A democratic view of Net-Neutrality
Taking Flipkart and Airtel Zero example, the Indian users have voted (rated) FOR #NetNeutrality.
Flipkart in India has recently taken an anti-Net Neutrality stance by considering becoming a partner to Airtel Zero — which is essentially a Zero rating platform where rather than the users, the developers would be charged for the mobile data consumption of their app’s users on Airtel’s network.
Proponents of Airtel Zero and Sachin Bansal, the CEO of Flipkart, have claimed that it benefits consumers and is akin to any other marketing promotion (e.g. Toll Free numbers of companies where consumers can talk to a customer rep for free, a sales promotion discount given by Flipkart, etc.). Opponents of Airtel Zero platform have argued that it clearly is an anti-Net Neutrality move as it distorts the marketplace and if this becomes the norm, a small developer in future wouldn’t have a chance of competing with the big guys like Flipkart as the Internet as we know it would be bifurcated into “Free Internet — sponsored by Big guys” and “Paid Internet” categories. The innovation that we’ve seen from the free Internet would be stifled and we’ll return to the VAS economy dark ages.
I personally am against Airtel Zero. However, irrespective of my (and you- the reader) opinion, let’s see how this may and is turning out to be for Flipkart already.
Deepak Abbott has already done an excellent analysis around how Airtel Zero doesn’t look like a cost-effective ROI platform for Flipkart/any app developer. In meanwhile, the community at Reddit has also come out with an excellent guerilla campaign around hitting Flipkart where it hurts the most — rating them badly and uninstalling the app (now that they don’t even have a wap site — app is crucial to Flipkart’s mobile strategy). So, let’s look at how the battle of public perception is playing out:
Before Airtel Zero strategy, Flipkart’s app had an average rating of 4.2 on Google Play.
Post its announcing the Airtel Zero campaign and the resulting Reddit community campaign, a lot of its users have vented their anger against Flipkart’s anti-Net Neutrality stance and the average rating for it in last 4 days has fallen down to 2.5
If this continues for a few more days, Flipkart’s overall average rating may fall even below 4 — which is clearly a red flag. In the long run, the reddit campaign may fizzle out like most social media phenomenons, however they’ve managed to give Flipkart a black eye for now.
It is the property of the Free Internet to keep churning out great utilities and lower prices for consumers, efficient ways of doing business, and making existing ways of doing business redundant by constant Innovation — which may come from anywhere, not necessarily from the bigger VC backed guy like Flipkart, which once was a upstart small company itself. Globally, the telecom players are already making tons of money from Data — and already 24% of revenues of Indian telecom players are coming from Mobile Data, and this is when we almost get 2G like speeds despite paying for 3G packs today.
This is a new revenue stream which didn’t even exist 10 years back. Supporting Internet is not a strain on Telecom network’s bandwidth — it is their very purpose of existence, and if they don’t want to support it, they may as well go home.
Come this 24th April, let’s hope the free internet wins and TRAI takes a long term view towards sustaining innovation and supports Net-Neutrality. If you do care about this issue, please do go to www.savetheinternet.in and send a mail to TRAI.
