Lots of factors at play here. Till a few months ago, India didn't even have a competition commission. We have no anti-trust laws.

You also have to understand the history of telecom in India, especially the Value-Added-Services on mobile. They killed startups ( http://rashmiranjanpadhy.com/2015/04/12/airtel-kills-startup... ), they activated services without users' consent and so on. Can you imagine how big this fraud was in India where 40% of the people are not even literate? It was plain and simple fraud.

Everyone and his uncle learned to curse the telcos in that era. Now they're coming for the web, disparagingly calling it "Over-The-Top services".

India has a Competition Commission since 2002.

http://www.cci.gov.in/index.php?option=com_content&task=view...

Denzil - we have bodies and committees for every thing but no action takes place. Our CCI is a joke. There is no anti-trust. And less said about our courts & justice system the better.

Just a small eg: Satyam chief, Ramalingam Raju, picked up the phone and gave himself in to SEBI (US version of SEC) confessing to financial fraud of INR 4000 crores+ massive job losses, massive losses/harakiri in pension/taxes owed to the govt (due to inflated employee #) to the extent of he had one of the big4 auditors in his pocket who signed over falsified bank balance statements. This resulted in govt having to take over the co and auctioning it out to TechMahindra. At the time Satyam was the #3 Software services company in India by sheer revenue and employee size. Raju gave detailed proofs of each of his wrongdoings ("when he could not ride this tiger anymore") and yet it took our courts 7 years + to impose a rap-on-knuckles 7 years of imprisonment and 5 crores of fines. An amount which he could've made bamboozled off in one day of stock manipulation on the exchanges.

So my point is it's one thing to have all these fancy bodies and titles and quite another to have them act on anything.

This recent action against zero-rated apps by one of our telcos, Airtel, is a heartening move which ofcourse morphed into heat brought upon FB's internet.org which is a bigger culprit on net neutrality front.

Way to go online activism in India! (Disclosure: I'm a member of the #SaveTheInternet volunteer group)

Quick note on numbers:

"Crore" means 10 million (it's a modifier like "hundred" or "thousand" and does not necessarily relate to money).

10 000 000 Indian rupees = 160 310 U.S. dollars

I do understand that most of these bodies are toothless but we do have a CCI. The parent comment mentioned that we don't have one and I thought I would mention the fact that we do. As we speak, the CCI seems to be probing Indian telecoms.

http://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/industry/cc...

I'm not in favor of zero rating or violations of net neutrality as we know it.

Disclosure : I'm a passive member of the #SaveTheInternet volunteer group (anonymously) too. I really appreciate your efforts and work. I am trying to tell all my colleagues and friends about you guys. Keep going!

These commissions are set up here, only after someone from a global body like UN, World Bank, IMF etc complains about their absence.

oh well ...hello! :-) and sorry I kinda took a shortcut to the assumption that you were not an Indian.

Thanks. I must have confused it with some amendment regarding competition commission.

> Facebook cannot become AOL (which is what all the platforms desperately want to become) unless they can vertically integrate with the network.

Maybe you could also interpret the backlash against Zero/AOL as an indication that customers do not want corporations regulating their access to information. So perhaps network carriers should think twice about aiming for a captive audience with "vertical integration".

This is their plan exactly. However, we have been able to get 6 out of 39 brands to pull their support back. Hopefully, tomorrow we will see even better support!

I just bought the book. Sounds like a very nice read. Thanks.