Sir/Ma'am,

I am a Masters in Informatics student at TU Munich, one of the most esteemed universities in Germany in this field. The recent debate and the complete crony capitalist like behaviour of some Indian telcos and startups comes as a shock to me. Net Neutrality is a fundamental pillar of the Internet. To protect it will be a boost for creative capitalism over crony capitalism like behaviours.

With the recent slogans of Make in India being made popular by the current government, how are we to foresee a future where entrepreneurs can use their creativity to start off companies and become job creators for an increasingly young India that needs a lot of local job creation viz. a viz. foreign investment fuelled job creation. We have seen over the past few years a trend in Indian markets of jobless growth and increasing income inequality. India has its own problems, its own methods at solving them, and young Indians will be the ones who will work towards finding those solutions. Many a times they will require free and neutral access to the internet, without which we can only expect even the corridors of entrepreneurship becoming hostage to crony capitalism. Its a well known fact, that e-governance can cut out a lot of corruption in our system and hence governments around India are trying their best to take Internet to every household. That also means as more people are connected, they can avail non-governmental services that the Internet provides too. And that access to service should be neutral irrespective of which website or online service they are trying to connect to. For all I would care, I would prefer governmental services being given preference over rest of the Internet to make the lowest strata of our society to easily access government schemes and services without going through a clogged and apathetic bureaucracy. But when it comes to the private sector, access to the Internet should be neutral for all.

I might never start a startup but in-spite of that I will support a neutral Internet as that is the very spirit of the Internet - it is not a property of any government or of corporations and it is for all to enjoy the fruits of it.

Major technological companies would not have been what they are today had it not been for a neutral internet. Facebook is a global social media giant, but when it launched - had it not been granted neutral access compared to other famous social medias of the time like Orkut or Hi5 - it would have never become what it is today. The same can be said about the launch of Google and its history. These major corporations have been very much against any law shaking the foundations of Net Neutrality even in the USA. I only hope they would stand for the same in India. 

Net Neutrality is also entwined with Consumer rights and consumer protection. If major e-commerce retailers were to make use of anti-net neutrality laws and make access to their smaller competitors difficult and slower, what incentive do these big corporations have in improving their services? When BSNL was perhaps the only service provider in the field, we all know of stories of total apathy of the bureaucracy running BSNL and the corruption in it. Is this what we should expect from our big e-commerce corporations? A monopoly over anything over the internet will only kill modern day entrepreneurship and harm consumers. It will also take away from consumers their right to a free choice. It will become increasingly difficult for bulk of consumers to not rely on the major online websites for various reasons. These corporations already have enough funds to woo consumers with massive ad campaigns that their smaller competitors might not be able to match. If over that they were also to gain faster access to their web services - it will be a monopoly and nothing short. 

Lack of competition will kill the much warranted race for improvement, thus affecting this internet based sphere of corporations with the same corruption and inefficiency we at times see in other organisations. 

Major telcos and companies wishing to provide such services to users that shatters the concept of net neutrality (a concept whose far reaching implications might not be so easily visible to the common man in India) should explain why and what they wish to achieve with these primarily monopolistic plans. When western countries have time and again upheld net neutrality laws even in the face of massive corporate lobbying by primarily telcos (and not new age internet based corporations) I feel India too can tackle this challenge and continue to safeguard the basic structure of the Internet by going in favour of Net Neutrality.

Regards
Pranav Jagdish
Resident of Delhi, India 

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