Sector regulator Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Wednesday released consultation paper on ‘Net neutrality’ and asked for written comments from stakeholders by February 15 and counter comments (if any) by February 28, on the issues.
Net neutrality is an important part of a free and open internet, which would enable access, choice and transparency of Internet to every user.
“In this second stage, the authority has considered all relevant issues identified during the pre-consultation process and the preliminary inputs gathered from stakeholders on these issues,” it said.
The first stage of pre-consultation was an attempt to identify the relevant issues in all the areas on which the Department of Telecom had sought TRAI’s recommendations, for which a pre-consultation paper was released in May last year.
In March last year, the DoT had sought TRAI’s recommendations on issues relating to Net neutrality. In view of the complexity of the subject, the authority decided to undertake a two-stage consultation process, TRAI said in its release.
“The purpose of this stage of consultation is to proceed towards final views on policy or regulatory interventions, where required, on the issue of Net neutrality,” it added.
The ongoing consultation process was initiated pursuant to this reference from the DoT. The present consultation paper is accordingly being issued in continuation to the ‘Pre-Consultation Paper on Net Neutrality’, the authority said.
TRAI in its Pre-Consultation paper dated May 30, last year, discussed issues such as the definition of Net neturality, scope of traffic management practices, importance of unrestricted access and transparency, need for preserving customer privacy and national security.
It has asked questions on some issues including — what would be the most effective legal/policy instrument for implementing a Net neutrality framework in India; which body should be responsible for monitoring and supervision; what actions should such body be empowered to take in case of any detected violation; and if the Authority opts for QoS regulation on this subject, what should be the scope of such regulations?
According to experts tracking the developments, the latest paper is a fairly exhaustive consultation paper, and it’s clear that the TRAI wants to deal with pending issues in a decisive manner.
“Our plea is that application based traffic management, and allowing telecom operators and ISPs to manipulate user access to websites and apps without checks and balances would lead to discrimination,” Nikhil Pahwa, Co-founder, Internet Freedom Foundation, said.
‘Violation of principles’ This would be a clear violation of the principles of Net neutrality, which mandates that all Internet users and content creators should be treated equally by access service providers, he said.
“We would urge the TRAI to ensure that traffic management is not used to create different classes of Internet users,” Pahwa added.