Sir/Madam,
I am a final year MBBS student from Mysore Medical College. I have used
the Internet starting from 8th standard. Of all the things I have
learned in life, more than half comes from the Internet.

Currently I have my own website (learnlearn.in) containing knowledge and
information I have and am gaining through my life.

The way I look at the Web and the Internet is as a conversation medium.
The Internet allows us to have conversations that we could not have had
in real life because of distance.

It lets a poor student in a remote village in Bihar or Karnataka connect
with a professor in Harvard or Berkeley University. It lets people who
are motivated by the same ideas come together and discuss their
philosophies. It lets people belonging to different cultures and
countries freely talk about the virtues and vices of their cultures.

Please do not let anyone change the way Internet is now.

Internet is analogous to telephone calls in the past when operators had
to connect wires to different sockets to connect calls. Imagine if the
operators said that to connect to particular people, you would have to
pay more or wait longer and to certain others you could connect easily
and fast. How difficult would it be to have a telephone conversation in
such a situation with the slower parties? How will people who are given
the slower connection ever get phone calls?

Neutrality of data packets is the backbone of the Internet.

Any legality that allows ISPs to decide which websites load faster, or
which websites would be free, or which websites will be slow or paid,
anything to that effect, would heavily damage the open nature of the
Internet.

Voices would be left unheard. And innovation would be stifled.

Please, please, please, never let anyone differentiate traffic on the
Internet.

If ISPs are running at a loss, let them charge more for GPRS or 3G
packs. If necessary, let them increase charge for Internet usage, but
not for particular websites.

My worries are not restricted to the damage that will happen to the open
nature of the Web. I am anxious about how the ISPs will abuse legalities
and pave way to surveillance, denial of opportunity, censorship and a
lot of other issues.

In medicine, there is a golden rule: "Prevention is better than cure".
Please do whatever it takes to prevent an eventuality where the Internet
loses its essence as an open platform for the exchange of ideas.

Yours sincerely,
Akshay S Dinesh
Mysore Medical College,
Mysore.