The ‘net neutrality’ campaign got a major boost today with a growing outrage forcing e-commerce giant Flipkart walk out of ‘Airtel Zero’—— one of the services that is seen as sabotaging equal internet access for all —— even as the telecom giant continued to defend its stand.

Keeping up the pressure on the government and regulators, the netizens shot off more than three lakh petitions to TRAI against “discriminatory services” from the telecom and internet firms, while opposition party Congress sought to make it a political issue and warned of protests if “freedom of choice of internet users was compromised“.

On Twitter and other internet platforms, support for ’keeping internet free’ continued to pour in from politicians, businessmen, film actors and others. Those who expressed their support include Omar Abdullah, Digvijay Singh and Ayushman Khurana, joining the likes of Arvind Kejriwal, Aditya Thackeray and Shahrukh Khan.

Dairy major Amul, known for its advertisements based on topical issues, also talked about attempts to ‘interfere’ in the internet access in its latest ad campaign, while topics like ‘NetNeutralityInIndia’ and ‘SaveTheInternet’ continued to trend big time on Twitter.

Net neutrality calls for equal treatment to all Internet traffic while any priority given to an application or company on payment basis is seen as violating the concept.

Switching sides to support ‘net neutrality’, Flipkart said it has decided to “walk away” from its proposed tie-up with Airtel, which defended its position saying it was offering services to customers “on a completely non discriminatory basis”. Airtel, on its part, also said it fully supports ‘net neutrality’

Incidentally, Flipkart is the first major company globally to walk out of such platforms.

“We will be walking away from the ongoing discussions with Airtel for their platform Airtel Zero,” Flipkart said, taking an entirely opposite stand from the one taken a few days back when its co—founder Sachin Bansal had openly supported ‘Airtel Zero’

Bansal today said Flipkart has “always unequivocally supported net neutrality and will continue to do so“.

“We did look into the zero rating concept and on one hand we felt that being able to make free Internet available could be useful but after looking in deeper we realised that net neutrality can get compromised in the future which we are not supportive of it at all,” he added.

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