Rapid connection

It’s only fitting that All India Bakchod (AIB) is having a bigger impact on the evolution of India’s internet policy than the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). After all, much of our telecom and internet policy is stand-up comedy gold. Ask A Raja. Or ask the officials who wrote TRAI’s 118-page, bombastically titled Consultation Paper for Regulatory Framework for Over-the-Top Services . “In the present licensing regime,” reads a section of the paper, “Internet Telephony is a licensed service permitted only under the UAS/ISP or Unified License granted under Section 4 of the Indian Telegraph Act 1885.”

So, the law governing internet in India predates the birth of the internet by a century. Can you think of better stand-up comedy material? I think not.

“If the date of your Act falls before the invention of moving image capture itself,” AIB puts it neatly, “maybe you shouldn’t get to regulate video streaming through it. Just maybe.”

Trolling for a cause

No wonder then, AIB’s nine-minute YouTube video on net neutrality has got about two million more views than TRAI’s consultation paper. Led by four stand-up comics, India’s online activists have pushed back hard at the intimidating axis of the country’s telecom regulator, it’s biggest e-commerce company and biggest telecom operator.

With over 6,00,000 emails sent against TRAI’s plans, the regulator and the government will find it very difficult to create the internet superhighway for the rich, which is at the centre of the fight. The slow lane would have killed competing start-ups and smaller businesses, which could not afford to pay millions of dollars to be on the superhighway.

Social media pressure has made Flipkart pull out of Airtel Zero, the net neutrality-breaking scheme whose future now looks in serious doubt. In fact Flipkart has completely flipped its position on net neutrality. Even as angry customers started uninstalling the app from their phones as a sign of protest, it came out with a pledge to fight for a free and equal internet, the exact opposite of its earlier plans with Airtel Zero.

“Thanks to all the #NetNeutrality supporters out there,” tweeted Flipkart’s Chief Technological Officer Amod Malviya. “Watching you, I truly believe that our Internet’s future is in safe hands.” This was a big olive branch to the committed online activists who were rapidly bringing down the brand image of the company, valued between $10 billion and $15 billion.

Start-ups to the fore

This is the second time in the last couple of months that an AIB online video has had mass impact and opened up serious policy debates. Their roast of Bollywood celebrities had pushed the envelope on acceptable free speech: their cuss-fest got more than eight million online views, guffaws and howls of protest, before being taken down.

The Supreme Court’s annulment of Section 66A would have come as a booster shot for many like AIB who are treading on the edges of hypersensitive society, which often prefers to shoot the messenger than tackle the problem.

AIB’s latest video is clearly inspired by John Oliver’s comic activism when net neutrality was under threat in the US last summer. Through his highly popular show, Oliver mobilised thousands of Americans to log on to the Federal Communications Commission website and crash it with user comments supporting net neutrality.

Both the regulator and the White House had to back down from giving in to the lobbying of telecom giants Verizon and Comcast. Super-corporations like Amazon and Google had to side with public opinion, joining in the net neutrality march to protect their image.

In India, start-up entrepreneurs and venture capitalists were some of the earliest faces of the net neutrality campaign. Prominent among them were Nikhil Pahwa of Medianama and entrepreneur/VC Mahesh Murthy. Pahwa’s team was the first to break down the 118-page TRAI document into a crisp readable version. Murthy’s viral LinkedIn posts had colourful headlines — “How Airtel, Voda and TRAI are trying to screw Indian internet users” — which were reproduced by many popular online publications.

“The TRAI paper is trying to make a make-believe case that telcos and ISPs who chose not to innovate should be compensated for their incompetence,” Murthy wrote. “To start with, the airwaves are ours, the people of India’s… What we do with the bandwidth must be up to us, not up to some profiteering telecom tycoon in Gurgaon or Mumbai.”

Murthy particularly influenced and organised the start-up community: tech geeks quickly created advocacy websites and simplified procedures for the public to respond to TRAI.

But the credit for making the movement truly mass goes to AIB. They added the spice that was needed for Indians to try this bland sounding dish called net neutrality. Otherwise, as they explained in their video, “You pay roughly the same amount of attention to an internet activist that Arvind Kejriwal pays to an open letter from Prashant Bhushan.”

( Sambuddha Mitra Mustafi is the founder of The Political Indian )

Follow Sambuddha on Twitter@some_buddha

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