The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has been stumped by the nature of responses it received on its discussion for ‘Differential Pricing for Data Services’.

Rather than expressing views around ‘differential pricing for data services’, majority of the responses have centred around comments on Facebook’s ‘Free Basics’ campaign for free internet for all.

Not satisfied with such ‘invalid’ answers, TRAI has now decided to ask such respondents (who sent comments on Free Basics) to send comments on specific questions pertaining to differential pertaining, rather than supporting ‘Free Basics’.

This has, therefore, prompted TRAI to extend the deadline of receiving the comments on its Consultation Paper to January 7, instead of December 30 and review of the comments to January 14 from January 7.

“The questions which were raised in that paper were – whether a telecom service provider (TSP) has the discretion to offer differential prices for different websites. We have done a preliminary analysis of the comments and we have found that a large percentage of these comments are about supporting a specific product called Free Basics,” RS Sharma, Chairman, TRAI, said.

Sharma said TRAI has received 18.27 lakh comments till now, out of which 14.34 lakh were in support of Free Basics and the comments did not answer the questions asked by the regulator.

He said the regulator has received only 3.81 lakh comments from people claiming supporters of net neutrality. However, Sharma also said that though those who have sent comments about Free Basics could not be ‘considered’, TRAI is writing back to those people to answer to its Paper’s specific questions.

Logical answers sought

“We will ask them to provide logical answers to those questions of Consultation Paper so that we can publish their comments on January 7. How supporting Free Basics help me (TRAI) in answering the questions which we had asked for ‘whether differential pricing should be permitted or not,” Sharma said.

He said, therefore, people should refer to the comments specifically, after the reading the Consultation Paper properly. “Therefore, it has become difficult for us to connect these answers to this paper,” Sharma said.

Therefore, one way is to ignore these 14.34 lakh responses, which will be unfair since these many people have tried to involve themselves in one way, so TRAI decided to extend the deadline for the comments to give them another chance to answer to the specific questions on ‘differential pricing’, he added.

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