India, other developing economies at risk of not getting access to web content outside country

India and other developing economies run the risk of not getting access to content originating outside the country if the  International Telecommunications Union adopts a treaty that gives governments more control on the internet  and could allow them to charge for internet traffic landing in their countries.

"There could be a lot of negative impact on the development of the Internet as we know it today, especially in developing countries," Micheal Kende, partner at Analysys mason, a London-based research firm told ET.

Kende explained that if the International Telecommunications Regulations ( ITR) laid down rules on how the internet should be governed then it could impose an accounting rate regime on the internet on the same lines as telephony. This would increase the cost for users, in complete contrast to the Indian communication ministry's agenda of bringing broadband to the masses.

He added that imposing charges on internet traffic coming to India would not work as there were ways to misuse the system, for instance, internet service providers programmed to only download videos from abroad to bring in one-way revenue.

"There could be unintended fraudulent actions to inflate termination revenues, avoidance of serving markets with high fees and discouragement of investment in facilities," Kende said in his report Internet global growth: lessons of the future. "With a liberal country like India, content packets can go through many different routes to get here, how do you keep track of them and figure out who to bill. For doing that you have to reduce the number of gateways and that becomes a security issue," he added.

Kende added that the rate regime used for charging voice calls across the world could not be imposed on internet because there were significant differences between telecom traffic that gets routed through switches and internet traffic, which is essentially packets of information that can take varied routes to travel from one part of the world to another, making it difficult to track and bill.

"Approximately 98% of intenet traffic (videos, file transfers) can be stored in multiple locations, and thus can move and originate from servers in multiple countries. It's hard to determine who initiated a transmission and even where it is possible, it is not always clear whether the sender or the receiver should pay for the transmission," the report highlights.

Further, a lot of internet traffic has shifted to mobile devices which has lead massive development of the internet traffic architecture. "Different routing of internet traffic makes traditional accounting regime an inappropriate compensation mechanism," he said.
With such restrictions and internet being governed, internet providers may no longer invest in creating the ecosystem that is required in a country like India to take services to the masses.

India will be part of 193 countries that will meet at the World Conference on International Telecommunications in December in Dubai to discuss and decide on several proposals that could give government's more control on content and access to internet networks. Issues like cyber security, data privacy, fraud and misuse of information would be debated on apart from the ITR's, which were last revised in 1988.

Ever since, mobile telephony has grown exponentially and majority of the large networks are owned by private entities. Further, internet usage has seen uncontrollable growth with more than 2 billion users till date.

India that has more than 900 million mobile phone users and more than 100 million internet users, has not taken a final position on the matter. Officials in the telecom ministry said that discussions with varied stakeholders were still on.