shade better than the Trai's consultation paper that was outright in favour of telcos.

"This is much better than Trai's consultation paper, which was the worst possible regulatory document," he said.

The Ministry of Communications & Information Technology is following a bureaucratic process whereby various agencies are simultaneously working to come out with a regulation for internet. Besides Trai and DoT committee, a parliamentary standing committee has also been constituted for this purpose.

A few months back, there was a huge hullaballoo over Trai's consultation paper that received over one million responses in support of Net Neutrality, and some 450 start-ups had made a representation to the prime minister raising concerns.

Krishna Kumar is of the view that pure Net Neutrality was just a wishful thinking.
"Telcos will need flexibility on cost and priority of data. While differentiation based on broad category of applications like VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), streaming, etc., is okay, we don't want specific content providers' data to be given different priority. For example VoIP apps should be given higher priority, but within the group Viber and WhatsApp should not be differentiated," he said.

Even Mahesh Uppal, director, Com First India Pvt Ltd, said Net Neutrality of the kind in the West was a non-starter in India. He feels something like Airtel Zero was necessary to help telcos to come up with innovative pricing to subsidise people to come on to the internet. Today, internet penetration is as low as 20%. Given the low internet access, Uppal believes the debate on Net Neutrality, at this stage, was more like the 'if you can't eat bread, eat cake' argument. "Net neutrality cannot be treated as a priority, given India's level of internet usage and access," he said.

Many also cannot decipher the discrimination between Airtel Zero and Internet.org as they are not very different from each other. The government expert committee believes that the content and application providers like Internet.org should not be permitted to act as a "gatekeeper".

Internet.org, although criticised by DoT, has over 80 million subscribers in the world and over eight lakh users in India.

A Bank of America-Merrill Lynch (BoA-ML) report on the issue said that government committee's stance seems "mildly positive for telcos" as it would reduce voice revenue cannibalisation from VoIP.

BoA-ML analysts Sachin Salgaonkar and Karan Parmanandka wrote if the suggestions were accepted by the government, new telcos like Relaince Jio (RJio) could look at acquiring VoIP licence.

"Given RJio's lack of traditional voice offering and considering that its Vo-LTE offering may not be mature immediately, we see possibility that Jio may look to acquire a VoIP license," they say in the report.

According to them, if such a scenario were to play out, then there would be no free VoIP call offers and this would be positive for all telcos as it will reduce cannibalisation of voice revenues from VoIP uptake. Their international revenues, however, would remain under pressure as that traffic would continue to move to VoIP.