Net neutrality principles being broken in India | Hacker News Reader

Net neutrality principles being broken in India

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13 pointsmonsterix6 comments

I think the author has net neutrality backwards. When Facebook works with Reliance Telecom to give free access to its app, Facebook is spending its own money to promote the usage of its app. That would be promotional marketing, like if Coke gave out free cans or sold it at a discounted price at your neighborhood Walmart. Violating net neutrality would be if Reliance Telecom demands extra money from Facebook for allowing subscribers to use the Facebook app at all. By the author's logic, all free and freemium models of apps should be banned because it is unjust to paid apps.

btw, yaay Net Neutraity! If you really want to help with it, go here http://netneutrality.in/ and sign the petitions and write to the government.

Actually no, zero rating[1] isn't something that is absolutely on either side of net neutrality. The author has it correct; so do you. The term is sufficiently vague and debated to be ambiguous about zero rating -- it's the job of the lawmakers to decide whether or not net neutrality includes it.

That being said, India really does have a net neutrality problem, so even if this may or may not be an instance of net neutrality violation, it's still something that needs fixing.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-rating

Regardless of whether zero rating is a violation of network neutrality in a legal sense or not, it is in any case discriminatory.

There are over 800 telcos in the world. Even if zero rating was free to the app/service provider, just negotiating with each and every telco would be a huge burden.

Zero rating is, however, neither free nor available to all app/service providers. Thus zero rating creates both a toll booth and a gatekeeper who gets to discriminate against app/service providers and pick winners and loosers.

Zero rating is a pox upon the Internet and should be killed with fire, regardless of any perceived short term benefit to some end users. In the long term zero rating is always toxic.

That's the thing; while it is discriminatory, it has been (and can be) used for subjectively good reasons, like Wikipedia Zero.

There are many who argue that zero rating is not a part of net neutrality and should be allowed. That's what I meant by saying that it's on both sides. I personally have mixed views, mostly leaning on the zero-rating-is-bad side, though I do feel that it may be possible to come up with a way to restrict what is allowed that helps boost accessibility of internet resources like Wikipedia without giving a competition boost.

Anyway, my point wasn't to argue for or against zero rating. I merely wanted to point out that zero rating was not objectively a part of the net neutrality debate.

Fair enough on the point about zero rating and net neutrality.

However, I have a hard time thinking of a scheme where allowing zero rating does not discriminate.

To not put too fine a point on it, what makes Wikipedia so special that only they should get zero rated? There are lots of other useful and educational sites out there that should also be zero rated by any criteria that Wikipedia meets.

Sure, you can try to minimize the discrimination, but you can never remove it totally. Zero rating is by definition discriminatory. There is allowed content and here is banned content and the ISP as the gatekeeper gets to decide which is which.

http://www.medianama.com/2015/01/223-how-indian-telecom-oper... is legendary article on this front.

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