The Conspiracy of Anti-Net Neutrality

Apr 19 2015 : The Economic Times (Kolkata)

The Conspiracy of Anti-Net Neutrality

Alok Kejriwal





Rather than making internet access biased, it may be time for telecom operators to partner players on the Net and reinvent themselves

What is this brouhaha about pro and anti net neutrality? I assume you know what net neutrality is. It simply means that consumers should be able to ac cess all web content at the same cost and terms without discrimination.

I believe that there is a deeper con spiracy of keeping the net anti­neutral:

The Disruption of Disruption

In 2000, I was invited to a glittering event at The Regal Room, Trident, Mumbai, to attend the first ever `Entrepreneur Awards'. I was invited to be a part of the audience.

I was seated at the "Zip Fone Table".Zip Fone was this new styled phone calling booth that had started springing up all across the country. It was slick, clean and best of all had `video ads' running in the centre of its chassis. Zip Fone was the disrupter of those shabby `STD' booths we had, where call charges were suspect and the service poor.This new phone service combined advertising revenues, aesthetics and transparency as a brand new service.

On the table was seated the founding entrepreneur of Zip Fone. When I asked him how he had spent his last year, he said, "Alok, just signing term sheet after term sheet. There is so much investor money chasing me, I am on a non-stop money raising spree."

Circa 12 months later. Mobile telephony kicked into the country with a bang and the Reliance Infocomm's `Monsoon Hungama' offer made every man, woman and unborn child an owner of a mobile phone.

Zip Fone was destroyed almost overnight, like one of the cars in the latest Fast & Furious movie. The landline business imploded faster than a death star. Mobile operators had disrupted Zip Fone, which was a disruptor itself.

Come 2015 and the very same mobile operators are on the brink of disruption by the untamable and ubiquitous internet. Look at the penetration and popularity of WhatsApp. A simple green buttoned app has the power to decimate the business of SMS and ruin the business of voice calls. Other internet-linked `apps' yield the same power.

Net anti-neutrality is a conspiracy aimed at self-preservation.

Nobody Learns from History. And History Repeats Itself!

In the late '90s, two teenage boys proposed an incredible hypothesis: every young person in the world had some kind of digital music stored on their PCs and always wanted to listen to more stuff. Why couldn't they `swap' music files between themselves (called peerto-peer or P2P)? Note that the boys did not care about the legality of sharing IP or the fact that they were hijacking the official sales channel of music.

This innocuous question posed by Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning became the fastest growing business in the world called Napster until it was brutally stopped in its tracks by heavy duty lawsuits brought out by the Recording Industry Association of America, the band Metallica and others.

This was a classical `knee jerk' behaviour of the big bully corporates who always felt threatened by innovation and chose to block monumental ideas rather than work with them.

While Napster was shut down, a few years later Apple introduced iTunes, which in many parts was inspired by Napster. Unfortunately, most music companies had gone almost bankrupt by then. History would have been very different if these companies had tied up with Napster and made it their own music distribution channel! In the effort to make the net anti-neutral, I see the same `self destructive' conspiracy by telecom operators. Rather than blocking most players, they should partner with them and re-invent themselves!

Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Who is the Most Neutral of Them All?

What is being net neutral? Internet jihadis like me argue that there should not be any price discrimination for consumer access between two or more internet services.But mobile companies argue that the massive costs of building infrastructure and their networks cannot simply be compromised by startups who become digital parasites; and by creating technology like WhatsApp ride on operator networks, hijack them and then squander their margins by giving away almost all telephony services for free.

The answer lies in the thin veil of disclo sure. Does the consumer know the choices on offer or is the lure of `free' versus charged very subtly hidden away?
To illustrate my point, consider two friends who access the internet using the same mobile network. Both are flying for their college reunion from the same city and meet on the plane. Both have used the internet to book their flight tickets.When they compare costs, the less techsavvy guy is shocked. He has paid 25% more for the same ticket. He learns that the website he used to buy his digital ticket is the culprit. He did not bother to check other sites because they were `not free to browse' on his mobile phone.

This is when net partiality rears its demonic head, because the participants of all things unfair will abuse their position sooner than later. And therein lies the undisputable case of having complete net neutrality.