Telecom watchdog Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has slammed the campaign of social media giant Facebook for Free Basics as a ‘crudely majoritarian and orchestrated opinion poll’ and the regulator said on Thursday that norms on the issue of differential pricing of data would be ready by January-end.
“We will take into consideration all valuable comments on differential data pricing. We will come out with the regulation by the month-end,” said TRAI Chairman RS Sharma, after an open-house debate with stakeholders in the national capital.
In fact, a service from Facebook, Free Basics is an app that promises to make Internet accessible to more people by providing them a range of some basic services for free such as news, health, travel, jobs, sports, communication and other information.
On the other hand, the regulator has written in a strongly-worded letter to Facebook, saying that “your urging has the flavour of reducing this meaningful consultative exercise, designed to produce informed decisions in a transparent manner, into a crudely majoritarian and orchestrated opinion poll.”
However, TRAI’s Joint Adviser KV Sebastian said in a letter dated on January 18 to Ankhi Das, Director of Public Policy, India, South and Central Asia, Facebook, “Neither the spirit nor the letter of a consultative process warrants such an interpretation which, if accepted, has dangerous ramifications for policy-making in India.”
However, Facebook responded the letter, saying that it was only trying to cooperate with the regulator. “When we reviewed your letter of January 7, 2016, we were alarmed by the discrepancy in the number of comments submitted. We promptly sought to understand the source of discrepancy,” said Das in the letter.
As far as the issue of net neutrality or differential pricing or zero-rating is concerned, it is a practice where Internet service providers do not take into account the content downloaded by subscribers from some platforms while computing their usage tariff.
Proponents of net neutrality call for a uniformity in such tariff. But those on the other side of the fence argue this may be impossible because service providers have to invest huge amounts of money on infrastructure and different bandwidths call for different level of investments.
The sparring match with Facebook was the result of a chunk of the 2.4 million respondents to watchdog’s consultation paper on net neutrality speaking about just one of its many aspects -- saying they supported Free Basics.
“Majority of the comments received are template responses and many of which do not address the specific questions that were raised in the consultation paper,” the regulator had said in a statement on January 8, referring to the remarks on the consultation paper.