Red Flag for Differential Pricing, TRAI Favors Net Neutrality!


BENGALURU: Monday came with good NEWS for all the netizens of India. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) ruled against differential pricing for Internet services, making it clear that no telecom organization can offer or charge discriminatory tariffs for data on basis of content reports. According to an announcement made by TRAI, no operators shall charge discriminatory pricing on content, source and application and anything on the Internet cannot be priced differentially reports Tech 2.

So what happens to the existing tariff plans which are in operation and are pricing users differently for different applications? Well, TRAI has also announced that these plans would be valid for the next six months only and if still continued, the telecom operator shall be liable to pay a penalty of up to 5,00,000 INR for each day of violation of regulation. TRAI will also be checking that whether attempts have been made to violate regulations set by them. TRAI is essentially attempting to put everything on the Internet on an agnostic platform.  Internet companies, however, will not fall under its domain. TRAI has though let emergency services off their ruling. It has permitted telecom operators to provide reduced tariff for accessing or providing emergency services, or at times of public emergency.

The rule comes after months of deliberations and considerations made by TRAI on whether differential pricing should be allowed. It all started with TRAI floating a consultation paper seeking views of the Indian netizens on whether to allow the telecom operators to differentially charge them on the basis of the application or the service they use. This created uproar in the Indian net activist community as they firmly believed that allowing differential pricing would mean ending net neutrality. The uproar also saw a famous Indian comedy group launch three videos and ask the netizens to support net neutrality and vote against differential pricing. Addressing this sudden wave of net neutrality support, TRAI quickly put out a statement saying the paper issued is not on net neutrality, but on a specific matter about differential pricing. It said that they wanted to know that whether Indians support differential pricing to be allowed and what steps should be taken to ensure principles of non-discrimination, affordable Internet access, competition and so on if differential pricing is allowed.

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