Opinion on the Net Neutrality and Internet Regulation paper.

To whomsoever concerned.

These are my humble opinions on some of the subjects discussed in the paper. I have tried to write it in the best of my abilities, and there might be some error in my grammar and language, so please forgive me whenever this happens.

Question. Should there be licensing of Whatsapp, WeChat, Ola, Uber, Line, Viber, Hike, Skype (communication Internet companies), and Flipkart, Snapdeal, Paytm, Saavn, Gaana, YouTube, Redbus, Naukri, Makemytrip (non-communication Internet companies ) in India or not?

My opinion: One of the reasons I have an Android phone compared to an iPhone is because of its cost. I hardly pay anything for the above products. These applications are a mediating agaent between me and the product that I seek. Licencing these applications is comparable to licencing these (Flipkart, Whatsapp, Naukri, etc.) on my desktop too. Would I need to pay extra money to watching a highlight of some random cricket match on YouTube on my desktop? The answer to that is quite frightening. Th services in question here have their same effect and application over other platforms like Smart-TVs, PCs, and Servers. At the moment, we are paying for the internet and are not bothered about paying for these services, as the medium is the internet, for which we are paying a monthly fee. A system of licencing these free services will be hard on a normal, economical user, who already has to pay over Rs 2000 for internet on phones and PCs.

Question: Should telecom operators in India (Airtel, Idea, Vodafone, Uninor, Reliance Communications , Reliance Jio) be allowed to do “traffic shaping” and use differential pricing:

Slow down some sites/apps and speed up others
Make some sites/apps/types of services more expensive, some sites/apps/types of services cheaper. Slice up the Internet into packs, so that instead of buying as per kb or mb, you are buying, say, a Whatsapp pack, a Twitter pack, a Flipkart pack.

Create gateways so you get only some part of the Internet?

My Opinion: An average internet user visits hundreds if not thousands of websites every month. Based on statistics and charts, the telecom operators can keep adding the number of sites to fast lanes and increase the price a user pays on top of the money they get from annual and monthly subscriptions. The number of channels on the TV is close to 200, but, websites, are not a countable commodity. So, a system to slow down websites, or have a package to control speeds of listed and non-listed websites is again a painful experience for an avenrage user.

Dear sir/madam, I am a research student. I need to access a barage of websites to garner data for my studies and career. If the website I am going to access tomorrow is behind some sort of a paywall, or bundled under terms and conditions I have not known, it complicates my every day routine to monitor how I am going to use a service which was as simple as breathing the air till now. If vegetables are sold based purely on their nutrition values, and if I am not a person who can afford apple with high amount of Vitamin A, and can only buy ones with low taste, low proteins and vitamins, it will be hard to even consider buying apples. Also, this hurts the use of internet in rural areas, where the bulk of the Indian population resides and who have no knowledge about the complications of the service they are about access.

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Dear sir/madam.

Please consider the impact of these systems on the future of a country that has over 1.4 billion potential internet users. The service providers are highly profitable companies, who are trying to move the system to work in their favor. Net Neutrality is a boon similar to babies having two lungs from birth. We don't know the impact of these systems yet, but considering debates over the internet and social media, it will hit all the users hard, a base that was built and nurtured by the users themselves and not by the companies. Giving the power to monitor and control the way a consumer uses a product not subject to competition to a company like Idea, which ran a thoughtless ad campaign of lies, is a nightmare to the average Indian internet user.

With a prayer of hope and concern, I am closing this mail.

Thank you for reading.

Govind.