Representational image only. File
The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday (January 2, 2025) ruled against the second attempt of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to enforce net neutrality, the concept that all traffic on the internet must be treated equally by telecom companies and internet service providers (ISPs).
The setback highlights India’s divergent path on the issue in the last decade and telecom companies’ more recent attempts to find some room within India’s net neutrality approach to extract payments from big technology platforms.
What is net neutrality and why does it matter?
Net neutrality appears straightforward, but the United States’ and India’s battles started — and were driven — by completely different motivations. U.S. tech companies such as Netflix had chafed at attempts by telcos and ISPs’ to extract payments from them to broaden the bandwidth they made available to their services to catch up with demand. Digital rights advocates aligned with the tech firms on the issue, fearing the broader consequences of internet providers being allowed to establish “fast lanes” and “slow lanes,” an abstraction of the fight that quickly gained momentum and resulted in the Obama administration’s first FCC ruling on the matter.
India’s experience has been different. In 2014, before Reliance Industries Limited’s Jio entered the market and made mobile data cheaper, Bharti Airtel Ltd attempted to impose higher data tariffs on online calls on apps like Viber (WhatsApp had not yet introduced calling), sparking a coordinated, but eventually widespread movement against the practice of discriminatory data pricing. Back then, Facebook entered the debate with a massive marketing budget to defend its Free Basics service, which aimed to provide some online services for users without a data plan. The discriminatory data pricing fight became one about zero rating, the specific practice of exempting certain data from fees.
A telco double dip attempt that threatens Net neutrality
The Net neutrality advocates won. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) respectively banned discriminatory data pricing in 2016 and made net neutrality a part of the Unified Licence (in 2018) which all telcos and ISPs must comply with. As a result, telcos have not been allowed for a decade to sell tariffs like WhatsApp-only packs, or slow down or speed up certain online services in comparison to others.
“The internet must remain a permissionless platform,” R.S. Sharma, who presided over the net neutrality debate as TRAI chairperson in the late 2010s said in a telephonic interview on Friday. “The basic issue is that there should be complete unbundling, unbundling in the sense that you cannot become a gatekeeper” of online data as a telecom operator or ISP, Dr. Sharma said.
In the U.S., the Obama era rules were rolled back by the FCC under President Trump in his first term, an effort spearheaded by then chairman Ajit Pai. Under the next Biden administration, the rules were reimposed by Mr. Pai’s successor, Jessica Rosenworcel.
The return of the Net neutrality debate in India
In the last two years, Indian telcos have advanced a demand that was not relevant in 2014 — when mobile internet traffic was negligible — but has always been front and centre in the U.S.: forcing large internet companies to pay up for the volume of traffic they occupy on internet providers’ networks. Telcos term this as the network usage fee, a demand that has alarmed net neutrality advocates.
Dr. Sharma argued that this was a “useless” debate. “Ultimately, they (telcos and ISPs) are selling bandwidth, and charging for the bandwidth. If they want, they can increase the price of the bandwidth, but they cannot increase the price of the bandwidth only for certain companies,” he said.
The Union government has not appeared so far to entertain the demand seriously, and a senior DoT official said that “no such proposal” was under consideration last May, months into the telcos’ campaign over the issue. On the other hand, the net neutrality advocates’ victories have not fructified completely. In the years after the concept was cemented into telecom licences in 2018, TRAI recommended the creation of a multi-stakeholder body to advise on the issue. In 2022, the Department of Telecommunications rejected the proposal, citing COVID-19 austerity measures.
Published – January 04, 2025 01:01 pm IST
