Last week, as Narendra Modi, India’s PM, met Mark Zuckerberg, the Founder-CEO of Facebook, social media was ablaze with debates on net neutrality, Internet.org, and PM’s Digital India Initiative. A lot of people saw Modi’s meeting with Zuckerberg as a sign of support by the PM to Facebook’s Internet.org initiative. And most of the people in opposition saw Internet.org as an evil scheme by Facebook for gaining a monopoly. Most of these debates centered around how monopolization and control of access of internet is a concern, possibly as a result of living in a community of technologists.

Since I had some natural doubts about the opposition to Internet.org and saw strong arguments on both sides of the debate, I decided to write this post elucidating some of the details on this issue. I certainly believe that Digital India initiative does not deserve a lot of criticisms it has recieved in the process, and have tried to argue why it is one of the most significant intiatives for economic empowerment. In this post, I try to address if the applicability of the principle of Net Neutrality is strong enough that the Indian State must prohibit Internet.org from operating in India or whether the goals of Digital India overpower the principle. Is Net Neutrality a categorical imperative or can the principle be foregone when it cannot be afforded or if there are other more important virtues? Should the Government restrict private actors from bringing internet infrastructure and connectivity if they violate Net Neutrality? Even though the state might not possess sufficient funds to bankroll these goals or the know-how necessary? In this post, hence, I have tried to present some of the strong arguments from both ends.

Also, to be clear, just because I have doubts about opposition to Modi on this issue, that does not make me a Modi-bhakt. In fact, those who know me well would be aware of my objections to the Indian Right-wing. But just because I have disagreements with the ideologies of ruling party and have issues with how their leader functions, doesn’t mean that I’m naturally obligated to antagonize the policy and policy-makers behind Digital India initiative.

In the name of Free and Fair Markets…

Why are monopolies bad?

Imagine you live in a small town, and really like ice-cream. There are a few cart vendors around the town who offer a variety of flavors and recipes of ice-creams. You can choose between ice-lollies and cones, and even if cones cost slightly higher, if your desire for cones over ice-lollies overpowers the difference in cost to you, you will go ahead and buy that. And in this manner, people will have their own tastes and preferences and will accordingly exercise their choice. Also, if someday an ice-cream maker suddenly gets an idea of something like an ice-cream sandwich, and she believes that some people would like it, she’ll be disrupting the market slightly, only because she has developed a better choice for the consumers.

But one day a new vendor enters the town. Interestingly, this new vendor only sells boring ice-cream cups, but sells them at extremely cheap rates. And it is so cheap, that the difference in its cost with other ice creams overpowers the difference in desire for most people. The guy is practically selling it for free, so one must ask how is he able to do that. Well, the answer is simple, he is not looking for quick profits and has enormous cash backup to fund these almost free ice-creams. Since this is hypothetical, let us assume that most people in town are scrooge enough to ditch their older vendors to enjoy the boring but cheap ice-cream cups. It is simple to see that most of the old vendors will close down soon, with dropping demand and depleting capital to sustain their business. And soon enough there will be practically no competition left for the new ice-cream cup vendor.

Now imagine, that this new vendor of boring cups eventually starts increasing the cost of his cups. Soon enough he’ll start charging what the real price of an ice-cream cup should have been based on its production costs and the average willingness to pay by the consumers. But interestingly, in a world where eating ice-cream is an absolutely essential part of life, the new vendor won’t have any reason not to surpass that price and start charging a huge unjustifiable price. In this world of compulsive ice-cream eaters, he wouldn’t lose any significant consumer base, and would still make a lot of money. And he can always use these excess profits later to throttle a new competitor, by unnaturally lowering prices again for some time, whenever any new player tries entering the market.

In this day and age, it is hard to find people from across the political spectrum who support monopolies. While those on the left would cry foul at the disparate bargaining power that monopolies enjoy and their ability to exploit consumers, for those on the right, monopolies are antithetical to most of the things that a free market stands for. To those who trust market and competition to find better solutions to problems of the society and its constituents, powerful monopolies are indeed the best way to hamper innovation and progress.

