Part III: In this three part series (Parts I & II here), we take a look at the TRAI's ruling on differential pricing in India. Yesterday, TRAI, India’s telecom and internet regulator, prohibited discriminatory tariffs for data services under the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India Act, 1997 (24 of 1997). Here are the key takeaways of the paper (pdf): TRAI’s understanding of the issues it raised: - A regulatory response on differential pricing should be based on a sound understanding of the basic architecture of the internet. Proposed changes must be seen in the context which needs to preserve the architecture of the internet. Key relevant features include: - Minimum intervention principle: Intelligence should be located only at the ends of the system. Communication protocols (pipes through which info flows) should be simple and general. This allows a network that is transparent to the host application communication and provide a general, application agnostic transport service. - Adoption of universal network protocols: Use of open protocols developed collaboratively has enabled private networks to communicate with each other through standard packets and flow rate. This is what led to today’s decentralised internet architecture. - Transit and peering arrangements: Service providers represent only one edge of the physical infrastructure which enables data packet transmission. - Other governing principles include heterogeneity support; robustness and adaptability; unambiguous addressing; loose coupling; simplicity; connectionless packet switching and distributed adaptive routing; network of collaborating networks (interconnection via gateways which focused at the connectivity functionality). *** - Unlike traditional markets where consumers and…
