You have to pay for certain TV Channels to the broadcasting company, these TV channels are clubbed in different packages with different prices and values. The same scheme will be applied to Internet if the government doesn’t change its stand on Net Neutrality. But, what exactly is net neutrality, you will ask. It isthe principle that an ISP (Internet Service Provider) has no influence over what we get and don’t get to see on the internet. To put it simple, ISP is there to connect us with the internet and it gets paid for that, it cannot charge us extra for visiting certain type of content on the web. It cannot influence our Internet experience beyond the bandwidth that we pay for.
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If net neutrality is abolished then soon you’ll be paying extra money to visit sites that you currently explore for free. Also, the ISP may slow down the sites that don’t pay them for high-speed access channels. This mean if there was a competitor of Facebook, probably better than that then it won’t reach to you if its creator doesn’t pay the ISP. Most of the times, creators of awesome online stuff don’t have that much of money. You see what is happening here? They are reducing space for competition and innovation. This is not how the Internet is supposed to be.
Quite recently, TRAI, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has come up with plans to alter how World Wide Web works. It published a 118 pages document last month stating that Telecom companies may create bandwidth highways. Where websites will have to pay to drive on the fast lane so that its visitors have fast access to it. Whereas, the websites that do not pay the ISP, will be stuck in traffic. Eventually, the user will get fed-up with a slow website and leave for another one.
However, there is still good hope. In fact with enough support we can turn back TRAI’s anti-net neutrality agitation. Send an E-mail to advqos@trai.gov.in and tell them that “Don’t Mess with the Internet”.