Of course, the ice-cream narrative is reductive and highly simplified look, and markets and economies do not work in such simple ways. However, I believe that the tale is sufficient to argue for the ills of monopolies in markets like hampering innovation and disparate bargaining power over consumers. Although there is a very strong descriptive argument for monopolies, that in some cases they will exist come what may, I believe that it is clear why everyone would agree that they still are undesirable, and at the very least, the State must never provide any extraneous boost to its emergence or sustenance.

Nevertheless, the problems of free market do not end here. Since the negative effects of monopolies can also occur without an observable monopoly. In Oligopolies, or markets with very few firms, the producers do enjoy lesser bargaining power than a monopolist, but despite that the market power is sufficiently concentrated in hands of few to prevent entry of new players. Also, even if there are multiple firms, a collusion, either through behind-the-curtain deals or as a result of unspoken understanding, is anti-competitive and hampers market efficiency.

Markets with ‘bad’ tendencies…

As much as one might find monopolies repulsive, there are certain industries that we already know have natural tendency to converge towards monopolies. For instance, let us take the old-school telephone lines as an example. Businesses like providing land-line services have fixed costs of establishment that heavily predominate any marginal cost incurred for a new consumer. In simple words, once the routing infrastructure and a network for some N consumers is set up, if a new (N+1)th consumer buys their service, the cost of laying of wires for her would be very small. The cost to the customer is equal to the average cost of sharing the basic infrastructure plus the cost of laying wires to her home. But since the former predominates the latter by a huge margin, it is easy to observe that as the consumers increase for a firm, they will be able to offer cheaper services, since there will be more people to share the fixed costs.

In such scenarios, provided that consumers choose more cost-effective options, a firm with some advantage in market will typically grow even faster, and firms with smaller consumer base will tend to diminish and disappear. Such scenarios, called Natural Monopolies, occur in markets which involve higher barriers of entry as a result of enormous starting-up cost or other similar factors. As a result many of these industries are either nationalized, like Railways, or strongly regulated by the State, like telecommunications is done by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) in their respective countries.

A common feature to some of these markets is that they are carrier services, that is they provide a media to transfer goods (or information) from one end to another. In most common law jurisdictions, this phenomenon is covered by the concept of Common Carriers. The distinction is made between common carriers and private carriers, on the grounds that the former is a firm that “holds itself out” to the public as willing to provide a media for reliable end-to-end transportation. As a public service, these firms operate under licenses given by regulatory bodies, such as TRAI and FCC. Since these firms discharge a public trust and occupy a special position in the economy as providing media for other transactions, they are expected to provide services to the public without any discrimination.

A few words on Net Neutrality

The current support for Net Neutrality caught fire when there were reports that Comcast was throttling speed selectively for Netflix, allegedly due to high amounts of traffic from that site, and had demanded additional fees from the on-demand media provider to be shifted to the high-speed category. Many Internet service providers wanted to implement two lanes for their connection, ‘Fast’ lane and the ‘Superfast’ lane. Of course, this manner of discrimination was clearly a deterrent to free competition among firms that operate out of the internet.

In a reddit post that went viral, a dad wrote how his 9-year old son gave a beautiful explanation of the phenomenon, here.

Pretend ice cream stores gave away free milkshakes. But you had to buy a straw to drink them. But that’s okay, because you still get free milkshakes. One day you’re drinking a free milkshake and you look down and the guy that sold you the straw is pinching it almost shut. You can still get your milkshake, but it’s really hard and takes a lot longer.

So you say, “Hey! Stop that!” And the straw guy says, “NO! Not until the ice cream store pays me money.” And you say, “But I already paid you money for the straw.” And the straw guy says, “I don’t care. I just want more money.”

The legal debate on Net Neutrality was primarily centered around whether the principle of Common Carriers was applicable to Internet Service Providers and were they obligated to be non-discriminatory with respect to the data flowing through their pipes.

