Dear TRAI,

The Internet is built on principles of openness and freedom. At the core of this is non-discrimination at an ISP level. So, three principles of Net Neutrality which have emerged and are reflected in some foreign legislation including the most recent order of the FCC in Open Internet include:

1. No discrimination in terms of speed: no throttling (slowing something down, like Comcast did with Netflix), or speeding it up (like Airtel did with YouTube).

2. No discrimination in terms of access: no gateways like Facebook’s Internet.org, which only includes a few websites and plays kingmaker. No blocking of certain sites just because they compete with you (for example, some operator could block Saavn.com because it has its own music service… :D).

3. No discrimination in terms of cost: access to one service should not be more expensive than another. Today, when you access something online, you don’t really think of how much it costs you to access, because it’s all the same. This means that startups compete on the basis of product, not on the basis of cost of access. If there is discrimination in terms of cost, then startups will have to queue up outside a telecom operator’s doorstep, and the telecom operator will play kingmaker. Companies with deeper pockets will pay to make their services free, and this way, kill competition because other services will be paid.