In December 2015 the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) requested members of the public and other stakeholders to respond to four questions on the matter of differential pricing for data services. After a 1-week extension of the deadline, the initial comment period ended on 7 January 2016. By then TRAI had received 24 lakh (2.4 million) responses, it said on its Web site. As the regulator wades its way through the responses, here's what it will find.
According to TRAI 18.94 lakh responses were generated by Facebook users through Facebook's platforms, @supportfreebasics.in (13.5 lakh) and @facebookmail.com (5.44 lakh). TRAI commented that most of these responses are in support of a specific product, Free Basics, and do not address the questions asked by TRAI. Reportedly Facebook spent an estimated Rs300 crore ($45 million) on the Free Basics campaign in India. If most of the responses are ignored by TRAI, then Facebook would have misfired in a big way.
Another set of 4.84 lakh template responses were generated through or copied from the SaveTheInternet.in platform. SaveTheInternet also spent a lot of energy or at least blog posts, although not much money, countering Facebook's Free Basics. This colored a lot of the public discussion on the matter, and many individual responses beyond SaveTheInternet's platform were also specifically about Free Basics rather than TRAI's questions (see the Other tab below).
The responses which did not fall into the above categories were then classified by TRAI as follows:
- Comments from Service Poviders: 13 (2 unavailable)
- Comments from Service Providers' Associations: 7
- Comments from Organizations/Institutions: 43
- Comments from Individuals sent as attachments: 47
- Comments received through MyGov.in: 986
- Comments from Individuals as emails: 5409
The primary question asked by TRAI was, "Should the TSPs be allowed to have differential pricing for data usage for accessing different websites, applications or platforms?" The tabs below list how the various parties responded to this question, reducing the response to either a Yes or No wherever possible in the case of service providers, trade bodies, organizations and individuals who sent an attached response. Some respondents did not answer the question directly, and for some it was difficult to tell. For the mass of emails that were received on the MyGov.in portal and another 5400 or so emails that the TRAI listed (see the Other Individuals tab below), more than half of them did not address the topic of differential pricing. Presumably, if the TRAI will not consider the emails in support of Free Basics generated on Facebook's platform, it will also disregard all these emails that also do not respond directly to the questions.
- Service Providers
- Service Providers' Associations
- Organisations
- Individuals
- MyGov.in
- Other individual responses
| Respondent | Response |
|---|---|
| Aircel | Yes |
| Atria | Yes |
| Bharti Airtel | Yes |
| BSNL | Yes |
| Citycom Networks Pvt Ltd | No |
| Idea | Yes |
| Reliance Communications | Yes |
| Tata Communications Limited | Yes |
| Telenor | Yes |
| Videocon | Yes |
| Vodafone | Yes |
| Respondent | Response |
|---|---|
| ACTO | Yes |
| NASSCOM | No |
| ISPAI | No |
| IAMAI | No |
| GSMA | Yes |
| C0AI AUSPI | Yes |
| ASSOCHAM | Yes |
| Respondent | Response |
|---|---|
| ACL Mobile Limited | Yes |
| Babajob | Did not address question |
| Broadband India Forum | Yes |
| CCAOI | Yes |
| Center for Democracy and Technology | Did not address question |
| Centre for Media Studies | No |
| Citizen Forum | Yes |
| Comptel NXT | No |
| Computer Society of India | Did not address question |
| Consumer Protection Association Gujarat | No |
| Consumer VOICE | No |
| CUTS | No |
| Dua Consulting | Yes |
| Yes | |
| FICCI | No |
| Free Software Mancha West Bengal | No |
| Indian Internet enabled Startups | Did not address question |
| International Center for Law n Economics | Yes |
| Internet Democracy Project | No |
| Internet Society of India Chennai | No |
| IPRG ICT Policy n Research Group | Yes |
| IT for Change | No |
| Jugnucraft Entertainment | No |
| Medianama | No |
| mKisan | Did not address question |
| Mozilla | Did not address question |
| MyRights | Did not address question |
| National Law School Bangalore | No |
| National Law University Delhi | No |
| NERA Economic Consulting | Yes |
| One97 Communication | No |
| Progressive Policy Institute | Yes |
| R Street | Yes |
| RFC | No |
| Robosoft Technologies Pvt Ltd | No |
| Savetheinternet in Coalition | No |
| SFLC | No |
| Socialblood | Did not address question |
| Society for Knowledge Commons et | No |
| Star India Pvt Ltd | No |
| Telecom Watchdog | Yes |
| Telxess Consulting Services Pvt Ltd | No |
| The Centre for Internet & Society | No |
| Times Internet | No |
| Zee Network | No |
| Respondent | Response |
|---|---|
| A R Manjunath | No |
| Aayush Aggarwal | No |
| Amit Kashyap | Did not address question |
| Anil Nag | No |
| Ankit Kumar | Did not address question |
| Anoop Singh | No |
| Arijta Kakati | No |
| Aswini Kumar | Did not address question |
| Darrell M West | Yes |
| Dharmendra Misra | Yes |
| George Mattathil | No |
| Jehangir gai | No |
| John Gibbons | Did not address question |
| K S Gopinath | No |
| Kumar Saurabh | Did not address question |
| Kunaal Prasad | No |
| Layton | Yes |
| Letter of startup founders | Did not address question |
| M S Abhinandan | No |
| Mahesh Uppal | Yes |
| Manjunath Jayakrishnan Nair | No |
| Narender Gupta | Yes |
| Pranay | No |
| Priyank Chandra | Not clear |
| Prof Arturo J Carrillo | Did not address question |
| Rajeev Chandrasekhar MP | No |
| Rajiv Kotibhaskar | No |
| Ravi V Prasad | Yes |
| S Pandivinayagan | No |
| S Ramakrishnan | No |
| Sagar Peswani | No |
| Saurabh Biswas | No |
| Shailesh V Halarnkar | No |
| Shamik Biswas | No |
| Shashank Mehra | Yes |
| Sriram | Did not address question |
| Suresh K Jariwala | No |
| T B Barot | No |
| Tathagata Satpathy MP | Did not address question |
| V B Lal | No |
| V Sridhar Rohit Prasad | Yes |
| Varun Sharma | Did not address question |
| Vedagiri | No |
| Vijay Dahiya | No |
| Vishal Misra | No |
| Yogesh | Did not address question |
| Yoo | Did not address question |
TRAI lists 986 responses received through MyGov.in, though a text analysis says there were only 822 unique responses. All 986 responses have been classified in the table below according to whether they mentioned "Differential pricing", or failing that, "Free Basics", or else "Net Neutrality." It is safe to say that most of those on the topic of differential pricing were opposed to the idea.
Surprisingly, only 12 responses were in Hindi, the rest were in English.
| Email Content | Number of Responses |
|---|---|
| Differential Pricing | 254 |
| Free Basics | 162 |
| Net Neutrality | 398 |
| Other | 172 |
TRAI received approximately 5400 other email responses. Of the 1,035 emails that addressed the topic of differential pricing (that is, mentioned the term in the body of the response), 639 responded "No" or that it "should not be allowed." If a response did not contain the term "differential pricing," it was then checked for "free basics" and then for "net neutrality."
| Email Content | Number of Responses |
|---|---|
| Differential Pricing | 1035 |
| Free Basics | 1370 |
| Net Neutrality | 1761 |
| Save The Internet | 52 |
| No | 5 |
| Yes | 23 |
| Other | 1163 |
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