Vint Cerf, one of the founders of Internet as we know it today and a prominent voice in Internet policy who is now affiliated with Google, in his letter to the US House of Representatives raised the following observations [ref:Goog]:

The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. The Internet is based on a layered, end-to-end model that allows people at each level of the network to innovate free of any central control. By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation. This has led to an explosion of offerings — from VOIP to 802.11x wi-fi to blogging — that might never have evolved had central control of the network been required by design.

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Telephone companies cannot tell consumers who they can call; network operators should not dictate what people can do online.

I am confident that we can build a broadband system that allows users to decide what websites they want to see and what applications they want to use — and that also guarantees high quality service and network security. That network model has and can continue to provide economic benefits to innovators and consumers — and to the broadband operators who will reap the rewards for providing access to such a valued network.

Thus, the question that we must ask about internet infrastructure is whether we want the telecommunication firms to dictate the barriers of entry and influence market structure and competition for social networks, internet search, e-commerce and other similar digital arenas?

The New Conundrums of Digital Markets

It must however be noted that we still do not have a very mature understanding of the nature of most online markets, as well. Search, Social Network and eCommerce themselves seem to be largely monopolized by Google, Facebook and Amazon respectively.

Social networks, like most networks, follows Metcalfe’s law and other similar behavioral patterns. That is, you are much more likely to join a social network that already has a lot of members, since its more likely your acquaintances are already there. Consequently, the consumer behavior for choosing social networks closely resembles that in natural monopolies, with respect to clustering.

Similarly, internet search is a business which relies heavily upon ‘knowing’ you in order to better understand your request. It also benefits, strictly quality-wise, as a result of collective feedback. Therefore the more people use a search engine, the better its results will be. Also, by operating in the Browser and Mobile OS as well, Google is able accumulate huge amounts of data about you, that allows it to provide better/‘more personalized’ results to you. In fact, this competitive advantage that emanates from the exclusive interoperability, seen by regulators as a collusion, between Search and other divisions of Google, has been at the core of the Anti-trust issue against Google by the European Commission [ref:tG].

In e-Commerce, while the apparently huge consumer base of Amazon doesn’t result in the same kind of consumer exploitation exhibited by Monopolies, some economists like Paul Krugman have raised eyebrows on the Monospony of Amazon [ref:NYT]. Amazon being the single largest seller of products does not produce them, but buys them from firms and retailers. Therefore, Amazon simultaneously also becomes one of the most powerful buyers to these firms, giving it enormous market power to regulate the prices, with potential to cause harm to the original producers and in turn the market.

The only solace is in the fact that at least till now digital monopolies are not known to exploit consumers as classical monopolies could. That is, the market power of digital monopolies does not, at least directly, cause economic harm to consumers. And since, in many digital frontiers, there is no notion of economic cost attached to consumer choice, therefore market power does not even result in permanence in the conventional way. That is to say that factors as simple as aesthetic judgments and user experience could overthrow digital monopolies and oligopolies. Indeed, even stashes of wealth and market power cannot save one from bad design.

Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that while we understand, to some extent at least, how asymmetry in wealth effects competition in markets, we do not understand how asymmetric access to stashes of private data effects competition and an open internet. In addition, we must also realize that our present economic laws lack a good understanding of digital marketplaces, like Amazon and Uber. And this gives us all the more reasons to be skeptical of these things, since unlike classical firms, the risks and negativities are largely hidden and unexplored.

Is Internet.org really evil?

Internet.org is a philanthropic project of Facebook with the goal of providing free or affordable access to some ‘basic’ sites, which includes their own, to developing or underdeveloped regions. They entered India in collaboration with Reliance Communication, which committed to sharing costs of the program. Facebook has insisted that goal of this initiative is to take the benefits of internet to millions of those who are still not connected to it. In fact one of the focus at the first Internet.org Summit at New Delhi in 2014 was in finding ways in which internet could be made more accessible to Non-English speaking parts of population.

