BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

A Demand For Net Neutrality Roils India, Campaign Reaches Crescendo

This article is more than 8 years old.

In an unparalleled, passionate campaign, India’s internet users have sent nearly 400,000 emails in the past three days asking the country’s telecom regulator to safeguard internet neutrality. The number of emails is expected to double in the coming days.

The regulator, Telecom Authority of India (TRAI), is currently being bombarded at the rate of 10,000 mails per minute through a campaign Savetheinternet.in set up by a chain of volunteers. The campaign is in response to TRAI soliciting public opinion on whether telecom firms, who are also India’s biggest internet service providers, can be allowed to charge different rates for different uses of internet data – for instance, email usage or internet browsing charged differently from usage of apps like Whatsapp, Viber and Skype.

India is to grow its mobile internet user base to 173 million by June 2015.

Along with hundreds of thousands of vociferous internet users, leading opposition politicians, actors and even stand-up comics are flooding the regulators’ inbox and egging on their followers to do so. A video campaign created by India’s best-known comedy group All India Bakchod has gone viral on social networks, its followers spewing ridicule against the regulator’s move.

“This is a shocking and totally unexpected response, we have never seen anything like this before on the Indian internet,” a campaign volunteer Kiran Jonnalagadda said. The intensity of the campaign demands that the telecom regulator and the government take notice, said Bangalore-based Jonnalagadda, founder of a platform for coders.

Net Neutrality, or the belief that internet service providers ought to treat all internet traffic on their networks as equal, became a hot discussion topic after the telecom authority began soliciting user opinion last month. On top of that, last week the country’s largest telecom provider, Airtel, launched Airtel Zero, a platform where companies that pay can have users browse their sites or use their apps for zero data charges i.e. free.

Airtel Zero was widely slammed as an assault on net neutrality which could potentially smother startups and innovators as it unfairly pits them against players with deeper pockets who can tout their services for free. Thousands of internet users attacked Airtel for its discriminatory product which they said would un-level the playing field for smaller companies and stunt the growth of ecommerce in India.

Airtel itself responded that Airtel Zero is ‘free’ to all consumers and open to all marketers, big or small. Since the launch of Airtel Zero on April 6, over 150 startups contacted have to inquire about the product, it said in a note, adding ‘...they will have an equal opportunity to run with the big boys..”

But such is the opposition to Airtel's proposal that Flipkart, India's largest online retailer, which reportedly was looking to sign up for Airtel Zero, backtracked in the face of serious flak online. On Tuesday, Flipkart said in a statement that it would be 'committing to the larger cause of Net Neutrality in India' and would internally discuss details of the action it would take to support the cause.

But Airtel is hardly alone in proposing such an idea. Internet.org, a Facebook initiative with several telecom operators, aims to develop new business models around internet access to the poor. The argument is that internet penetration in under-developed countries like India warrants huge investments in infrastructure and justifies the extra charges.