Impact of Violation of Net Neutrality on Indian Society

The principle of net neutrality has gained much attention since 2006 and again in 2015 in India when Telecom Regulatory Authority of India released its consultation paper in which it invited public opinions with regard to the regulation of free availability and access of content (text, voice and media) on internet by various service providers. The topic gained much attention when the established telecom corporations started suggesting that they should be paid by the internet content providers like Facebook, You tube, Google etc, for providing them the network for reaching the masses. Telecom companies argue that the internet content providers have been making high profits from low investments while they are the ones to have made high investments in building the infrastructure for these service providers to operate, due to which the internet service providers should share their revenues with the telecom companies. The violation of net neutrality will take place if any kind of discrimination takes place in terms of providing any type of data to the consumers. This means their very right to free access to information from internet will be violated. Violation of net neutrality has generated much uproar around the world since telecom corporations like Airtel demanded that telecom companies like Airtel should be paid by the content providers like Google, Facebook, Amazon etc for letting them display their content on internet to the mass consumers and generating huge profits. This violation means that differential pricing is likely to be practiced by the telecom firms in terms of charging both the internet service providers and consumers. Currently there are no laws in India which govern net neutrality which means the content available on internet can be accessed by anybody without any kind of discrimination. This study seeks to fulfill the knowledge gap by empirically analyzing the various cross sections of the society which are bound to get affected by the violation of net neutrality.