However, despite what Facebook might claim and believe, Internet.org at its heart is a monopolizing strategy. It cannot be argued that the initiative does not serve the purpose of aggressive market acquisition for the firm. In fact, reportedly, in some countries the penetration of the social network giant is so deep that most people who use Facebook don’t know they are even connected to Internet [ref:Qz]. For many Facebook is becoming the primary source of online content, a function in which it is replacing Google Search.

It must be noted, thus, that in strict economic sense, the collusion of Reliance and Facebook is essentially a collusion that benefits both, and more than that, facilitates monopolization by Facebook and its partners. It must be remembered that when Reliance gives Facebook access for free, it is in effect charging you for access to other sites. And this extra cost I would pay for other sites is not something I am paying to the site, but to the ISP. In effect, Reliance network is incentivizing you to use Facebook.

E xamining the Virtue of Fairness

Fairness for whom?

The Preamble of the Indian Constitution commits the State and its People to ideas of Justice in political, social and economic spheres. And anyone well acquainted with Indian political history would attest to the fact that Social Justice has been a central principle of polity.

Fairness in Markets is undoubtedly a very important issue, but what we do need to examine is what is this fairness and what is its scope? What we do need to ask is whether the idea of fairness in markets extends to those who have been left outside the boundaries of these markets? One must ask whether the goal of social justice for the economically disenfranchised is greater than the goal of fair markets?

Allow Ad Hominem for a moment

Allow me to present an ad hominem attack, and while I do not think that these kind of arguments add any value to the debate and find them undesirable for any public discussion, in this case they do add some irony. And the irony here is that most of the people who started opposing Internet.org on grounds of net neutrality, were people who themselves enjoy the free coupons of Uber and Foodpanda on a regular basis. A lot of these people enjoy the benefits of aggressive market acquisition by these firms regularly, but believe that similar tactics by Facebook or others must be stopped at the earliest.

In an absolute sense, it is ironical how those who feel entitled to comment and regulate the choices of others, do not forego these ‘evil’ choices when it comes to their own personal decisions. However, that, of course, does not imply that they are not making a substantive point about technology and markets. And in fact, I do share some of those concerns. (And yes, in the process also becoming a target of my own ad hominem, albeit maintaining a skeptical stance)

From Free Markets to Free Press

Often described by the metaphor of Global Village, internet today has permeated almost all spheres of social and economic life. The idea of public spaces is soon changing in the collective imagination to also encompass the emerging virtual spaces. Today’s active participation in political discourse is not limited to journalists or people attending townhall meetings. But the rise of the fifth estate has taken politics and public debate to Twitter and Facebook. Internet and the media it provides is soon becoming the prime medium of public discourse of all forms.

When Raghav Bahl, after selling his ownership in CNN-IBN to Reliance, founded thequint.com, he only became yet another small player in the ever-growing field of journalism in the digital media. Conventional Press firms like Bennett-Coleman and NDTV are already growing their web presence, while Atlantic Media’s Quartz.com claims itself to be the journal for the digital natives and the new economy. While Youtube, home to a significant number of videos on news and politics, is becoming home to traditionally-styled news videos by non-conventional organizations like The Young Turk and Newslaundry, on the other hand, journalism in blogosphere has led to traditionally unpopular forms getting acceptance like Listicles and Infographics. In the United States, a 2013 study showed that at least 71% of those in the age group of 18–29 cite internet as their primary source of news [ref:pew]. It is worth noting, that internet has provided an unprecedented power for the reader to focus on relevant aspects of news, dig deeper and access specific information from past publications.

And with internet becoming the new frontier of journalism and public discourse, we have another very strong reason for Net Neutrality. And that is in the sense that any policy of service providers must not result in censorship or control over free flow of ideas and information. What noted philosopher-author Umberto Eco wrote in his 1983 essay can be read today with relevance to the Net Neutrality debate.

Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country, you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d’état, still use tanks. If a country has reached a high level of industrialization the whole scene changes. The day after the fall of Khrushchev, the editors of Pravda, Izvestiia, the heads of the radio and television were replaced; the army wasn’t called out. Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.

Thus, there is a strong argument for Net Neutrality, at least in the sense of neutrality against content or authorship, on the grounds of principles of Free Press. In Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, the Supreme Court of India ruled in favor of applying the freedom of expression to internet for striking down Article 66A of the IT Act of 2000, albeit some reservations. Many political and human rights organizations, such as London-based ARTICLE 19, have argued for net neutrality on the grounds of freedom of expression and freedom of information, as enshrined in the Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; the right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.

However, with the public discourse going online, it also becomes imperative that we make this new information sphere more and more inclusive. A functioning democracy needs an informed citizenry, and if the public discourse takes place on a medium that sections of society do not have access to, it would not only be against raj-dharma, the normative principles of governance, and could also lead to many social problems. Disconnectedness and lack of social understanding can be some of the most vicious things in any society, and lack of access to the most widely used media of communication is the easiest way to reach there.

A New Poverty

The United Nations General Assembly, in their 1997 statement on Universal Access to Basic Communication and Information Services, observed:

We are profoundly concerned at the deepening mal-distribution of access, resources and opportunities in the information and communication field. The information technology gap and related inequities between industrialized and developing nations are widening: a new type of poverty — information poverty — looms. Most developing countries, especially the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) are not sharing in the communication revolution.

It has been of the view of some contemporary thinkers that information and knowledge constitute the core of economics and are the essence of all economic activities. Marshall McLuhan, who coined the phrase ‘global village’, argued that information is no longer means of producing economic merchandise but is itself becoming the chief merchandise. And Jean-François Lyotard, author of the Postmodern Condition and the Libidinal Economy, observed that the central position of knowledge in an economy comes from its role as an enabler of industrial change and effective use of resources for economic ends. He saw the centrality of knowledge as so strong that he suggested perhaps one day wars will be waged over the control of information. More recently, César Hidalgo of MIT Media Labs, in his book Why Information Grows has argued that “economy is the collective system by which humans make information grow”. He proposes that economies grows when information grows, and explains how all products and services around us embody the knowledge and technology behind them, which enable the constituents to be of some utility.

In that understanding of the economy, any society where a significant fraction of the population stays disconnected with a powerful medium of information exchange cannot guarantee inclusive growth. Even classical liberals would agree that information asymmetries, as large as those generated by disparate access to internet, are not good for competition and economic justice. This huge social disparity, termed in literature as the Digital Divide, is considered by many economic commentators as one of the biggest hurdles to global growth.

If you are reading this, most probably you have been privileged with a internet connection. And it shouldn’t be hard to recollect and recognize the amount of knowledge you’ve gained through internet throughout your life. There is hardly anyone, among those reading this, who wouldn’t agree that they have gained immensely from Wikipedia. And for my programmer friends, a world without Google, Stackoverflow and other similar sites would be close to a nightmare. In a world where knowledge is exploding at an unprecedented rate, we are looking at a changing face of education, at least in the context of skill acquisition.

Programming, a skill that today permeates industry and engineering, scientific research, commerce and trade, and almost everything else, is relatively easy to acquire given a decent internet connection. But even if you remove programming from the equation, the internet today is filled with resources, formal like MOOCs to informal like blogs and Youtube videos, on a variety of skills ranging from industrial management to drum playing, and from wool weaving to learning languages. And if there is an argument that most of these skills are hobbies and might not be economically useful for those sections which constitute our subject matter, then what is amiss is not a platform but demand. There is no reason why better access to information highways would not result in greater sharing and cooperation, as well as transactions of skills and knowledge.

If the Right to Education covers basic access to decent primary and secondary education, then regardless of whether the act is effective or not, it will not meet the economic needs of the nation, unless extended to a Right to Learn What you Want to. If the economic debates in the last few centuries centered around the freedom of economic activity and accumulation and use of wealth and property as one can and wishes to, then it must also include in this century the freedom to learn what one can and wishes to. In addition, it also becomes imperative for a society that desires technological progress to make accessible, to the best of their abilities, the frontiers of knowledge to anyone who wishes to dwell in them.

