India bats for equal internet access to everyone, approves net neutrality

The Telecom Commission on Wednesday approved net neutrality rules which stop service providers from unfairness against Internet content and services by blocking, throttling or giving them higher speed access.

Some applications or services like remote surgery and autonomous cars will however be kept out of the bracket of net neutrality framework.

“The Telecom Commission (TC) on Wednesday approved net neutrality as recommended by Trai expect some critical services will be kept out of its purview,” Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan told reporters in New Delhi.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India had promosed restrictions on service providers from entering into agreements which lead to discriminatory treatment of content on the Internet.

The Telecom Commission also approved the new telecom policy - National Digital Communications Policy 2018 - for seeking approval of the Union Cabinet, Sundararajan said.

“Everybody in the meeting today said that digital infrastructure is even more important than physical infrastructure for India... CEO of Niti Ayog (Amitabh Kant) said that for...districts, we must ensure digital infrastructure is provided at the earliest. Therefore, India must have ease of doing business and enabling policy environment,” she said.

An official, who was part of the meeting, said that the TC has approved installation of around 12.5 lakh WiFi hotspot in all gram panchayats with viability gap funding of around Rs 6,000 crore by December 2018.