TelecomLive April-2020

Net Neutrality www.telecomlive.com 46 Telecom LIVE April 2020 submit that DoT may consider identifying an industry body for providing advisory services rather than forming a new MSB. We submit that the industry body should be a not for profit body and its membership should be open for all the stakeholders likely to be impacted by imple- mentation of TMPs. We understand that DoT has stated its decision that the monitoring and enforcement functions for net neutrality should lie with DoT. We submit that beside the advisory role, industry body should also play an active role in assisting DoT in its monitoring and enforcement functions. This will establish a strong working relationship between the government and the industry while the government retains the decision-making control. We submit that the industry body's role can be broadly divided into three parts as described below: a. TSP centric: It should be responsible for reviewing the TMPs of the TSPs/ISPs and publishing the 'Repository of Necessary TMPs' upon approval of DoT. It should also prepare formats for TMPs disclosure, which can be provided to TSPs/ISPs for uniformity in TMP disclo- sure. b. Customer centric : It should be handling the complaints or reports submitted by consumers reporting violation of NN principles or other queries or feedback raised by consum- ers. It should be conducting the probe for verified incidents and submit the report of the same to DoT for final course of action to be pursued based on the findings of the probe. Such industry body, authorization from DoT, should be eligible to request records on traffic management measures / practices applied by the same upon the incident meeting the defined incident admission criteria. Incident admission criteria should include a verification step by the industry body itself to avoid admission of frivolous incident reporting. In addition, industry body should continuously monitor consumer complaints and conduct market surveys to assess any violation of NN principles by ISPs. Upon admission of the incident for probing, the data should be collected at end user level through crowd sourcing in the given geographical location for the given ISP through interactive tools available to be downloaded from dedicated websites performing measure- ments at a specific point in time, or as measurement tools that are downloaded and installed by the end-user for the purpose of on- going monitoring in the back- ground. While probing an admitted incident, industry body should be authorized by DoT to request information from respective TSP/ISP and monitor their technical network. We agree with Body of European Regulators for Elec- tronic Communications (BEREC) Guidelines, which mentions that the measurements should be performed beyond the internet service provider's leg. Hence measurements should be per- formed at the edge of the net- work which provides the internet access services, i.e. at the end consumer level. Also, the true impact of the TMPs is faced by the end user and hence it may first be experienced and reported by the same. Q4. What should be the composition, functions, roles and responsibilities of MSB considering the decision of DoT that MSB shall have an advisory role and formulation of TMPs and Monitoring & Enforcement (M&E) rest with DoT? A4. As stated above, we technical description, what framework need to be adopted by MSB to docu- ment it. A2. We believe that the impact of TMPs on consumer experience can be interpreted from its name and short descrip- tion. Such names and their short description can be standard, as suggested and maintained by the industry body, which may be adopted by all TSPs/ISPs to maintain uniformity for conve- nience of end consumer. A link may be provided on the same web page which should take consumer to webpage of industry body, where detailed elaboration of standard names and their short description is provided. Q3. What set up need to be established to detect violations of Net Neutrality, whether it should be crowd source based, sample mea- surements, probe based, audit of processes carried out by access providers or combination of above? How to avoid false positives and false negative while collect- ing samples and interpreting Net Neutrality violations? A3. We believe that to detect violation of NN principles by the TSP/ISP, while implementing the TMPs, can be suitably done by a reactive regulatory approach, which is based on monitoring upon reporting of a potential incident by a relevant stakeholder, rather than a proactive regulatory approach, which requires continuous monitoring of the quality of the internet by the regulator. A proactive approach will be onerous and burdensome for both the regulator as well as the ISPs. We submit that the set up for detecting violations of Net Neutrality should be primarily probe based. The incident stating TMP violated the NN principles should be reported to the industry body, which may admit