The Inertia of Industries and Antifragility of New Marketplaces

In 1812, at the height of Industrial Revolution, a large number of weavers gathered in Westhoughton, Bolton in north west England, around the Rowe and Dunscough’s Mill. As a result of riots in Bolton, a cavalry regiment of the British Army deployed there was sent to guard this mill. But seeing everything quiet there in the vicinity for some time, they soon left. However, as soon as the regiment left, the same day, people started mobilizing around the Mill. And while the manager was out to recall the regiment, the crowd started throwing stones and bricks. And soon the Textile Mill was set alight, burning on straws brought by crowd and the cloths from the loons.

The Westhoughton Mill Fire took place in the middle of the years dominated by Luddite protests. Luddites were a group of weavers, who had been replaced in industries with automation, who protested by breaking and damaging machines in mills. The movement was a major issue across England for a few years. Any form industrial organization in a society is subject to its own forms of conservatism to change and progress, in order to resist any immediate friction that the change might bring. Technological unemployment and the social problems that it brings can be a strong factor behind inertia of the markets.

Today, we stand at a juncture in history where not only do we not know how the economics of our future would look like, but we have already started to be conservative with technological progress. Connectivity, personalization, artificial intelligence, and decentralization are becoming some of the core economic features of the new era. Today, while many of the utility services and industries can be disruptively changed to reduce human effort, and increase efficiency, many countries are not so prepared to adapt. And one of the major neo-luddite reason why it is so can be traced to the attachment of ideas of self and identity to the labour and profession, and consequent resistance to any progress or disruption that takes away this economic role and sense of identity.

It can be argued that industrial revolution was able to change Europe only because the social system of Europe at that time was prepared for such a change, overpowering any inertia. According to thinker-author Nassim Taleb, a system is antifragile if it allows positive accidents to propagate and have greater impact across the landscape. For instance, according to him evolution and free markets would be antifragile in some sense, since they allow fitter mutations and efficient solutions to prevail respectively. In some sense, the first step towards antifragility therefore requires the economic planning to be better prepared for the economic systems based on internet, knowledge and agency of machines.

In that sense, Digital India initiative can be seen in context of the Make in India initiative. And it should be clear that in order to be better prepared for new economic systems today, the former must come much above the latter. It is not paramount today to push large unemployed population to secondary sector jobs, as much it is important to empower them with an access to platforms for skill acquisition and moving towards new forms of professions and a more flexible economy.

Secondly, it can be argued that connectivity and decentralization caused by internet have the capacity to change the shape of markets. The Cluetrain Manifesto of 1999 suggested that internet will cause the emerging marketplaces to be of a very different shape than the existing one where financial measurements are the most dominating form of economic data. While their prophecies are yet to be fulfilled, the comparison that they drew to renaissance of old-school marketplaces can largely be agreed upon today.

The first markets were markets. Not bulls, bears, or invisible hands. Not battlefields, targets, or arenas. Not demographics, eyeballs, or seats. Most of all, not consumers.

The first markets were filled with people, not abstractions or statistical aggregates; they were the places where supply met demand with a firm handshake. Buyers and sellers looked each other in the eye, met, and connected. The first markets were places for exchange, where people came to buy what others had to sell — and to talk.

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Conversation is a profound act of humanity. So once were markets.

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The long silence — the industrial interruption of the human conversation — is coming to an end. On the Internet, markets are getting more connected and more powerfully vocal every day.

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The Internet is a place. We buy books and tickets on the Web. Not over, through, or beside it. To call it a “platform” belies its hospitality. What happens on the Net is more than commerce, more than content, more than push and pull and clicks and traffic and e-anything. The Net is a real place where people can go to learn, to talk to each other, and to do business together. It is a bazaar where customers look for wares, vendors spread goods for display, and people gather around topics that interest them. It is a conversation. At last and again.

