Net Neutrality

'Net neutrality' is not the most well known of terms. However, in the last few years, there has been a constant rise in discussions regarding net neutrality and an open-internet due to the threat of restrictions imposed on internet access by large corporate firms.

Net neutrality is the principle that individuals should be free to access all content and applications equally, regardless of the source, without Internet Service Providers (ISPs) discriminating against specific online services or websites.

Why is net neutrality important?

The basic principle of Net Neutrality is that access to all websites and web services should be equal and that anyone can start their own website or service and make it accessible to anyone with internet access, just like any other website or service.

Without Net Neutrality, your Internet Service Provider could arbitrarily block whatever websites it didn't want you to access. For instance, your ISP might block you from accessing its competitors' websites. It could also mean your service provider purposefully degrades access to certain websites or services and/or forces you to pay extra to access certain websites or services. Without net neutrality, for instance, you may be forced to pay ₹500 extra to access Instagram, Snapchat and other websites.

Let us take a basic example:

Say Pepsi owns a stretch of highway, and this was a toll highway. Now say Pepsi decided that any truck carrying Coca-Cola had to pay twice as much as anyone else to use the highway.

This would obviously be unfair, immoral and somewhat illegal as Pepsi is using the highway to give themselves an unfair advantage.

So, in the United States, there's a company called Comcast. Comcast is a very large ISP. There's also a content studio, Universal Pictures. Universal makes a lot of well known movies. Turns out Comcast actually owns Universal.

Now, if Comcast decided to charge a company like Netflix an additional fee for traffic on Comcast's network, then that wouldn't be fair because this is actually a direct conflict of interest to the benefit of Comcast.

Another example would be if Comcast decided to provider slower connection speeds (or throttling) to its internet subscribers watching Netflix instead of Comcast's own streaming service. That would also not be fair because it too, is a direct conflict of interest to the benefit of Comcast, and unfairly treating subscribers.

Both of those above examples are actual events that have happened. Therefore, it can be concluded that net neutrality is excruciatingly important.

India's stance on net neutrality

Fortunately, India has strong net neutrality regulations and norms. 

As of July 12, 2018, Net neutrality has come into effect in India. These rules ban any form of data discrimination. ISPs which violate these rules can have their licenses cancelled. The debate on net neutrality in India gathered public attention after Airtel announced in December 2014 additional charges for making voice calls (VoIP) from its network using apps like WhatsApp, Skype and so on.

In March 2015, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) released a formal consultation paper on Regulatory Framework for Over-the-top (OTT) services, seeking comments from the public. The last date for submission of comment was 24 April, 2015 and TRAI received over a million emails. On 8 February, 2016, TRAI took a revolutionary decision, prohibiting telecom service providers from levying discriminatory rates for data, thus ruling in favor of Net Neutrality in India. This move was welcomed by millions of Indians and also by people from other countries who are fighting or fought for net neutrality and the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners Lee.

The Bottom Line

In my opinion, net neutrality is quite underrated. Every single one of us uses the internet on a day-to-day basis. Heck, you're reading this post on the internet. If the readers had to pay to access my blog, it would get exactly zero views. The internet has millions, if not billions of unique websites and web-services. Nobody can afford to pay for each website or web service individually. This not only harms the consumers but also has adverse effects on the internet as a whole. Moreover, I'm sure that Tim Berners Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, would never want his invention to be exploited by corporate giants vying to make a big buck.

In the end, net neutrality is absolutely essential. I would like to end this post with a video on net neutrality by Extra Credits.

Thank you for reading and have a great day ahead!

-Ritin Malhotra