Free Basics is Data Access for people belonging to the Low Income Group of our country. It is provisioned for users who cannot pay for data services but want internet access. It is provided through non-exclusive tie-ups with operators, so any operator can offer it. This Trai calls discriminatory, and on December 9, 2015 launched a consultation process titled, “Differential Pricing for Data Services”.

What is discriminatory about providing news, maternal health content, local government information and helping the poor build communities through use of technology?

What is discriminatory if local content development is to be funded and fostered through this service?

Today, we are seeing the government spend so much in advertisement campaigns, dedicated channels (like DD Kisan) to create information networks for specific target audiences. But when you have free services of a purely public purpose nature in the telecom sector, which is the most penetrated platform, it is denied.

What is free for our people has to be promoted, not demoted. And just because it is not a sop from the government and it comes from a company (Facebook), it is not to be struck down. Neither is it proper to suspect that it is malafide and designed for deceptive pecuniary gain. Because there is no evidence to suggest this, only propaganda by vested campaigners. And the regulator and policy makers are falling prey to it.

As a rule, the regulator, Trai should step in only when there is a situation of unfair tariff, discriminatory and anti-competitive behaviour. Why should the regulator initiate proceedings when consumers are benefitted through provisioning of free services?

Therefore, the steps against Free Basics, is decidedly anti-consumer. Also one has to remember the context in which it has arisen; and the context is the failure of the large operators to get OTT services priced differently at higher levels. The popularity of OTT services can be traced to Trai’s anti-consumer move of levying Termination Charge on SMS, thereby making it costlier. So users stopped sending SMS through operator networks and started using app services.

Large operators were left squirming when their efforts to price OTT services through Trai’s March 2015 consultation blew up. And so now we have the consultation for differential pricing of data services and the campaign against free basics. This is a staging post for making the OTT services expensive through the backdoor.

Free Basics is the ruse, the real target is to ensure that OTT services become dearer. So the operators get to charge the users on multiple points, first for consuming data and second for using OTT app services. Is that the retrograde tariff regime we will look at in telecom at a time when the whole ethics of consumption is moving towards rationalization of taxes?