Consequently, Internet marketplace doesn’t only create business for digital firms, but also boosts outside-of-internet economic transactions. A common feature in many startups today is the use of connectivity and intelligence to connect outside-of-internet sellers and buyers, in the process assisting economic growth. And there are even more opportunities to grow in that direction if we are able to bring more diversity and bridge the digital divide. While it is hard to agree with the optimism that entrepreneurial spirit alone can resolve many of India’s miseries, it must be noted ‘Startup India — Stand India’ Campaign and Skill India initiative, in conjunction with Digital India initiative, have the potential to drive the nation and its economy forward in an unprecedented fashion, if done sincerely.

A New Directive Principle

Today internet is becoming that where culture is shaped: where art and literature find audience; where science and technology progresses; where public discourse takes place; where marketplace interaction happens; and where endless opportunities for learning and exploration are present. Thus this disparity in access of internet has the potential to become the greatest form of discrimination in this century.

Also, in order to fulfill the dreams of our democracy, we need both an active and an informed citizenry. Today, eGovernance and modernization of state machinery has allowed decentralization of various policy work flows, and has created opportunities for greater public participation. Today, Right to Information is not just a philosophical notion about a diligent society, but ease of operation and access has made it an important tool for democratic institutions.

It must therefore be argued that it must be the function of the state to work towards improving quality of access, and combat disparity of access, to spheres of information created by internet. And it must also be noted that the state must take steps, to best of its abilities, to combat disparate access across linguistic lines, and provide impetus to emergence of a multilingual and inclusive internet.

Hopes and Doubts

In my personal opinion, an inclusive internet is essential for our democracy and our economy. And while it is hard to predict on such issues, I do think that Digital India might just be the greatest economic empowerment scheme in our history. And with its focus on digital literacy and eGovernance, it is at least as significant as the rights-based entitlement legislations of the last one decade.

Insofar as the principle of net neutrality is concerned, while I agree with most of the concerns, I would like to point out that the Digital India initiative is not in philosophical opposition to the principle. However, if a regulated competition over an open consumer base can help bring better infrastructure and services to the nation, then I would find it hard to argue for an absolute applicability of net neutrality.

It must be understood that law cannot be arbitrary to go against Internet.org and not close doors for any similar ventures with potential to serve the desired goals. And I am not sure if a state should prohibit private firms to do social good, in situations where it is unable to do so itself.

A fair criticism, of course, is that this is a false dichotomy between two principles, and both can be met simultaneously. But provided the lack of know-how with the government, I personally do not think that public sector infrastructure will be able to compete with the work that private competition can achieve in this regard.

I am also naturally skeptical about the flip side of better internet access, and how that would just provide ease of propaganda and could lead to a more polarized society. But I do not feel it is appropriate for a few to decide against a potential consumer choice to others, and do not see it as good for our young republic.

Insofar as the actual implementation of the underlying principles is concerned, I do not think that I am well situationed to take a stand on that. There are undoubtedly a hundred ways in which this policy can go wrong, but I do believe that there is at least one way in which it can work. And while I do not think that internet access is the solution to India’s miseries, I do think that lack of same is a significant misery on its own.

A friend once remarked to me why he thought that right-wing parties usually won against left-winged ones. According to him left parties sold hope while right-wingers sold fear. And fear almost always trumps hope. But in this case, I am willing to hope that a few positive steps could lead to positive change. I do not know if government is taking the right step in the right directions, but I hope that the diligent citizenry and a mature democracy and judiciary will not allow private interests to cross the line of social goodwill.

However, undoubtedly, even if we do choose not to have an absolute application of net neutrality, we as a nation must remain conscious about it. The government must get a fair bargain in sense of open access to state websites and greater regulatory power, for instance. Even if do choose the greater of the virtues, we must do so in the cognizance of adopting the lesser of the evils.

The author would like to thank Arnav Sharma and Ravi Agarwal for their editorial reviews.