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

TRAI doesn't as yet regulate political / AstroTurf campaigns of any sort.  Even email spam - which this could be argued to be - isn't really under trai's remit, and is anyway quite hazily defined in section 66.

--srs

> On 22-Jan-2016, at 1:05 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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