 Hello and welcome to NewsClick and today we are going to discuss net neutrality, the latest recommendations made by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. To do this we have Rishabh Bailey with us. Rishabh, you and I have been involved as Knowledge Commons giving various representations on the issue of net neutrality. So are you happy that starting from what was called the OTT paper over describing the internet as over the top services, to what has come now, this two and a half years I think it started in 2015 to now 2017. Do you see that there has been a distinct shift and clarity in what the Telecom Regulatory Authority is now done or is doing? No, this clearly been a huge change in the way the Telecom Regulatory Authority and the government itself has been looking at the issue of the internet and regulating the internet from back in 2015. At that point of time the government was primarily concerned based on representations made by the industry, by the telecom industry who were facing or who feared losing profits because more and more people were migrating to services like Skype and so on, which they could use to avoid making regular phone calls. So the attempt then was very much to see whether they could try and bring these internet services under the same regulatory regime that traditional telecom companies have. Now we see that given this sort of two and a half year process, multi-stakeholder consultation process, the government has actually changed its stance in order to recognize the fact that content on the internet really should not be differentiated based on what it is being used for. And the second part of course is that increasingly, voice is looked upon as something which is a legacy service and really everything is becoming, shall we say, digitized and packet based. So effectively what you are seeing is that even voice is migrating to essentially the internet as voice over the internet protocol is of course one part of it, but other part of it for instance takes you, which is really converting everything to data packets and as we know the backend of all the long haul networks even for Indian purposes are again using essentially digitized traffic. So it's a recognition that times have changed and that it's no point looking at things from that same perspective maybe. So in that sense yes, we are, I mean I am fairly happy with the recommendations that Tri has come up with, which are fairly broad based and holistic in nature. They take a more principled approach to the issue of neutrality, looking at laying down broad regulatory principles rather than specific rules by which they will regulate the internet. Of course that leaves space for further rules to be made in specific areas in the future and they will I'm sure be numerous little fights to be had over the coming years. And it's a very distinct shift of focus shall we say, then what Mr. Ajit Pai seems to be doing for the United States, which is to throw out the baby with the bath water and in fact abandon net neutrality itself for what it appears and that would essentially mean that at least in India our regulatory regime is really being aligned to what has been the demand for most of the internet users. It's also interesting because if you look at what happened even in the US when the first rules were passed under the Obama government, the amount of public attention and the involvement of various stakeholders, civil society, various content companies and so on was one of the reasons it created huge pressure on the regulator at that point of time in order to pass rules which were broadly in favor of maintaining the internet as a free and open space, which is the idea behind the internet and which is something that our regulator has also recognized. Here now however we have Mr. Ajit Pai who is an ex-lawyer from Verizon clearly connected to the industry who has now gone against this public pressure to say no we will do what is right for our big corporations. Do you think we can say that in some sense that neutrality recognizes that internet is playing a public utility function and therefore needs to be really regulated for public good? Absolutely I mean that is the crux of the net neutrality debate essentially on whether you can privatize bits of the internet and charge money or toll for you know accessing these areas or whether it should be essentially a free for all with certain regulations and restrictions and the fact that it is increasingly be used to provide all sorts of services people are using it to access information our government is trying to push more and more government programs through it means it has to be treated as a public utility whether you now deem it as important as electricity or water is debatable but no doubt it is reaching the level for an informed citizen you have to have internet access now. The government wants every banking money transaction to move to the internet of course it has to treat it as a public utility it leaves open the question then you declare section 144 ban the internet for the pressified periods and so on and how do you square the circle of keeping it consistent with the public utility? Absolutely no I mean that is a problem that in particularly states like Kashmir and so on where you have blanket bans of the internet so one is not quite sure how you deal or you square these these two positions but no doubt that this is a step forward in ensuring that the internet is gradually recognized not just as a public utility but as a right to access. Coming back to the actual recommendations and as you said rightly that this is more establishing certain principles and not looking at just rules because you've established the principles rules are easier to derive if you don't then you can get contradicted rules come in and then it becomes very very arbitrary and that was always and it provides a certain amount of flexibility to deal with new technological innovations that might occur new practices that one might see in the market as long as it's all specific rules are made to deal with specific situations keeping in mind the broad principles that have already been laid down I think that is the attempt of try over here and I think that should be commended. There are two car routes which try has left into a certain degree open one is what it called specialized services and in this they have said certain services which use IOT could be specified the specialized services but the car route is very specific it says that it has to be declared as a special service and you cannot just on your say so claim it to be a specialized service so that is one do you think that it's a good step leaves enough flexibility for new technologies as you say or new services as well as maintains that in the name of specialized services you do not create a private space. No try I think has been fairly clear in saying that specialized services must be specific services which are optimized or which because of the kind of service it is that needs specific conditions to function at the same time they've also been really really clear in saying that specialized services cannot be a replacement for general access to the internet and also that while providing specialized services you cannot cause harm to the general public internet so for instance Facebook cannot now say zero rated the zero rating platform it was running is a specialized service and therefore we will provide this because that's clearly then an attempt to get around net neutrality regulation they cannot just be normal services which are now moved into a specialized category and of course there are specific tools on the internet or specific services which do need you know very quick connections a hundred percent packet receipt or you know a high percentage of packet you shouldn't have too many packets dropped and so on and so forth so no doubt there is a need for this cover which is also of course useful in the case of say public emergencies if the government itself wants to provide particular services whether it's education medicine so on and so forth so there is a need for this cover and I'm glad that try has sort of laid out very clear boundaries for this what cannot be classified as specialized services and then make it