In a bid to uphold the principles of net neutrality, around 129 startup founders, including notable names like Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma, PhonePe’s Sameer Nigam, and Zerodha’s Nithin Kamath, have written a letter to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), requesting the reinforcement of the net neutrality principles established by the government in 2016.
What do founders want?
The letter comes in response to the propositions made by major telecom service providers such as Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone Idea. The telecom giants have suggested that internet companies should bear the costs for telecom networks based on the traffic generated by their platforms, among other parameters.
However, The industry argues that such a proposal could potentially undermine net neutrality principles, limiting user choice and possibly pushing smaller companies out of the market.
The letter, which was addressed to PD Vaghela, the chairman of TRAI, and Akhilesh Kumar Trievdy, advisor in TRAI, emphasized the potential implications of the telecom service providers’ demands on the economy.
The letter urged TRAI to fortify the principles laid out in the 2016 regulations instead of diluting them. The signatories of the letter include other influential figures like Rohan Verma of Mappls and Murugavel Janakiraman of Bharat Matrimony.
The founders have reportedly expressed concerns over any moves towards overregulation of internet services, which could lead to discriminatory consequences. The founders have rallied under the banner of the “Save the Internet” campaign, a movement initiated in 2015 during a similar debate over net neutrality.
It’s worth mentioning that the campaign had previously got extensive support from the public, who vociferously appealed to TRAI to uphold net neutrality principles.
What is Net Neutrality?
The Internet is increasingly becoming central to the lives of citizens, consumers and industry. It has emerged as a transformative medium for innovation and economic growth. The future growth of the telecom sector is largely contingent upon innovation and growth of the Internet infrastructure and many applications, content and services linked to it.
However, increasingly, concerns have been raised globally as well as in India relating to the potential for discriminatory treatment of Internet traffic by the entities that control access to the Internet. These concerns regarding non-discriminatory access have become the centre of a global policy debate, often referred to as the debate on ‘network or net neutrality’. ‘
Net Neutrality refers to non-discrimination of Internet traffic by intermediate networks on any criteria. The network should be neutral to all the information being transmitted through it. All communication passing through a network should be treated equally i.e. independent of its content, application, service, device, sender or recipient address.
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