Dear Sir,
With regards to the Consultation paper for OTT services, I want it to be known that I am strongly of the opinion that active regulatory oversight is needed to preserve net neutrality. 

A 'services pay for bandwidth' regime may reduce the cost of internet access to the masses, but this will not be the internet at all. It will be a terrifying ghost of the internet that will end up giving absolute authority of the internet to companies like Facebook and Google. Hundreds of millions of people would never see or know of the internet outside of these websites!


The internet has, like never before in the history of mankind, made it possible for small groups of people without boatloads of money to change the world. Wikipedia was a startup that nobody thought would succeed. It had less than 20 employees in 2007 and still has only 57 employees worldwide. Craigslist and tumbler, which are now fast growing and extremely popular social websites with hundreds of millions of daily users, have 30 and 18 employees respectively. Whatsapp had only 55 employees worldwide when it was bought by Facebook in February 2014 for 19 billion dollars!

Today, the internet is dominated by american companies. But our startups are catching up. Zomato is quietly becoming the leading food app in Asia and Europe. Meru and Ola are giving competition to Uber and flipkart and snapdeal are same level fighters in India as global ecommerce giant Amazon. Hundreds of other extremely innovative Indian internet startups are coming up every year and it's only a matter of time before we make the next Facebook or Google. If we remove net neutrality, these will never stand a chance. 

We cannot pander to the wet dreams of these international Giants who are trying to fool us into destroying our IT startups and becoming the lords of the internet for all eternity. 

Sir, we need a framework, like the FAA has made in the US against intense lobbying from internet majors, to specifically disallow speed or access throttling of the Internet by service providers. Otherwise, we will destroy our startups and millions of our people will never see the internet beyond that censored by a few companies. 
 
Regards
Rohit Gupta

Viat instruments pvt ltd. 
Module 2701-04, Shilpangan phase 2,
Salt lake sector 3, block lb1
Kolkata 700098, India
Ph: +91 33 23352925
Fax: +91 33 23352926
Mobile +91 9903023490
www.viatin.com