compete with the open internet exactly and as you were saying I mean there were some suggestions during the entire consultation process that the internet of things itself should be kept out of the net neutrality framework and I'm glad in fact that the try hasn't firstly the internet of things is rather nebulous concept it broadly just refers to every device which has an IP address and is connected to the internet so as a cell phone exactly the other issue is really content delivery networks does it violate net neutrality and what are the limits of the content delivery networks now for the lay people content delivery networks are for instance Netflix Amazon etc etc particularly video on demand kind of stuff yeah so what content delivery networks actually do is if you have a Netflix whose servers are located physically very very far away from from the user it will likely take more time for that content to be accessed so therefore you hire services or you hire co-location services which are closer to the user so that the person can access them I mean it's a distributed method of accessing information is actually the same thing in lots of places exactly and what it would mean for instance if a certain kinds of films are popular in India they will have local servers catering to that in India while for instance Spanish films may be buffered or stored in servers in Latin America say for example so now try has actually I think done reasonably well to exclude CDNs however what is interesting though is that they do point to the need to ensure that there is greater transparency in the CDN market as well because right now no one knows about the sort of arrangements that are taking place between service providers and content delivery networks and these sort of providers so this is basically what would mean then the content content delivery networks when they interface to the public internet which is ultimately through which the content really comes to the user that part of it is at the moment identified as an issue but really no no may no deal shall we say rules have been laid out for that so that's sort of an open issue at the moment because it is possible to the back door content delivery networks may get privileged over other services so that risk remains but it is good that they haven't taken a decision either way and left this as as of now because look ultimately the issue also comes down to if I have you know very very fast as a service provider if I have really really fast servers which I can afford because I'm a bigger company I can provide faster services on the internet so this does give an unfair advantage to the YouTube's and the Facebook's of the world but given the fact that there is this issue that they are today hosting a huge amount of content therefore this does not seem to be something that we should prevent unless it mitigates against other at the level of certain ISPs privileging no so that is exactly the issue so even CDNs will I think ultimately have to be regulated in a sense that they cannot enter into discriminatory agreements with companies and the last my for the last one so that is where I think try is coming from and it says that we need more transparency on the agreements that they sign with ISPs because then that then becomes the next step how do we regulate it once we have this information on the practices that they are actually following now it's also something that we have discussed earlier which is particularly applicable to the no anti-net neutrality positions that for instance the US regulator is taking that ultimately this issue is that you need larger bandwidths and the policies should be something which encourages increase argument bandwidth rather than try and ration bandwidth and therefore get the existing telecom operators generate rent from creating an artificial scarcity and that this therefore the net neutrality rules therefore would be in that sense promoting a wider bandwidth generation rather than creating rent incomes to scarcity at the moment the the recommendations are very clear that traffic management practices must be reasonable like they must be transient they must be proportional and they must be carried out to meet one of the four or five conditions that are mentioned the regulations to you know improve security of the network or for network you know management practices whether it's to deal with public emergency so on and so forth so there are few things specifically mentioned that they can use it for so it's good then for instance that they cannot use it now for commercial purposes it's already taken care of but however we will need to see how it is actually implemented in regulation also what will be important is how it is actually monitored and how penalties or punitive action or bans of any kind are enforced at a later stage try has taken a slightly unusual position on this by creating a multi-stakeholder group to make recommendations and I was actually wondering what your thoughts are on this particularly in a country like India where you have such vast differences between the various stakeholders I think it's interesting that they are talking about multi-stakeholders because normally the stakeholders they have respected more than anybody else has been the telecom operators and I think what they're increasingly realizing that the way this is moving dynamically particularly based on internet that that's a very restrictive view of the internet itself and therefore they need to have more people come into the room for the discussions and I have to say that I think the net neutrality debate has also been very important in terms of the public voice which was at least forced into the tREI particularly after the OTT service has got a very negative reaction for the people and after that the Facebook case which as you remember the zero rating case by which they try to privatize if you will free basics issue and both these did may get the public voice heard and it was also very clear that the public voice was an aware technically informed voice and it was not just creating opposition for opposition's sake and I think it's that recognition which has driven the multi-stakeholder approach that they have talked about two provisions over here one is that it is possible as we know very well the multi-stakeholder process itself to be corrupted by co-opting certain kinds of stakeholders and claiming them to be people's representatives that can happen even more easily when you talk about public interest groups because whether they're really public interest or private interest is a difficult question to figure out the second part of it I think that we need to also know particularly areas you're technically relatively more complex when you talked about traffic management or traffic management is a technically more complex area then the broad net neutrality debate that we have been having and we need to see what kind of technical expertise the public interest groups will be able to bring into the debate but I think it's a recognition and that's what has also really differentiated the TRAI from other regulatory bodies in India that they have had much more public consultations and forest is the electricity regulator this has actually been a two-year process with at least six or seven public consultations various open houses so in that sense I think Tray has done a wonderful job in taking the country on board if I can you know be as and also moving from its initial position to position it has now and we have to give everybody a pat on the back back including ourselves who participate in the process and we helped everybody has helped themselves and here I come to a better understanding of the debate particularly when it is moving retrogressively in what many of the Indian tech industry will consider their fatherland namely the United States I think this is a really welcome change thank you very much Rishabh for being with us and I hope that you would be appearing for knowledge commons to which we are both parties on such issues in front of TRAI as these things developed thank you very much for being with us this is all the time we had for news click today keep watching news click also visit our youtube channel and also visit our facebook page