Net Neutrality: What happened?

So, not very long ago a raging debate started in our country over a term that we never had heard of,'Net Neutrality'. The question is what happened? what started the whole debate and what was the end result, well let us see,  shall we? First things first what is net neutrality? If you Google the term you will get answer which goes something like this,"the principle that Internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favouring or blocking particular products or websites." Simple enough right!!(Its like racism but for Internet!). Now this is not exclusive to India, US has had there fair share of troubles regarding net neutrality. But recently the FCC had to, yes! had to pass rules that protect net neutrality. This happened after FCC on its website opened a kind of poll to decide to whether or not act on the issue. Many people tried to create awareness but failed to do so nobody cared about it because nobody actually knew what it really was, it was after an episode of 'Last week tonight' which is a show hosted by a famous stand up comedian John Oliver(which by the way you should watch,  its on YouTube),this became public knowledge. Right after this that very night the FCC website was crashed by the number people petitioning against it and on 26 February 2015 the FCC passed the laws to protect net neutrality and were in effect as of June 2015.
 But how did the debate started in India? Well again you can say thank you to the brilliant minds at airtel! They came up with the plan to offer some of the websites(which obviously they thoght were important) for free under a plan they called 'Airtel Zero'. But again the question is why oppose this right? I mean who would not want free access to internet, wrong. Consider this, initially airtel had tied up with flipkart, now to every airtel customer they could use flipkart for free now for this flipkart had to pay certain amount to the company which they could afford to pay but not every one can do that. There are a ton of local e-commerce sites which are not as big which will take a giant hit in sales because of this. This is something which is unethical and in violation with net neutrality. This is often termed as 'Paid Prioritization'.

Its when company pays the ISP to give them special treatment, let assume YouTube pays ISP's to give there site a special treatment and create high speed lanes for them meaning YouTube videos on any plan would buffer flawlessly but this again is not fair to other video streaming services(not that we use any others but still!!). Another thing that was against the idea of net neutrality was the operators claim they were losing money because of OTT(over the top)services like whatsapp,Skype etc. They wanted to charge extra money for allowing the use of services like these. That means you pay for the regular internet pack then say if you feel like using any of the social networks pay extra for every single one of them. Now wait a minute then,  what was the initial internet pack charge for? Well its for the operators being generous enough to allow you to be on there network. The very idea of this is in violation with the idea of net neutrality but nobody cared in India too because nobody knew. Again it took a set of comedians to make this a relevant issue, thanks to AIB a group a highly controversial comedians, who made a video about it and boom. Everyone was talking about ,similar to what FCC had done our very own TRAI and DoT were asking for opinions of the people but they wanted us to answer 50 questions for it. Enter some genius people who created a website called 'savetheinternet.in' with an automatically generated email answering all those 50 questions. And again with this TRAI received over a million email responses in favour of net neutrality.

But what happened? Last date of submission was 23 April 2015 and the TRAI was supposed to come out with the guidelines by 16 July 2015. Yup, they already did!! But what happened? Did we win? Well the answer to that is a 111-page report that was released. Now I don't claim to have read the whole report but I have read the excerpts of it and things are not looking good. In the report TRAI says that they are looking at the international implementation of net neutrality and trying to create a county specific version of it. They go on mentioning the 76000 crore losses that operators have suffered because of OTT services. But not all is not lost some parts of the report do claim that they are in favour of net neutrality but are still thinking about the issue of OTT services.
Now, we have to think about the bigger picture here. If the net neutrality laws are not implemented correctly it can have major issues not just that we have to pay more, consider a scenario where your ISP is in favour of a political party and blocks everything that is considered against the ideology of the party they support. We are the biggest democracy in the entire world, and at the very heart of democracy is lies the freedom of content and publishing , so please for God's sake please let logic and reason prevail, and let this new digital India have a complete and neutral access to the internet.