Parminder Jeet Singh, February 13, 2016
NET NEUTRALITY : As most public services go digital, it makes sense to ensure access to them free of data charges, as a citizen's right.
In its ruling on “Prohibition of Discriminatory Tariffs for Data Services”, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has held that data services over the Internet are a commodity business whereby data cannot be discriminated on the basis of the content it carries. It also asserted its regulatory control over data services, which would be provided as a regulated public utility.
This is a historic decision setting a high bar for maintaining complete Net Neutrality, and thus sanctifying the Internet in the Indian law, as a model of equal and non-discriminatory communication, information-exchange and networking.
Social networking giant Facebook has added 13 million users in six months to take its user base to 125 million in India, its second-biggest market globally.
“In India, Facebook has 125 million average users (MAU), while the number of mobile MAUs stands at 114 million. On a daily basis, 59 million users in India are accessing Facebook and 53 million are accessing us from their mobile phones,” Facebook head of Products (Facebook Lite) Vijay Shankar told PTI.
Talking about the Facebook Lite app, announced earlier this month, he said the product has been “built ground up for markets like India” where internet speeds are slow.
Facebook Lite will feature all core functions of the standard app like news feed, messaging, photos, links and notifications among others but does not show videos on the news feed.
Mark Zuckerberg is feeling the force of critics who believe his effort to provide Indians with free access to a limited number of internet services hurts India's democracy and violates net neutrality.
The airwaves, the newspapers and even the online space are now saturated with a Rs. 100 crore campaign proclaiming that Internet connectivity for the Indian poor is a gift from Facebook which a few ch