U.S. net neutrality rollback highlights India’s divergent path on issue

US court rejects FCC's net neutrality enforcement, contrasting India's successful implementation and ongoing battle against discriminatory data pricing.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday (January 2, 2025) ruled against the second attempt of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to enforce net neutrality, the concept that all traffic on the internet must be treated equally by telecom companies and internet service providers (ISPs).

The setback highlights India’s divergent path on the issue in the last decade and telecom companies’ more recent attempts to find some room within India’s net neutrality approach to extract payments from big technology platforms.

What is net neutrality and why does it matter?

Net neutrality appears straightforward, but the United States’ and India’s battles started — and were driven — by completely different motivations. U.S. tech companies such as Netflix had chafed at attempts by telcos and ISPs’ to extract payments from them to broaden the bandwidth they made available to their services to catch up with demand. Digital rights advocates aligned with the tech firms on the issue, fearing the broader consequences of internet providers being allowed to establish “fast lanes” and “slow lanes,” an abstraction of the fight that quickly gained momentum and resulted in the Obama administration’s first FCC ruling on the matter.

India’s experience has been different. In 2014, before Reliance Industries Limited’s Jio entered the market and made mobile data cheaper, Bharti Airtel Ltd attempted to impose higher data tariffs on online calls on apps like Viber (WhatsApp had not yet introduced calling), sparking a coordinated, but eventually widespread movement against the practice of discriminatory data pricing. Back then, Facebook entered the debate with a massive marketing budget to defend its Free Basics service, which aimed to provide some online services for users without a data plan. The discriminatory data pricing fight became one about zero rating, the specific practice of exempting certain data from fees.

A telco double dip attempt that threatens Net neutrality

The Net neutrality advocates won. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) respectively banned discriminatory data pricing in 2016 and made net neutrality a part of the Unified Licence (in 2018) which all telcos and ISPs must comply with. As a result, telcos have not been allowed for a decade to sell tariffs like WhatsApp-only packs, or slow down or speed up certain online services in comparison to others.