wordpress blog stats
Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

India considers licensing Internet content and services by reopening MVNO discussions

On 7th July 2014, India's Department of Telecom sent a letter to the telecom regulator TRAI, seeking its recommendations for "delinking licenses for networks from the delivery of services by way of virtual network operators (VNOs)". The letter also says that the Unified License, which India adopted last year, "may be introduced in two phases with the delinking of licensing for networks from the delivery of services being taken up in a subsequent phase." In its pre-consultation paper (download), the TRAI raises a relevant point: Another point for deliberation could be that today there is no licensing regime for application providers and Over-The-Top(OTT) operators. With the introduction of the proposed model, would those entities also need to take a licence for providing these services? As we had pointed out earlier, the report on the TRAI is not looking to regulate Internet services appeared to be false. A mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) is a service provider who, without investing in infrastructure, can pre-buy telecom resources like calls, messages (and possbily Internet bandwidth), rebrand them, and provide these to their own customers. Read: Our complete coverage of TRAI's Internet Regulation discussions Delinking Services from Opertors will lead to licensing of services The TRAI doesn't really need to ask the question about whether application providers and OTT operators would be covered other this regime. The telecom policy already defines what a Service Delivery Operator is: The draft National Telecom Policy-2011 issued by the DoT, on 10th October 2011, envisaged two categories of licenses: (a) Network Service Operator…

Please subscribe/login to read the full story.
Written By

Founder @ MediaNama. TED Fellow. Asia21 Fellow @ Asia Society. Co-founder SaveTheInternet.in and Internet Freedom Foundation. Advisory board @ CyberBRICS

Free Reads

News

The Bill allows the Attorney General or any district/ city attorney to seek injunctive or other equitable relief against a large online platform

News

The tech giant made it clear it doesn't share data from organizations using Azure OpenAI and Copilot to third-parties or use it to train...

Google

Among the selected organizations are Quill.org and the World Bank, both known for their work in AI-powered tools.

MediaNama’s mission is to help build a digital ecosystem which is open, fair, global and competitive.

Views

News

NPCI CEO Dilip Asbe recently said that what is not written in regulations is a no-go for fintech entities. But following this advice could...

News

Notably, Indus Appstore will allow app developers to use third-party billing systems for in-app billing without having to pay any commission to Indus, a...

News

The existing commission-based model, which companies like Uber and Ola have used for a long time and still stick to, has received criticism from...

News

Factors like Indus not charging developers any commission for in-app payments and antitrust orders issued by India's competition regulator against Google could contribute to...

News

Is open-sourcing of AI, and the use cases that come with it, a good starting point to discuss the responsibility and liability of AI?...

You May Also Like

News

Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...

Advert

135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...

News

By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...

News

Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...

MediaNama is the premier source of information and analysis on Technology Policy in India. More about MediaNama, and contact information, here.

© 2008-2021 Mixed Bag Media Pvt. Ltd. Developed By PixelVJ

Subscribe to our daily newsletter
Name:*
Your email address:*
*
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide

© 2008-2021 Mixed Bag Media Pvt. Ltd. Developed By PixelVJ