The issue of ‘net neutrality ‘ created a lot of furore in
the latest past and even our own Rahul Gandhi brought up the issue in the
Parliament. The western world, the Bollywood industry joined the bandwagon to
accentuate the magnitude of intricacy in the whole issue. In India, the issue
got highlighted by the Flipkart-Airtel Zero deal. But the common man needs to know what exactly
it means, since he is a stake holder here. Net neutrality is akin to Land
acquisition, where the big corporations, through the government, are
encroaching the space of civil liberty of the common man. It has ballooned into some kind of fight
dreaded between the ordinary folks and the corporate honchos.
Net neutrality in simple terms means all websites should be
equally accessible; at the same speed; and one should pay the same amount for
the said data irrespective of the content. Why should we be bothered then?
There are fast lanes (paid) and slow lanes (free) of internet traffic.
Elucidating further, it implies that big companies such as YouTube and Skype
can dig down their deep pockets and pay for higher speed internet access. Hence
people would obviously prefer them over other companies. Smaller start-ups will
inevitably be decimated and innovation will cease to exist. The choices before
the consumers will get reduced. As proposed by the Father of Economics August
Comte, the ‘invisible hand of market’ (that balances the implicit forces of
market) gets amputated. This could eventually lead to Oligopoly or even
Monopoly.
The second issue is that of ‘control’. Information available at the disposal of
public could be twisted, tweaked and manipulated. Suppose one is looking for
the reviews of a movie that he plans to see, but finds only the positive
reviews. This takes place because the producers and the distributors of the
movie have paid the internet provider to block all the websites that have
negative reviews of the concerned movie. Hence through this, the perception of
the people can be moulded to benefit certain companies.
The third issue may be that the internet providers in the
future may charge you for preferential access. It means that the heavy users of
YouTube, Skype, etc. may be charged more to get access to the same data as
before.
The Airtel Zero Issue
Now having seen one side of the coin (people’s perspective),
it’s also important to know the other side too (companies’ perspective). It is quintessential to admit the fact that
every company enters the market to earn money. So certain companies have
competitive advantage vis-a- vis others
due to their resources in terms of infrastructure and technological
superiority. Now let me explain you what exactly happened. Airtel Zero is a
platform for any website to join. What Bharti Airtel did was, it passed the
cost of surfing from the subscriber to the website. Initially the subscriber
would pay for the surfing certain websites, which now will be paid by the
website itself. For Bharti Airtel, it is an accounting issue; money that used
to come from the subscribers will now come from the websites. Hereby, the
subscriber will get a lower bill, while the expenses incurred by the websites
will be higher. But for the website, it’s not a cost, but an investment to
create more traffic. It is akin the toll free number that we use to order a
pizza, the cost of which is borne by the pizza company. It’s like the discount offered by certain
companies like e-commerce websites. These are normal business practices that
companies use to attract more customers, and hence cannot be deemed as
discriminatory or unethical. This would amount to ‘crony capitalism’ if this is
used as a tool to control the market forces or if certain websites are blocked
to enter the Airtel Zero platform.
People who speak about net neutrality advocate equal net
access for everybody. This is a noble intention, but is plausible only in a
utopian world. The net accessibility depends upon three things- the hand set,
the data plan and the spectrum. To have equal net experience, all the Indians
should have the same aforesaid trilogy.
But is it ever possible?
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