Re: India regulator pillories Facebook over Free Basics lobbying - BBC news

By some miracle, I was in Delhi, and was able to attend the open house. The
telcos made a huge pitch for differential pricing, but civil society and
the Save The Internet coalition and others argued that the Internet cannot
be regulated like telecom networks because users on the Internet are both
content creators and consumers.

Some coverage of the issue is below.

http://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/features/trai-differential-pricing-open-house-what-facebook-airtel-and-others-said-792959

Tweets are at
https://twitter.com/search?q=TRAI+open+house&ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Esearch

I made the following points when I got a chance to speak:

1) The original vision of Sir. Tim Berners Lee, was that of a platform that
enabled universal access to knowledge. Differential pricing violates this
vision.

2) As an entrepreneur, if I have to choose between Free Basics, X Basic and
Y Basics, instead of publishing my content and software onto a unified,
open internet, my task as a startup becomes much harder. This goes against
the government's Startup India goals of making it easier for startups to do
business in India.

3) Differential Pricing is a very divisive agenda. With Internet
penetration still very low, the telcos and the Internet industry should
work together to solve the larger problem of empowering millions of Indians
with Internet access. For example, there is a massive amount of work that
needs to be done to enable Indians to use the Internet in their own
languages.

Venky

On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 1:06 PM Kiritkumar Lathia <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Arun,
>
> TRAI is much more than what you suggest. From their 2013-2014 annual
> report, I quote:
>
> "  ... An important aspect of TRAI’s functions as mandated under the TRAI
> Act is to make recommendations to the Government on diverse subjects
> including market structure and entry of new operators in the sector, the
> licencing framework, management of scarce resources such as spectrum,
> consumer safety and security. Under this mandate, several significant
> policy regulatory recommendations were made during the year which include
> Recommendations on ‘Valuation and Reserve Price of Spectrum for Auction in
> different bands of spectrum’, ‘Full Mobile Number Portability’
> ‘Availability of Spectrum’, ‘Liberalization of Usage’, ‘Spectrum Usage
> Charges’, ‘Spectrum Trading’ etc.
>
> ... The mobile phone is rapidly emerging as a useful instrument for
> customers to conduct financial transactions. TRAI has assumed a
> facilitative role in the endeavour to leverage the mobile phone for
> financial inclusion of India’s vast population. TRAI has, over the past
> year, arranged for banks and TSPs to have detailed consultations for
> working together on this important national project. Recognising the need
> for regulatory intervention to set the process in motion, the Mobile
> Banking (Quality of Service) Regulation has been amended to direct all TSPs
> to facilitate Integrated Voice Response (IVR), Short Message Service (SMS)
> and Unstructured Supplementary Services Data (USSD) based connectivity to
> banks and their authorised agents for mobile banking services.
>
> ... Regulatory enforcement is an integral aspect of the functioning of
> TRAI. To ensure better enforcement, various regulations and orders has been
> issued prescribing financial disincentives for infringements such as wrong
> rejection of porting requests; failure to comply with tariff reporting
> requirements or levy of excess charges on consumers in violation of the
> provisions of the Telecommunications Tariff Order (TTO); delay in
> submission of or for submission of false information in Accounting
> Separation Reports; non-compliance with the benchmarks for Network Service
> Quality Parameters and Customer Service Quality Parameters; failure to meet
> the prescribed Quality of Service benchmarks for broadband services etc.  "
>
> It also deals with the broadcasting sector including IPTV.
>
> FB (as new operator) public enquiry is part of the TRAI work and the abuse
> of their platform to their advantage is TRAI's issue as well. However, who
> issues the actual licence? DoT? Because this  -  non-abuse of platform  -
> of their platform and dominant position should be part of the licencing
> terms and conditions.
>
> So Parminder is correct in formally pointing out to TRAI about the above
> mentioned abuse.
>
> The full (20Mb) report is at :
>
> http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/UserFiles/Documents/AnuualReports/TRAI-Annual-Report-(English)=01042015.pdf
>
> best wishes,
> Kirit
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 22 January 2016 at 07:41, Suresh Ramasubramanian <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> Yeah, it does help to be clear about the actual roles and mandates a
>> regulator, or any other policy body (ICANN for example) has.
>>
>> --srs
>>
>> On 22-Jan-2016, at 11:35 AM, Arun Mehta <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 6:44 PM, parminder <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> I think, TRAI should be formally approached to examine this case and ban
>>> such political campaigns by platform owners, when such a platform is of a
>>> monopolistic character as FB is.
>>>
>>>
>> Hi Parminder, glad to see you here.
>> ​
>> Once again: the TRAI has no such powers. It only has powers with regard
>> to tariffs.​
>>
>>
>> ​Arun Mehta​
>>
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