The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Thursday issued a paper to explore various models through which service providers would be able to offer free data, while keeping the principles of differential rate regulation intact.
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As opposed to a model like Free Basics, which provided a select few websites or a “walled garden” for free, this paper invites comments on the viability of a model that has the “benefits of offering free data while avoiding the ingenuity that the Differential Tariff Regulation is meant to prevent”.
The Director General of COAI, Rajan S Mathews wrote a letter to Secretary of TRAI, Sudhir Gupta saying, “Developing applications/ Products / Platforms / VAS requires a huge resources, investments, and innovations”.
Critics of TRAI’s net neutrality regulations at the time argued that the harmful effects of zero-rating weren’t wholly backed by empirical data and that the larger question of ensuring Internet access to India’s rural population was ignored.
The second model suggested is very similar to the first but instead of a reward or cash back there’s no data charge for consumers.
As per the models proposed by Trai, through a telecom service provider agnostic platform consumers is directly paid for the data consumed in accessing the website “in the form of a recharge for data usage or for voice usage to the user”.
The last date for submission of comments is June 16 and that of counter comments is June 30, 2016.
The regulator is also examining whether current platforms (apps) such as Gigato, mCent, Ladoo, Taskbucks – which allow users to earn data or talktime in return for using or downloading certain apps – need to be regulated or whether the market can be allowed to develop these platforms freely. Civil activists said Free Basics is unfair as it would only throttle competition in the market, and let new internet users to access only those websites that were handpicked for them by Facebook. The paper asks whether free data can be provided to users without violating its previous order that banned discriminatory pricing for some content and websites. This helps the businesses make their service easily accessible without impacting the mobile bill of the consumers. Another example that it gives is that of a “dont charge” or toll-free API, where the telecom service provider doesn’t act like a gatekeeper.
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Should free data or suitable reimbursement to users be limited to mobile data users only or also to subscribers of fixed-line broadband or leased-line as well are some of the issues the paper will look into.
