US President Obama Calls for Strict Net Neutrality Rules

The lack of a clear policy ensuring net neutrality is worrying countries, even the developed ones. Recently, the United States of America President, Barack Obama has called upon the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) to issue and implement strict rules for net neutrality.

The principle of net neutrality is against the practise of the broadband companies blocking or intentionally slowing down the content or from allowing the content providers to pay for a fast lane to reach the consumers. It is critical in ensuring a free and open internet environment. In line with the working of telephone lines, where there is no distinction in charges for calls to another operator’s network, restaurant, school etc.; the net neutrality also envisages the situation of uniform charges for all traffic.

In the absence of net neutrality rules, the internet service providers (“ISPs”) would be at liberty to and also inclined towards shaping the internet traffic, giving preferential access to services and websites. The belief of some ISPs is that there should be charges for the services consuming more bandwidth, such as YouTube etc.

President Obama is of the view that the entities connecting a person to the world have special obligations not to exploit the monopoly they enjoy over the internet access. Media reports suggest that he is of the opinion that the net neutrality regulations are to ensure that neither the cable company nor the phone company acts as a gatekeeper, restricting what a person does online. The previous rules of the FCC were struck down in January this year by a Federal Appeals Court.

As in the United States, India too does not have the concept of net neutrality. There have been various consultations initiated by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (“TRAI”) in this regard; however the rules ensuring net neutrality have not been formulated till date. Although currently, the networks in India do not differentiate between the traffic flowing through their networks to provide different quality levels of service, but the practice of revenue sharing arrangements with large internet companies like Facebook, Yahoo, Google etc. is becoming common.

It is feared that for the Indian start-ups, banking on its internet infrastructure, net neutrality becomes vital to ensure an effective competitive market, by eliminating possibility of large companies to shell-out more money for preferential access.