Dear TRAI,

For some personal background about me and my involvement with the internet, you can look below.

I use the internet for work in a very serious way and was a prime mover in the creation of an Indian mirror of the arXiv (which distributes scientific papers all over the globe in an open access way).

Hence, it concerns me that road blocks to a free and unfettered data network are being erected.

1. Who will arbitrate on how or why some net servers will be charged? How will this not prevent the development of services like arXiv in the future?

2. There are numerous services like "ssh", " rsync", "irc" which are used by the scientific and technical community. Who will decide that these will get higher or lower priority? The http service itself was an "experimental" one at one point! If we let commercial interests prioritise "popular" services, how will new networking ideas be tried and developed?

3. As someone with a long involvement in network and computer services, I am sure that those who want to cheat the "system" will find new ways to do so. The regulation of network usage is only likely to hamper those who are honest but want something useful which the rule makers did not think of!

In summary, I would be quite willing to live with current or even marginally higher data rates provided the network remains unfettered. The companies that provide connectivity would do well to improve their quality of service (there are dead zones even in tier-1 locations like Pune and Hyderabad!) rather than make deals to provide special connectivity for services that they think the people want!

Thanks for reading through so far.

Regards,

Kapil Hari Paranjape.
Professor of Mathematics,
IISER Mohali
Mohali
Punjab
India.

Some notes on my background.

I have been an internet user since 1989. I have participated in the development of software and services for use with and without the network (you may visit http://www.imsc.res.in/~kapil for further information). So I have some idea of the technical side of the internet even if I have much less involvement with the commercial aspect. However, I have also been a personal subscriber to broadband at home and to 2g and 3g networks from the time when they became available.(I haves dialup and PPP before that!)

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