NET NEUTRALITY. Maintain consistency, please!

The denouement of the epic Indian saga on net neutrality, which has been running for over 30 months featuring frivolous comic shows, serious dissertations and semi-tragic confrontations, has now hopefully commenced with the telecom regulator Trai recently releasing a pre-consultation paper on the subject. While exhaustive consultations are always welcome, one is rather puzzled and concerned by this re-commencement of de novo consultations.

Trai had, after all, issued a very comprehensive 117-page consultation paper in March 2015. This came after holding an interactive whole-day workshop involving all stakeholders in January 2015. The paper posed 20 weighty questions on net neutrality.

That exercise has not yet been taken to its logical conclusion through the well-established process of open house discussions and the subsequent regulatory deliberations and reasoned recommendations. Not only this, a special high-level committee of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) held comprehensive consultations with all stakeholders and came out with a detailed report and recommendations in May 2015.

It is reasonable to presume that the policymaker, DoT, had taken cognizance of the March recommendations of Trai when making its final recommendations. In this situation, for Trai to again issue a pre-consultation paper does seem rather perplexing.

I support extensive and robust regulatory dialogue in this exceedingly complex and sensitive subject. However, the regulatory process needs to be a smooth-flowing continuum, without discontinuities, surprises and flip-flops. To ensure the confidence and trust of both genuine consumers as well as the commercial parties involved, the national regulatory agency needs to function as an institution of permanence and continuity. Else, both take-up and usage of the service as well as the huge investments required for infrastructure growth could be irreparably harmed.

Hence, it is very important that all the questions and learnings from the previous exercises of both the Trai and DoT are fully assimilated into the current consultation. It would be unwise to attempt to discard or ignore or foreclose without debate, any of the issues highlighted by earlier consultations.

There is another confusing aspect. While net neutrality has not yet been defined, several regulatory actions are flowing which are linked to the contours of the defined regulatory domain. This would lead to a very confused situation in many areas. One would not know what are the acceptable tariffs and how regulatory filings need to be made. A paralysis of innovative approaches would result and the outcome would inevitably be losses to the ‘genuine personal use customer’.

We are a Net-starved country, which is placed in the sorry class of ‘least connected countries’. Our national priority is to connect genuine personal-use customers or augment their usage. Undoubtedly, that goal could be met at least partially through products such as zero-rating platforms. Most countries permit these products, at least on a case-by-case examination. The Trai appears to be diffident about adopting a case-by-case examination and, hence, outlawed all zero-rating plans. It need not be so. The DoT Committee had clearly recommended in May 2015 the core principles of net neutrality. All that Trai needs to do is to test the proposed tariff against these principles and give its decision. Post-implementation, any complaint or dispute relating to the tariff could be dealt with by a specialist cell set up by DoT. This is a simple and workable system.

There is another angle to the consumer aspect. The basic dispute is a commercial one between two sets of commercial entities — telecom service providers and commercial content providers playing in a two-sided market. Unfortunately, the latter are being mistakenly considered to be genuine personal-use end-customers.

Nearly 99 per cent of the latter group are not even before us because they do not even have access to the Net. These constitute the overwhelmingly-huge mass who direly need positively differentiated (beneficial) tariffs and special products such as zero-rating platforms. It would be cruel to deny them these in order promote the commercial content providers.

Ours is a very competitive telecom marketplace in India with more than double the average number of players per market elsewhere in the world. Content providers have abundant choice for commercial tie-up.

To conclude, Trai’s current approach of part-by-part unfolding provides the learnings for course correction, but the time has come for the final act. Importantly, when the final comprehensive decision is announced, it should automatically render null all the intermediate part-steps. If this not done, there could remain many inconsistencies and grey areas. Digital India can ill afford that.

The writer is president of Broadband India Forum. The views are personal