Monday, April 13, 2015

Net Neutrality: Is net really neutral?

TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) is looking at the possibility of introducing a right to an internet service provider (ISP) to vary a speed or charge an extra amount to use a certain services on internet according to choice of ISP. The choice of ISP will essentially based on a financial gain that ISP gets.  The user will no longer have a control over the choice to access particular website for free or to access all the websites at the same data speed.




When we think about a variation of speed which violates the Net Neutrality, we should see if an internet is really a neutral in true sense. Internet is a network where all computers in the world are connected to each other using a network. ISP provides a network infrastructure to connect all computers which we call a internet. 

Now there are leading companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter etc who are providing a popular services to the people via internet. Companies like these have a necessary infrastructure to provide search engines and social networking experience to internet users. These companies fall in the category of Software infrastructure. So network infrastructure and  software infrastructure are two important part of internet. 

The software infrastructure has a liberty of charging money from advertisers to show their website or advertisement on search engines or on social networking sites. Do these advertised base priority is violating net neutrality? Another question that arises is, Can we keep the network infrastructure and software infrastructure in the same footing so that we can question the Net Neutrality of internet in both aspects? In the point of view of users we need to see if we have options other than well established enterprises in both network and software infrastructure? Can we built something like open source social networking sites or search engines (like Wikipedia or Linux OS) to avoid these issues to keep software infrastructure to be a neutral?

These question need be answered and then only we can question the violation of Net Neutrality in true sense.

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