The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has taken a stand against discriminatory pricing for Internet services. This is a step forward towards net neutrality. Visit
The Internet was born with much opposition from vested interests. There was a protocol war with the Internet protocols on one side and protocols favored by the telecom monopolies of the world at that time. A lot of effort was expended to try and save the monopolies from competition from new technology-oriented companies. The victory of a set of ideas promoting competition and innovation has brought rich dividends to the large global community of Internet users.
Many arguments had been used against net neutrality in India. One of them was that if you can have first and second class on trains, why can’t you have differential pricing for Internet services? Why can’t we give better services to those who pay us more? I would like to ask a question in this context: Can a taxi service tell me that they will take me free to one hotel but will charge me 50% more than usual fare to take me to other hotels? May be the first hotel is willing to pay you more; but you are a licensed service regulated in the public interest.
The existence of discrimination in one sector is no argument for introducing discrimination in other sectors. For instance, one cannot argue that even temples discriminate against women; therefore, telecom service providers should be free to charge women more for Internet services!
I have written earlier against the most severe form of discriminatory pricing that frightens away many potential users of the Internet. This is the business of charging a novice user several times the rate that is charged to those who pay a sizable monthly fee for a package. I am not talking about 50% or 100% higher cost for small users, but large multiples that are effectively punitive charges. It looks as the service providers are saying “How dare you small fry tread on the toes of mighty companies like ours and our big users?” Visit
In the article mentioned above, I have also discussed the foolishness of ignoring all other factors and expecting technology alone to solve major problems. For instance, 55% of the websites on the Internet show English as the language of their content. Indian Languages, including Hindi and Tamil, are among languages accounting for less than 0.1% of the websites each, but the bulk of the people in this country prefer to read information in their own languages, not in English. Newspaper statistics show this clearly. Challenges like this have to be understood and addressed if Internet usage in India is to become widespread among all sections of society.
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