TRAI announces new deadline for specific issues relating to Facebook�s Free Basics
Posted on: 04/Jan/2016 12:12:03 PM
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has asked respondents of Facebook�s net neutrality Free Basics campaign to comment on specific issues rather than follow a template. The telecom watchdog has given Jan 7 as the deadline for the submission of these comments. TRAI has said that many of the responses have supported the Facebook product for net neutrality, but ignored differential pricing issues.
Facebook has been promoting Free Basics aggressively by issuing ads in newspapers, TV, billboards and online forums. Speaking about this, a TRAI official said, �A record 18.27 lakh responses have been received so far, of which a large percentage are about supporting a specific product called Free Basics. It is like we have asked Question X and they have given answer to the Question why? So about 14.34 lakh are such comments. Now the problem for this is that we had asked for response to the specific question of differential pricing. instead we have got responses on supporting Free Basics. Now how supporting Free Basics help in answering the questions. It has become difficult for us to arrive at. One approach that could have been taken is to just ignore these responses but as people have taken time out to respond, therefore ignoring the comments is not fair. That was one of the reasons why we extended the deadline because we thought just ignoring this will not be appropriate because this is the record number of responses which we have got. Consultation by TRAI are not opinion polls, we are not asking if the answer is yes or no because that does not help us. We are asking why you think it is yes or no because that helps us in formulating the policy or guidelines. To all those whom we can approach, we will try to reach them.�
