Following intense debate in India over Net Neutrality, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) published regulations on Monday that effectively prohibit mobile service providers from zero-rating data, which involves exempting certain websites and apps from counting towards a data cap. Facebook's Free Basics aimed to do just that: Free Basics, in partnership with Reliance Communications, one of India's largest mobile service providers, aimed at providing zero-rated access to a number of websites like Wikipedia, Bing, news websites, maternal health websites, job search websites, and others.
While this seems incredibly philanthropic on the surface, Indian regulators took issue with the fact that this effectively 'closes off' a huge majority of the Internet to subscribers, essentially dividing the Internet into free and paid tiers for access. In addition, by providing users with free access to Bing but not to other search engines, Free Basics would effectively single out Bing and provide its functionality to billions of subscribers, relegating Google and Yahoo to a paid tier of internet access, sharply skewing competition and usage towards a chosen search engine, Bing in this case.
This follows 2 months of rigorous debate between activists in India, and is the result of approximately 1.8 million responses received by TRAI regarding the matter. As of now, Free Basics is being offered as a paid albeit heavily discounted service by Reliance Telecommunications in order to comply with TRAI's ban on zero-rating data.
The reason this sounds eerily familiar is that an almost identical frenzy swept across the United States when the FCC published Open Internet rules supporting net neutrality in February 2015. Though the debate has been around for considerably longer, and the FCC has habitually contradicted itself and gone back on its own rulings, February brought a decisive victory for net neutrality activists, which was of course immediately challenged in courts by telecommunications providers.
Following that fateful ruling in February, net neutrality activists are alarmed by T-Mobile and Verizon's plans that sees certain audio and video content being zero-rated. T-Mobile's Binge On allows unlimited streaming from video content providers like Netflix, Hulu, HBO GO, and Showtime. YouTube is notably absent, and in fact later accused T-Mobile of downgrading its video content despite not being a Binge On partner. AT&T, Comcast, as well as Verizon have all been accused of violating net neutrality rules by use of zero-rated Sponsored Content, exploiting loopholes in the FCC's ruling, and by throttling content. TRAI's ruling, however, differs from the FCC's ruling in that the latter explicitly prohibited zero-rating, whereas the FCC's rules were more ambiguous with regard to the practice.
While the FCC has not yet conducted an inquiry into these practices, Chairman Tom Wheeler intends to keep an eye on these practices, and met with representatives from Comcast and T-Mobile as of 15 January in order to further understand and discuss the implications of their programs. While T-Mobile's Binge On has received by far the most widespread backlash, it remains to be seen if the FCC intends to challenge and discipline this flouting of net neutrality rules. Even if so, rulings are likely to be challenged in court, and it has been predicted that Net neutrality will eventually be brought before the United States Supreme Court.
