Net Neutrality

Very recently we did a polling on Google+ to ask people if they support Net Neutrality. As expected 86% supported Net Neutrality but surprisingly 9% people did not have any idea what Net Neutrality is. So we thought of educating them and will explain in a simplified manner. Imagine someday you trying to search something on Google but your service provider doesn’t allow you

to go to Google but gives you an alternative to search on Bing. With all due respect to Bing, but wouldn’t that be scary? In a different scenario imagine you open Flipkart.com and its just taking its own sweet time to open and ultimately after waiting 5-10 minutes you had to close it. Not a good practice, right? Net Neutrality is a principle which says all content should be allowed to access equally and the end user get to choose what they want to access and what not and nothing is implied on them.

Zero Rating

Having said that may be we should also discuss about Zero rating. You might have heard about Internet.org which launched very recently by Facebook. In India they are partnering with Airtel, one of the most important tele communication companies in India. The crux of the matter is Facebook has developed a new concept named Internet.org which allows free access of data for certain websites. This sounds fine but will it remain fine in the long run, lets think through this. Since this is free, most of the people are likely to take this service only but the twist is they are partnering with few companies only and you will only be able to access if that website is a part of zero rating. Since this would cost good money, smaller websites and companies will not be able to afford this and hence, getting out of the competition which is against the principle of Net Neutrality.

Can you raise your voice against this?

Of course you can. Just share your views with advqos@trai.gov.in by 24th April, that’s the deadline.   Picture Courtesy: www.savetheinternet.com