After a painful scandal that paralysed India’s parliament for years, involved the Supreme Court and catapaulted a new prime minister into power, the spectrum saga reached a Bollywood-style happy ending last week when the NDA government announced it would net Rs 110,000 crore from the auction of airwaves. While communications minister Ravi Shankar Prasad says…
In a landmark decision last month, federal regulators in the United States approved new rules governing internet traffic which forbids wired and wireless internet providers from blocking or slowing down traffic from certain content providers and bans them from prioritising some content over others. The decision raised concerns that internet service providers would be prevented…
Indian Telecom service providers (TSPs) such as Airtel, Idea and Vodafone have been complaining about over-the-top service providers (OTT SPs) such as Whatsapp, Facebook and Viber for more than a year now. Their complaint is two-fold. First of all, these OTT SPs are able to provide competing services of voice calls/text messages without having to…
As per MediaNama report, Flipkart has joined Airtel Zero platform, and this is some bad news for advocates of Net Neutrality principle in India. Basically, Flipkart and Airtel (and some other unnamed ecommerce portals and online services) have taken steps which can ruin the basic principles based on which Internet was formed, and an Open…
The internet’s success in fostering innovation, access to knowledge and freedom of speech is in large part due to the principle of net neutrality — the idea that internet service providers give their customers equal access to all lawful websites and services on the internet, without giving priority to any website over another. Due to…
On December 25, 2014, Airtel, the country’s largest mobile operator with over 200 million active subscribers, dropped a bombshell: it wanted to charge customers extra for using services like Skype, Viber and Google Hangouts even though they had already paid for Internet access. If customers wanted to use a service that used Internet data to…
The Indian telecom regulator has proposed 20 questions for your views on two basic topics: should there be licensing of Internet services, and should there be non-discrimination of Internet access via telecom operators. Download the complicated, 118 page long paper here. This consultation has two possible implications: First, if there is licensing of Internet services,…
India’s Supreme Court court has struck down a law that made posting “offensive” comments on the internet a crime punishable by a jail term of up to three years. But, for the free speech campaigners, there is more work to do, writes technology writer Prasanto K Roy. Section 66A, inserted in 2009 into India’s Information…
The Supreme Court today ruled on a series of cases challenging the IT Act, including Section 66A (3 years in prison for offensive statements online), Section 79 and its rules (forcing intermediaries to take down online content) and Section 69 (blocking of online content). How they ruled: Section 66A The bench, consisting of Justices Chelameswar…
Section 66A of the Information Technology Act is unconstitutional in its entirety, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday striking down a “draconian” provision that had led to the arrests of many people for posting content deemed to be “allegedly objectionable” on the Internet.
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