Thursday, April 16, 2015

Indian Telecom - Commoditizing Internet

Indian telecom industry has seen a lot of upheaval and a lot of movement in past decade or so.  This has indeed done good for the nation. The movement by Reliance "Karlo Duniya Mutthi men" really bridged the gap between rich and poor by taking the Cell Phones in the reach of "AAM Aadmi" (Common Man).

But come March 2015, what we witnessed was totally outrageous move by the telcos and then the 115 pager feasibility study by the Teleom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).  And what more TRAI puts up that report on its site with "Open for Consultation" till March 24, 2015. And what is all about?

The move by Indian Telcos is something where they want to commoditize Internet.  In a Layman's language, the current Data Pack provides access to all the sites without discrimination.  but if the Indian Tecos succeed, they would be able to create Buckets like - Facebook & Chat or Skype and Video Conferencing or Whatsapp and Google Hangout or Social Media or News Updates or Ecommerce sites etc.  What would that mean? That would mean one would need to buy addition Data Packages to access various sorts of sites, or they may have to pay premium charges to have all in one Data Package.  If this would happen, then we may see more of Monopolistic Trade Practices cropping up in the Ecommerce arena.  The Ecoomerce sites with fat wallets will be able to influence the Service Providers to push their content better than others.  This way they would end up getting better foot fall than the other slower loading sites and thus the slower loading site (certainly those with low budgets) would die their own death as they would be pushed out of the race.

The movement in India to save the neutrality of the Internet is opposing this move by the telcos and they have hosted a site "Save The Internet" where answers for the questions raised by TRAI have been pre populated for you to copy and paste in your mail and send the mail to TRAI to oppose the said regulation.  The target that is to be achieved is 800,000 signatures...More the Merrier.

Not sure if most of you would have read that clear trip and times of India group have opted out of internet.org, the Facebook led initiative in support of Net Neutrality movement in India.

So, being the Internet Savvy people and being the people form the Independent Democratic Republic of India, we need to rise and raise our voice to keep Internet independent of Content providers and the Commoditization!!!

Please click on the link "Save the Internet" and copy the content to send to TRAI...its important and its critical....

Operation Rahat and Indian Media

Media and Yellow Journalism seems to have become synonyms for the time that we are living in.  Media would just report what would sell and what would bring more money to them.  And certainly it has to be controversial.  

Regarding the operation Rahat, where India really did well to bring back almost all Indians (but one) back home alive, the Indian Media was by far the last to report it.  Rather I happened to read one specific report in one of the leading publications that India responded slower than China and where the mistakes made by India were highlighted.  But that particular media house seems to have missed the boat in understanding that there were only 500+ Chinese, where as there were 4000+ Indian stranded in Yemen.  Interestingly, the western countries were also issuing travel advisory to contact Indian Mission to get evacuated from the War Torn region. 

The whole world was looking towards India to help evacuate their citizens.  However, the Indian Media was busy praising Pakistan for helping rescue 11 Indians and sending them home.  The whole limelight was occupied by that news than the efforts by the Indian Mission and Indian soldiers and other government departments to smoothly run operation Rahat.

As usual, Indian Media has proved that they are not going to publish what is right, they are going to publish what is paid for!!!!  Would have they done anything like this -
Foreign Channel CNN has covered India's successful Yemen rescue operation "Operation Rahat"