Is Net Non-Neutrality The Demon It Is Made Out To Be?

I admit I, like everyone else, was swayed initially by the whole “sign this net neutrality petition and save YOUR online future” brouhaha, and was going to write an impassioned defence of “my freedom to surf what I want, how I want and pay for that”, and “you will not dictate to me what I surf” and all of that. But something got me thinking. (The things watching an engrossing England v West Indies Test Match at midnight stimulates in your brain!! :P)

Just look at Tata Sky. (Subscribers of other DTH services may please pitch in with their stories)

1. You choose the base package you want. If say, you want one without sports, be my guest.
2. Extra channels come at a fee, either individual, or bunched (You could take only Star Sports 2 if you wanted to watch endless India v Bangladesh World Cup QF re-runs, or all four Star Sports offerings, to watch 24×7 re-runs of ALL the knock out matches of CWC 15.. 🙂 )
3. Preferred channels during big-bang events are often priced marginally higher than they are on normal days. (Let’s face it, no one’s NOT watching the IPL so Tata Sky simply prices Sony Max and Six during IPL days a little higher)
4. You take off a channel when u have no more use for it, just like many of you will drop Sony Max and Six the moment the IPL ends. The monthly fee for the channel is adjusted for the number of days you used it. (And there’s no Duckworth-Lewis to calculate that, don’t worry.. :P)
5. Generally more watched channels are priced higher. (Coz that’s where the eyeballs are, and those subscribers wouldn’t mind paying that much too!)
6. Tata Sky fell out with Nimbus so there’s no Neo Sports or Neo Prime I can subscribe to. (They take up rights to a few hockey events every now and then, and that REEALLY gets this hockey nut’s blood boiling!) I am forced to recalibrate my sporting fix with what is available, and not what I WANT.

Doesn’t Tata Sky’s pricing policy dictate what you watch or pay to watch? Tata Sky never gave you something like, say 1,000 minutes of viewing absolutely any channel of your choice, for ₹200 per month, with a validity of 30 days, did they? 🙂 Tata Sky violated DTH neutrality!! Why then are we crying foul when what is happening to DTH TV is happening to internet?

If the doomsday prophets are proved right, YouTube usage may be priced higher per MB, or maybe WhatsApp or Facebook will be. Will this not help the “base pack” user, who can conceivably get away with lower prices for only say, browsing because he may not use e-mail or any other data-needing apps?

Secondly, so what if an online retailer signed a deal with some service provider? Are you, for example going to buy a flight ticket on Yatra.com instead of Cleartrip.com (if, say it offers a cheaper flight), just because your internet service provides Yatra.com free? Or would you take up the ClearTrip option simply because it gave you the cheaper flight? Even in this case, Yatra wouldn’t be doing anyone a charity by offering a free-access website. The data provider would recover from them the same costs of providing the free data, which of course, Yatra.com will pass on to you the consumer. In effect, there is no new expense billed to you the consumer. It is just split differently between Yatra.com and the internet service. Simply put, the total split of the data usage plus purchase in the website, is their headache, why would you give a damn as long as you are not charged a penny extra because of this rearrangement? Even now, certain airline websites are far more data-guzzling than others, maybe because of their web-design, clutter due to too many ads or whatever they chose to do with their website! Do you do RND on their data usage or do you look at the flight prices they offer and get what’s convenient?

The last point mentioned above in the Tata Sky example is significant. There are suspicions this places too much power in the operator’s hands over what you access, how they can restrict it and so on. With power comes responsibility too!! They will feel the heat to provide you that website at that quality! If Tata Sky cannot give me Neo Sports at sufficient quality and consistently, I switch to another DTH service if i want my hockey so badly. Similarly, if Airtel is playing around with your access to a website because they want you to pay for it, you can switch to another that doesn’t hassle you so much!

So many data-packs, Internet providers and even call plans have separate night plans, with differential rates for day and night hours. Doesn’t THAT violate neutrality? After all it’s none of their business as to when you choose to make calls or surf, you ought to be charged the same!! It is the same principle used by them – a combination of the provider’s response to choking on their load, or incentivising usage in lean load hours. Now instead of time, if someone does the load-based pricing on sites visited, there’s a problem?

Sample this.  You visit a swanky restaurant for lunch, where they serve a buffet. Every conceivable item in a normal buffet lunch, unlimited, for ₹150. You gorge yourself, and rightfully so! Now the banquet manager notices, that the Schezwan Noodles and the Tandoori Roti kept disappearing pretty quickly, and was refilled ad nauseam by waiters, while nobody touched the salad and the soup! So what does he do? He makes a “Standard Buffet” menu with an assortment of all items resulting in a wholesome meal for ₹150, and puts out extra helpings of Schezwan Noodles at say ₹50 and extra Tandoori Rotis for say ₹20. The result is twofold:

• Those who simply want a full meal, get that at ₹150, just like earlier.
• People do not gorge on additional helpings of Noodles or the Roti, and consumption of those items reach saner levels, thereby helping his load and the efficiency of delivery of those items.

What the banquet manager essentially did was to prevent overstretching of certain sections of his load, in order to prevent running out of stock and all of the bad press! Likewise, when Sachin Tendulkar was on 198* on the way to his ODI 200, so many logged into Cricinfo that they almost crashed! Does Cricinfo owe us any favours in providing the website for free, and cop all the abuse when their servers fail because so many of us log in? Cricinfo would any day accept a marginally lighter load on their servers, in return for not crashing and losing face! And if that means Cricinfo access will be priced differently, in a free world as is desired by net-neutrality, we will see that day one day, because that simply is what demand-supply forces dictate.

Load-based pricing is a reality in so many other areas, and yes, access to certain internet services is NOT the same as access to certain others. Differential pricing isn’t exactly the demon it is made out to be. It might be in the fitness of things not to get swayed by the jingoism of “internet freedom” and think through the pros and cons without sounding doomsdayish about how just to read my blog you might have to pay more one day!!