Re: Why is Mark Zuckerberg angry at critics in India?

While I can't claim to have conducted a rigorous data backed study into the
matter, when I reflect on the internet scene in India it occurs to be that
historically mainstream non-telco ISPs like the urban cable internet
operators have always offered better prices and faster speeds than telco
ISPs. And why wouldn't they - the telco ISPs have no motivation to offer
faster speeds which would eat into their bread and butter of leased lines
and voice traffic.

It doesn't help that Airtel, Tata and Reliance, all telcos own most of the
backbone in India that is privately owned. Effectively they control how
fast the internet can be in India, and in their ideal world it will be just
fast enough so as to maximize their profits. For all their noises for two
decades now about triple play, the services aren't there yet, though the
tech and the rolled out dark fiber is most definitely there.

Besides profit maximization, there is also some legacy telco mentality when
it comes to pricing.

Why haven't TRAI or MRTP or the numerous state and central trade
commissions and IT ministries done something about this? Answer: regulators
in India are asleep at the wheel like they are in much of the world.

What about the free markets then?

It should be in the interest of Flipkart, Amazon and other ecommerce
retailers besides Google and FB to lobby against this telco monopoly rather
than make common cause with the telcos and offer packages like Free Basics.
Even if in the long term their customers would be able to access their
services faster, they would undoubtedly suffer heavily in the short term by
going against the powerful telcos. That is unacceptable, and so they don't.

Neither free markets nor regulation are perfect answers, but since they
both work some of the time, we need to rely on both, as well as law makers,
technological innovation and the consumer activists to keep the agenda of
progress going.

To argue that we ought to lose regulators, activists, or any one of the
levers that keeps telcos honest and straight is not seeing the full picture.

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