Opinion How to ensure that the internet remains accessible to all

Telecom companies have been instrumental in providing a gateway to essential communication services such as voice calls, internet data, and text messages. We have seen governments across the world take measures from time to time to regulate these entities to ensure democratic access for the public. The breaking up of AT&T in the 1980s is one such example. If this code of conduct was not enforced on these gateway providers, the internet would not be what it is today. These providers would have turned into gatekeepers, and the internet would have been controlled by them, thwarting innovation and its democratic expansion.

Closer home, another example of the enforcement of this code on providers was when the Indian government came out with the policy on Net Neutrality which, inter-alia, stipulates that telecom networks should be neutral to all the information being transmitted through it. In other words, networks should treat all communication passing through them equally, independent of their content, application, service, device, sender, or recipient address.

Adopting Net Neutrality ensured that we took a democratic stance against Big Tech. But for this policy, we would have had the likes of Facebook offering its Free Basics only to see the internet being partitioned into walled gardens controlled by telcos and Big Tech companies. Fast forward to today, India is one of the largest consumers of wireless internet, with over 800 million users. As we plan to roll out 5G, the sky is the limit for innovation. The internet must remain an open and permissionless platform for a digitally empowered India.

With the rate at which digital technologies are evolving, the code of conduct and regulations can’t catch up with the new gateway providers that are emerging. One such example is distribution platforms for smartphone applications. The two prominent operating systems emerging for smartphones, Google and Apple, enjoy a lion’s share of the app store market. They brought in good practices to ensure basic hygiene for smartphone applications, maintained quality benchmarks for the content on their operating systems, and safeguarded the interests of their users. Though, without proper regulations to oversee how they decide on what should be weeded and whose interests should be guarded, it’s a slippery slope.

Various practices of these distribution platforms have come into question lately. These range from restrictions on payment gateways, advertising choices, app policies and various other aspects of an application or business that could be considered discriminatory in both principle and practice. In March, a report placed before the Competition Commission of India found Google Play Store’s payments policy “unfair and discriminatory”. As per an update in Google’s Play Store billing policy in September 2020, all applications on its platform were mandated to use its payment services for any kind of in-app payments or subscriptions. Similar concerns have been raised for Apple’s App Store, with both platforms said to be charging up to 30 per cent commission on payments processed.

Google and Apple dominate the global market share of smartphone operating systems (OS). This has enabled them to garner unilateral control over the publishing of smartphone applications on their OS. As businesses are increasingly driven digitally, developers are forced to bend to the diktats of these gatekeepers and make changes to their applications or resort to using their proprietary advertising engines if they wish their applications to see the light of day.

As is evident from the overnight change in Google’s billing policy, various smartphone application-dependent businesses and developers continue to remain vulnerable to such internal business policy changes on these platforms. The suspension of prominent applications, especially in the payment space, by distribution platforms is not unheard of. This leaves most developers and businesses with no effective recourse against such a disruption. Such unfettered influence over all smartphone applications is fostering discriminatory forces that would make it harder for Davids to take on Goliaths.

Recognising these concerns, the European Union has recently enacted the Digital Markets Act, which received its final approval in July 2022 and is expected to be implemented by early 2023. The Digital Markets Act regulation aims to keep digital markets innovative and open to competition, through ex-ante regulation. The DMA will prohibit the implementation of the most harmful anti-competitive practices by the largest digital platforms. The objective is to balance the relationship between these platforms that control access to digital markets and the companies that offer their services there.

The Indian government has taken a huge leap forward in maintaining its sovereignty through the path-breaking and disruptive digital public goods it has created. Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker, and CoWIN are just a few names that adorn this list. However, there is still a wide dependence on various digital offerings enabled by multinational Big Tech companies. It is the need of the hour for the government to devise appropriate regulations to ensure a level playing field and not let the innovating gateways turn into tyrannical gatekeepers.

The writer is CEO, National Health Authority. Views are personal