The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (“TRAI”) on March 27, 2015 issued  a ‘Consultation Paper on Regulatory Framework for Over-the-top (“OTT”) services’ inviting comments from the stakeholders on the issue.

The TRAI, while issuing the consultation paper, observed that there is an ongoing debate worldwide among governments, industry and consumers regarding regulation of OTT services and net-neutrality.

Last year, the US President Barack Obama called upon the Federal Communications Commission to implement strict Net Neutrality Rules. Our previous post in this regard can be read here.

The telecom service providers (“TSPs”), offering fixed and mobile telephony, are currently overwhelmed by online content in the OTT services and applications, such as WhatsApp, Skype, Viber and a gamut of others.

As on date, users can directly access these OTT applications online from any place, at any time, using a variety of internet connected devices. The chief characteristic of these OTT services for the TSPs is that the TSPs realize revenues solely from increased data usage by the devices for various applications and do not realise any other revenues, be it for carriage or bandwidth.

TSPs have been clamoring that OTT players are eating up their main revenue without investing in networks. Presently, there is no legislation or specific regulations on net-neutrality and the OTT Services in India are being offered as part of the internet service package.

TRAI proposes to discuss the following issues, by way of the present consultation process:-

• Policy and regulatory environment and the need for regulation,
• Current policy dispensation for the OTT players vis-à-vis the TSPs,
• Security concerns of OTT players providing communication services,
• Issues related to security, safety and privacy of the consumer,
• Issues arising because of net-neutrality,
• Network discrimination and traffic management practices,
• Non-price based discrimination of services and other pricing-related issues.

From Indian perspective, divergent views have been provided from time to time. Whereas, at one stage the TRAI appeared to have rejected proposal to regulate and charge the OTT application (please see our previous post to know more about the issue), while at a later instance the TRAI  agreed to examine the internet packages offered by TSPs (as discussed in detail our here).

The consultation paper issued by TRAI can be downloaded here.