BENGALURU: Advocating net neutrality and a level playing field for startups, the Indian IT industry's representative body NASSCOM proposed a synergistic model for Internet platforms, applications and telecom service providers.

"Net neutrality creates an open and level-playing field to facilitate innovation, adoption and inclusion," NASSCOM president R. Chandrashekhar said, sharing its response to the Trai consultative paper on regulatory framework for over-the-top (OTT) services.

Noting that Internet, mobile telephony, social media, big data, analytics, cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) have created a perfect confluence for economic development, the former telecom secretary said the startup and innovation ecosystem and the government's Digital India initiative would transform social and economic spheres, including education, healthcare and financial inclusion.

"As the essential building blocks of the digital revolution are not contradictory and can be synergized, we have advocated a forward looking definition of net neutrality to achieve the objectives," Chandrashekhar said.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) released a paper in March inviting comments from users and firms on how OTT services should be regulated in the country and sought suggestions from stakeholders by April 24 and counter-arguments by May 8.

In net neutrality, governments and Internet service providers treat data on the Internet equally and do not charge users, content, platform, site, application or mode of communication differentially for the benefit of end-customers.

"Any stifling regulation restricting access to Internet or Internet platforms and services will not only hamper the country's socio-economic development, but also suppress growth and success of innovation driven startups and small and medium enterprises," National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) Internet council chair Sanjeev Bhikchandani said on the occasion.

The emergence of the Internet, resultant data revolution and the advent of a host of application service providers has disrupted equilibrium and business models in several sectors, including telecom and IT.

"It is essential to synergize adoption of Internet platforms and innovation driven models with growth of telecom infrastructure. This will lead to a cycle of growth, where sustained rise in revenues from data consumption is spurred and driven by the Internet platforms and OTT services," Chandrashekhar added.

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