Indian Telecom – Commoditizing Internet

Indian telecom industry has seen a lot of upheaval and a lot of movement in past decade or so.  This has indeed done good for the nation. The movement by Reliance “Karlo Duniya Mutthi men” really bridged the gap between rich and poor by taking the Cell Phones in the reach of “AAM Aadmi” (Common Man).

But come March 2015, what we witnessed was totally outrageous move by the telcos and then the 115 pager feasibility study by the Teleom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).  And what more TRAI puts up that report on its site with “Open for Consultation” till March 24, 2015. And what is all about?

The move by Indian Telcos is something where they want to commoditize Internet.  In a Layman’s language, the current Data Pack provides access to all the sites without discrimination.  but if the Indian Tecos succeed, they would be able to create Buckets like – Facebook & Chat or Skype and Video Conferencing or Whatsapp and Google Hangout or Social Media or News Updates or Ecommerce sites etc.  What would that mean? That would mean one would need to buy addition Data Packages to access various sorts of sites, or they may have to pay premium charges to have all in one Data Package.  If this would happen, then we may see more of Monopolistic Trade Practices cropping up in the Ecommerce arena.  The Ecoomerce sites with fat wallets will be able to influence the Service Providers to push their content better than others.  This way they would end up getting better foot fall than the other slower loading sites and thus the slower loading site (certainly those with low budgets) would die their own death as they would be pushed out of the race.

The movement in India to save the neutrality of the Internet is opposing this move by the telcos and they have hosted a site “Save The Internet” where answers for the questions raised by TRAI have been pre populated for you to copy and paste in your mail and send the mail to TRAI to oppose the said regulation.  The target that is to be achieved is 800,000 signatures…More the Merrier.

Not sure if most of you would have read that clear trip and times of India group have opted out of internet.org, the Facebook led initiative in support of Net Neutrality movement in India.

So, being the Internet Savvy people and being the people form the Independent Democratic Republic of India, we need to rise and raise our voice to keep Internet independent of Content providers and the Commoditization!!!

Please click on the link “Save the Internet” and copy the content to send to TRAI…its important and its critical….