Globally, there is a move to offer digital access as a fundamental right. Countries like Estonia and Finland are pioneers in making broadband access legal. While they may appear small Scandinavian countries, the trend to universal digital access is gaining momentum across the world, with institutions from the United Nations to the courts. Over the last two decades, India’s telecom revolution – with a rise in internet users from 60 million in 2009 to 260 million this year and poised to touch half a billion by 2018 – has made neutral access to internet an important and immediate issue.

As our primary window on the rest of the world, internet has revolutionary potential to drive rapid economic growth. It is also an extension of avenues for free speech and is a force for democracy. With such a central role in individual and social life, ensuring even-handed internet access is a public responsibility. In this sense, internet is a public good. Thus, the issue of net neutrality, precipitated by the TRAI guidelines, lies at the heart of internet ethics.

Access

In lay terms, it means that content, sites, and platforms should be treated equally. While you, as a user, may pay for membership of a website, or pay for the goods and services you purchase off the net, or wander carefreely into corners of the cyberspace, equal access demands that no one should “guide” you to certain sites just because they have deep pockets to make such an arrangement with your operator.

With IT entrepreneurship a major source of creativity, innovation, and economic value, network equality ensures vibrant competition and allows a relatively robust ecosystem to sort out long term winners from the also-rans. Internet allows millions of Indians to dream big as they develop their own websites and applications in the hope of turning them into multimillion dollar enterprises. The average user surfing the net does so in the belief that secular criteria such as impersonal search engines, ratings and content are the basis of popularity of content.

All this is at risk if we flounder on our path to net neutrality. The selective free access to some content by operators takes away from the principles on which internet was conceived and built. While contractual agreements are the lynchpin of a market economy, this cannot override concerns about deeper values like freedom of speech and fair use of sovereign resources like spectrum and bandwidth. The TRAI discussion paper with its controversial stance comes close on the heels of an expensive spectrum auction. Even at that time, concerns were expressed about whether these expensive bands of spectrum would come at too high a price for the consumers.

Liberty

Government and TRAI have already given wildly different numbers on pass through of these spectrum acquisition costs in voice and data rates for end users. One has to wonder if consumers would also pay a much higher price in terms of their liberties as netizens as companies rush into agreements with content providers to recover costs. Since civil liberties have to be constantly upheld, and majoritarian politics threatens it, one must be mindful of the possibility that constrained access to content will drive a particular kind of agenda.

We must resist these pressures. Any concession on net neutrality will put us on a slippery slope. Once concessions such as tiered services being proposed are agreed to, not only will competitive and democratic forces be distorted, but demand for further concessions such as discriminatory treatment of peer-to-peer data and file transfers etc will intensify. While concerns about a neutral internet have circulated for a while in India, matters have now moved into a high gear. Federal Communications Commission, the US regulator, has ruled in favour of net neutrality in February this year. The battlefield may therefore have shifted to India for more than one reason.

Test

In view of so many competing strands, the government must take a well-considered position on the matter and use this opportunity to demonstrate commitment to an inclusive society. For our regulator, TRAI, this is an important test of maturity and independence.