TRAI gives stakeholders more time to send comments on Net Neutrality

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has extended the time to receive comments on Consultation Paper on ‘Traffic Management Practices (TMPs) and Multi-Stakeholder Body for Net Neutrality’. Stakeholders can now send their written comments by February 13, 2020 and counter comments by February 27, 2020.

TRAI had released its Consultation Paper on ‘Traffic Management Practices (TMPs) and Multi-Stakeholder Body for Net Neutrality’ on January 2, 2020 and stakeholders were invited to send in their written comments by January 30, 2020 and counter comments by February 13, 2020.

With stakeholders seeking more time to send in their comments, this extension has been given.

The Consultation Paper deliberates on issues related to traffic management practices and its compilation, including establishment of a framework to formulate Traffic Management Practices (TMPs) and evolve it. The paper also covers composition, function, Governance Structure of multi-stakeholder body and its role and responsibilities.

As per TRAI’s report, titled ‘The Indian Telecom Services Performance Indicator Report April - June, 2019’, India has 665.31 million Internet subscribers, out of this, wired Internet subscribers are 21.67 million and wireless Internet subscribers are 643.64 million. Total mobile Internet wireless subscribers are 643.09 million. If we follow the trend of Internet subscriber base in India, it shows out of total Internet subscribers, 96.66 per cent subscribers are using Mobile device for accessing Internet service.

Performing measurements for monitoring TMPs for such a large subscriber base, which reflect actual experience of consumers, would be a major challenge. The body conducting such measurement may face several challenges, such as the potential impact of the end user environment on the measurement results, lack of awareness among end users, assessment of measurement data, etc.

Issues for Consultation

TRAI’s Consultation Paper has highlighted the following issues that need deliberation:

What are the broad types of practices currently deployed by the Access Providers (APs) to manage traffic? Out of these practices, which ones can be considered as reasonable from perspective of Net Neutrality? Whether list of Traffic Management Practises (TMPs) can be prepared in advance or would it require to be updated from time to time? If the later is yes, then what framework would be required to be established by Multi-Stakeholder Body to keep it up to date?

Whether impact of TMPs on consumer’s experience can be interpreted from its name and short description about it or detailed technical description would be required to interpret it in an objective and unambiguous manner? In case of detail technical description, what framework needs to be adopted by Multi Stakeholder Body to document it?

What set-up needs to be established to detect violations of Net Neutrality, whether it should be crowd source based, sample field measurements, probe based, audit of processes carried out by access providers or combination of these? How to avoid false positives and false negative while collecting samples and interpreting Net Neutrality violations?

What should be the composition, functions, roles and responsibilities of Multi-stakeholder body considering the decision of DoT that Multi-stakeholder body shall have an advisory role and formulation of TMPs and Monitoring & Enforcement (M&E) rest with DoT?

Whether entry fee, recurring fee, etc., for membership need to be uniform for all members or these may be on the basis of different type or category of membership? What may these categories be? What policy may be adopted for initial set up of Multi-stakeholder body?

What mechanism may be prescribed to determine fee and other contributions from its members towards expenditure in a fair and non-discriminatory manner?

What should be the guiding principles and structure of governance of the Multi-stakeholder body? What may be the roles and responsibilities of persons at different positions such as chairing the organisation or working groups, governing the functioning, steering the work, etc.?

Any other issues which are relevant to this subject?