Another Take on Net Neutrality

LETTER FROM INDIA
By Manu Joseph
April 15, 2015

NEW DELHI — The world loves alliterations, but "net neutrality" is ugly. And it does not convey its own meaning, which is that the telecom company that enables one to connect to the Internet should not influence what websites one visits.

In India, as elsewhere in the world, the debate over net neutrality is framed as a battle between nice, regular people, including incipient innovators, who benefit from an open Internet, and greedy telecom giants that want to make more money by giving preferential treatment to their own substandard products or to those firms that pay for it.

But the fact is that a violation of net neutrality would gladden most of the more than one billion Indians who cannot afford to pay for data and so are not connected to the Internet. Such a violation raises the prospect of a cost-free Internet. A limited, impoverished Internet created by corporate strategy, perhaps, but a free slice of Internet that might introduce hundreds of millions to a utility that everyone now agrees is a human right.

The drama of net neutrality has hit India full force in the past few weeks for two reasons: First, the government's release of a "consultation paper" that argues that telecom companies have a moral right to break net neutrality to make higher profits because they incur huge costs on infrastructure and license fees. Second, the violation of net neutrality by two telecom giants, which, like all giants, are unloved.

One of them, Bharti Airtel, has announced that it will give users free Internet access to the online products of select companies with which it has commercial arrangements. This in effect means that its users may be lured to restrict their web experience to applications that have paid Airtel or are Airtel's own. If other telecom companies devise similar plans, it could create a vast market where users are influenced to restrict themselves, often to inferior products. In the long run, one argument goes, the rewards for software innovation would be diminished.

The plan of the other telecom giant, Reliance Communications, is more pious because it involves Internet.org, a nonprofit organization founded by Facebook in association with a clutch of companies. The goal of Internet.org is to bring cheap Internet to all, as long as they use Facebook.

The 150 million customers of Reliance's mobile service can now use Internet.org to gain free access to nearly 40 websites and applications, including Facebook, of course. One entertainment website is offered, but video is restricted. The other sites are news or information sites. Internet connectivity might be a fundamental right, but it appears fun is not.

Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Center for Internet and Society, an advocacy group, is not impressed. "There are many other ways in which free access can be provided to the poor without the harms to free speech, competition, innovation and diversity," he said in an interview. Mozilla, the free software community, "has experimented in some developing countries — you can make users watch an advertisement a day in exchange for 5MB of data."

But for years such innovations did not arrive to help India's poor. Now that the poor constitute a powerful argument for the violation of net neutrality, the evangelists of an open Internet might move faster to introduce alternatives.

It is amusing that the minister of communications and information technology, Ravi Shankar Prasad, has been misunderstood by the Indian news media as a supporter of net neutrality. Mr. Prasad has yet to give his formal opinion. Recently, he posted on Twitter that the Internet belongs to "entire humanity and not to a few." "Few" has been interpreted as referring to telecom companies, but "few" from the mouth of an Indian politician usually means those who don't matter to politicians. Also, at a news conference, he said he believed in "inclusion," which in Indian political language means giving something free to the poor.

Follow Manu Joseph, author of the novel "The Illicit Happiness of Other People," on Twitter at @manujosephsan.

A version of this article appears in print on in The New York Times International Edition.