Not content with watching the US and certain other countries screw around with net neutrality the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has decided to pitch in and make a mess of things (again) in India. These are the same brilliant folks who decided in 2007 that an entire IRC network (undernet.com) should be blocked in India because there are a few channels on it that promoted piracy. It took a few years for the stupid ban to get lifted. Even now a bunch of URL’s are blocked but for the most part things are ok.
Unfortunately that is not going to be the case for long if the telecom lobbyist’s have their way. They want to break up the internet access to Paid and free access with the Telecom’s deciding what content should be available to a user. If a site doesn’t pay then they would either get blocked or get put on a ‘slow-lane’ where traffic to the site is artificially slowed down to give more bandwidth to paying sites. In short they want to take away net neutrality. So what exactly does net neutrality mean? In short it means:
- All sites on the internet must be equally accessible (that means that no site’s traffic is given priority)
- The same access speed at the telco/ISP level for each (So assuming all else is the same then all sites will be accessible at the same speed)
- The same data cost for access to each site (per KB/MB). (No reducing of data cost to sites that pay Telecom’s money)
TRAI has released a consultation paper with 20 questions and wants you to send them an e-mail by 24th of April, 2015. Please visit Save the Internet to submit your responses to TRAI. It is as simple as going to the site, reviewing the email with the answers and then sending it out. Your 5 mins just might save the net in India.
More information on this issue is available at the following sites:
- What Net Neutrality is about: a simple explanation
- Airtel wants to ruin the internet by bringing in a digital VIP culture
- Net Neutrality.in
Once you have emailed your responses please help in spreading the word to others via Social Media/Email/Smoke Signals.
– Suramya