As Trump’s America prepares to tilt the electronic game board in favour of the big players, India has spoken out against the motion. On December 14, the US Federal Communications Commission will vote on a proposal to roll back rules instituted by the Barack Obama administration to guarantee net neutrality, the principle that internet hosts and networks must not discriminate between users and providers. They must neither throttle nor accelerate access in any effort to put certain content providers and certain users in preferential contact with each other. This anti-discriminatory principle has served as an accelerator for the internet and made it a site of innovation, to the benefit of content and service providers, and their consumers.
The TRAI’s recommendations, which flow from year-long consultations, support the perception that the internet will remain a fast-moving domain of innovation, to the enormous benefit of the developing world. Equal access will accelerate interventions in banking, commerce, agriculture, distribution, retailing and e-governance, whose cumulative benefit far outweighs the gains in infrastructure expected from an unequal internet, in which participants pay for preferential access. The TRAI has excluded only specialised services like intranets, which do not use the public internet, content delivery networks which accelerate access, and technical services which depend on fast, dedicated traffic.
