IN 1961 A.J.P. Taylor suffered a caustic book review at the hands of Hugh Trevor-Roper, another British historian. The book put Taylor’s standing as a serious academic in peril, said his reviewer. Taylor responded with an article: “How to quote: exercises for beginners”. In it he juxtaposed quotations from his book alongside passages from the review. They were somewhat at odds. Trevor-Roper’s methods of quotation might harm his reputation for seriousness, concluded Taylor, “if he had one”.

Half a century later, the seriousness of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has been questioned in a Taylor-style takedown by SaveTheInternet.in. The group, which lobbies for net neutrality (the equal treatment of all internet traffic), has analysed a text box in a recent TRAI discussion paper, which the agency attributed to The Economist. Compared with the two original articles on which the box was based, in our January 31st 2015 issue, the campaigners found that arguments against strict net neutrality had been inserted while arguments for it had been removed or tweaked. For instance, “net neutrality is under threat” became: “net neutrality is difficult to sustain”. Robert Ravi of TRAI denies any deception. The text does not purport to be verbatim, he says. And the tweaks? “I don’t find there is a great difference between ‘difficult to sustain’ and ‘under threat’”. Yet one implies the status quo may change; the other that it must.

The threat seems real enough in India. The purpose of the TRAI paper was to ask whether “over-the-top” services such as data, internet telephony and instant messaging, which rely on mobile networks’ data connections and which in some cases compete with those networks’ basic call and text services, should be treated differently from other traffic. Bharti Airtel, India’s biggest operator, recently launched a scheme that gives customers free access to a select group of data services. Airtel says this is little different from letting businesses provide toll-free phone lines, and that it is committed to net neutrality. But SaveTheInternet.in argues that Airtel’s differential pricing means it is not being neutral between providers of online content, and that consumer choice will suffer.

Indian regulators do not generally enjoy a reputation for independence. And the net-neutrality activists see TRAI’s misquoting of our articles as evidence that it is doing the operators’ bidding. The industry’s poor profitability, the result of intense competition, might indeed be boosted if it were allowed to charge variable prices for data traffic. But its squeezed profits also mean a lack of money to invest in improving call quality and extending mobile coverage. Perhaps that is why the sacrifice of net neutrality is being mooted in India.