Article, Paragraph, Essay on “Net Neutrality – Internet in Neutral Gear” article for Class 10, Class 12, Graduation Classes and descriptive examination

Net Neutrality – Internet in Neutral Gear

There was a merchant who opened a shop in the middle of a town and announced that he will provide all the spices of daily use free of cost to each and every person living in that town, because spices are fundamental ingredients and should not be sold or charged and hence, urged everyone to stop purchasing spices from any other shop.

People happily agreed to his yearning and they boycotted every other seller selling spices. Gradually, almost all the shop keepers vanished from the town and the merchant was the only one selling spices.

To everyone’s utter surprise, one day the merchant again made an announcement that, though spices are free of cost at his shop and will continue to be free of charge as promised but ‘Salt’ not being a spice and due to the extremely high demand, will be sold at two hundred rupees per kilogram.

Everyone in the town was baffled but left with no other alternative, they were strained to buy salt from his shop. Now, those people who had advocated free spices were forced to pay such huge amount for salt!

Same game plan has been executed by some technology giants in the name of ‘Free-Basics’-free internet to everyone or internet for all. In the era of internet penetration, internet has become food for human beings. One can live without food for some days but not willing to excuse internet even for an hour. In such frenzied locus, when social media giant Facebook, along with telecom market king Airtel came with an idea called ‘Free-basics’, through which, they upheld that internet should not be charged and it should be free for everyone, if not completely than atleast some of the Internet related sources like facebook or WhatsApp, and other social media platforms should be absolutely free. And for that cause, they direly campaigned for curbing the ‘net-neutrality’ phenomenon.

Free internet sounded very melodious to the ears and initially people supported free-basics campaign nearly on every social media platform. But, when more layers were surfaced about the dogma behind this internet for all approach, we got to know the technicalities it had.

The doctrine of free internet is based on giving all the rights and authority to control internet and its access into the hands of cartain companies and in lieu of that they will provide some amount of internet access free of cost to everyone. Like the merchant in the story, they offered spices free of cost but if anyone needs salt, then, he or she has to pay a handsome amount of money. And, what is the use of spices without salt, isn’t a rocket science to understand.

But thanks to the our telecom regulator TRAI in its ruling in February 2016 clealry halted all this debate and said that differential treatment of data on the basis of content is discriminatory and cannot be allowed in a democracy like India, therefore, net neutrality won eventually.

The Ginn of free internet or most important data, least important data demarcation has once again come out of bottle with US Federal Communication Commission’s chairman Ajit Pai’s comment and proposal to repeal net neutrality.

This ghost has to rest in peace for good, we are Indians, our culture doesn’t allow to do partiality or give preferential treatment to someone or something over someone or something else, especially when it comes to Internet or data. Net neutrality will remain a constant factor in the way of our craving for technical advancement.

By

Satendra