IAMAI Says Revenue Sharing Between OTT and TSPs to Violate Net Neutrality

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What Does IAMAI Think?

However, the IAMAI does not agree with the notion that the TSPs are pushing. In response to the TRAI’s paper, IAMAI said, “Such demands are based on the erroneous notion that OTT service providers consume bandwidth, and disregard the fact that not OTT players but consumers themselves independently transact and purchase data from TSPs.”

The association said that if you charge the OTT players a fee or get a share of their revenues, then the telcos will be earning twice for the same service. The TSPs have already charged their consumers to pay for the data, and then getting more revenues on top of it because they have traffic on their networks because of the OTT players is an absurd notion, as per IAMAI.

“Revenue-sharing mechanisms would essentially mean charging twice for the same service as consumers already pay TSPs for the data they consume. In any scenario, the amount of data that is consumed – and the resultant ‘pressure’ put on the infrastructure of TSPs – is directly dependent on the amount of data sold by telecom companies to consumers,” said IAMAI.

According to IAMAI, if the OTT players are asked to share their revenues with the TSPs, then it will hurt the Net Neutrality rules announced by the Ministry of Communications in 2018.

“Implementing revenue-sharing mechanisms would also mean adding a cost to accessing free or cheap content, which may eventually be passed onto consumers, thus raising the cost of internet usage. Prima facie, the ‘’collaborative frameworks’’ proposed in the consultation paper might lead to a violation of the net neutrality framework,” the body added in its response.