Nikhil Pahwa was drawn into the battle to preserve net neutrality, a battle that would come to consume and define his life, because he “was afraid we were about to be disconnected from the rest of the world.”

Sitting at his Civil Lines residence in Delhi one evening in May, Pahwa, co-founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation – a volunteer-driven organisation that advocates and educates on internet-related issues – is recounting how he came to spearhead one of the largest mass movements to defend the internet as we know it in India. As founder and chief editor of MediaNama, a popular website for news and analysis on digital media in the country, Pahwa had been observing, with increasing alarm, the actions of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) as it considered allowing certain Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to charge users for accessing specific online services.

The internet is basically an interconnection of ISPs across the world, he explains. “ISPs are the route to that public sphere. If the ISPs control what you can and can’t access in that public sphere, and if they start favouring a Google or an Apple or a Microsoft or an Amazon over you and me, we lose out on the opportunity to participate.” In other words, from being creators and consumers – aka users – we become only consumers.

For Pahwa, the stakes were personal. Having dropped out of engineering college, it was the internet that provided him gainful employment: He began writing for ContentSutra, another media analysis website, soon rising to chief editor. When he went into business for himself, establishing MediaNama in 2008, all it took was buying a domain and setting up a WordPress site. “It barely cost me anything,” he says. “I want everyone else to have that ability to participate, the way I did.”

Therefore, when the TRAI brought out its “horrible and aggressive” consultation paper detailing its scheme in March 2015, Pahwa realised he had to do something. The proposed measures would have allowed ISPs to monetise web services that were free to use. If this happened, not only would using the internet have become more expensive, it would have stifled innovation by encouraging rent-seeking activity, as success for an app or service would stem not from how good it is, but from what monopolies it could achieve through deals with ISPs.

However, not many seemed to get the magnitude of what was about to happen. “I realised that asking the hard questions as a reporter wasn’t going to be sufficient.” Pahwa had to mobilise opposition to the proposed measure.

So he called his friends – lawyers, tech writers, web developers, software professionals, anyone who could be persuaded to give a damn. He put out a public call on Twitter to help simplify the TRAI’s 118-page document. The campaign was run on “zero money”, and people all over the country pitched in. A team of techies in Bengaluru created SaveTheInternet.in. A team of lawyers began drafting answers to the 20 questions raised in the consultation paper. A graphics design company created banners and memes.

A parallel campaign on Reddit, and the support of a Member of Parliament – Tathagata Satpathy – provided the movement much-needed momentum. “The noisier we got, the more people started getting involved,” Pahwa recalls. “And all of this was before the AIB video.”

Two weeks after the TRAI paper came out, comedy troupe AIB released a YouTube video directing viewers to a website that would auto-generate responses to the questions raised in the paper. In his original email to Gursimran Khamba, Pahwa had talked about putting together 15,000 responses. The website ended up generating 5,000 every hour. Over 2.4 million people wrote in. “The TRAI didn’t know what hit them.”

In February 2016, it passed an order banning differential pricing, and a subsequent ruling last November addressed the unresolved issue of throttling – ISPs slowing down or blocking access to certain websites. An attempt by Facebook to provide a section of the internet for free was also thwarted.

We’re speaking a week after Pahwa – who looks nothing like the popular caricature of the Indian activist – attended a conference in Toronto where, along with the teams that set up the American and European chapters of Save The Internet, he followed the United States Senate’s vote to uphold net neutrality: a response to the recent reversal by the FCC on the issue. Even if the House of Representatives doesn’t follow suit, he expects the Democrats to do so once they return to power. Meanwhile, he’s confident that support for net neutrality remains unaffected across the political spectrum in India, and cites telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad’s endorsement of the principle, even after the US FCC ruling.

Pahwa recognises that, in 2018, the fight to save the internet is a wider one, as exponentially more Indians come online each year, with cheaper, faster data plans and smarter phones. “What this movement told us,” he says, “is that the internet is now integral to the lives of many people in India, and they feel very strongly about the freedom that it has provided them.”

In 2016, Pahwa was among a group of Save The Internet volunteers who set up the Internet Freedom Foundation. The IFF has been on the frontline of every major battle over how we use the internet, from privacy and data protection to criminal defamation and restrictions to internet access.

Take, for instance, the Privacy Is A Right campaign that the IFF has launched: We’re experiencing, according to Pahwa, “a global market failure in data protection.” He’s been one of the foremost critics of the mismanagement of the Aadhaar project. Another IFF campaign seeks an end to internet shutdowns, of which there were reportedly 71 last year. “It’s the equivalent of imposing a curfew. The question that we have to ask is, would a physical curfew have been imposed that many times?”

The fight to keep the World Wide Web open and accessible to all, though, continues to be of paramount importance. More and more, he says, monopolistic tendencies are coming to dominate the internet, and must be resisted. “You have Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple, Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu – these are humongous players with over a billion users each, and they’re essentially crowding out the internet,” Pahwa says. “We have to ensure that there’s enough room for the diversity and plurality of the internet. This is now the battle of our times.”

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