Musings over the crossroads

— Amitabh Singhal

Ipersonally and on behalf of the ISP industry in particular, congratulate the entire Voice & Data team on completing 25 years of being in publication. This Silver Anniversary is truly unique, not only for the Cyber Media group, but also for the telecommunications industry in India, since it also signifies the completion of 25 years or the Silver Anniversary of the National Telecom Policy of 1994, which opened the doors for the first time ever, for domestic and foreign investments to enable development of our telecom sector with the aim and objective of providing world class telecom services in India. inception stage, this is a story of so many pioneering efforts and milestones.

for under Rs 1,000 per month or even less now. It has taken a lot of hard work and many factors came into play to make telecom and internet prices come down and make the services amongst the most affordable ones compared to any other country. V&D, I know for sure has the archival treasure trove of those days gone by and which would be of immense interest for telecom historians wanting to track those beginnings.

It is also important to note that a couple of months ago, on 8 November 1998, the licensed ISP industry’s completed its 21 years – from the day when the first ISP licenses were signed and issued after the ISP policy and draft ISP license was approved by the then Prime Minister, late Atal Behari Vajpayee himself. VSNL enjoyed sole monopoly before that from 1995 even before which a select group from the science and academic community had been using email services using dial up modems since 1986 and over TCP/IP links in early 90’s. reservation and maybe even derision from certain quarters then.

V&D has one of my first interviews and quotes which came about when we took a stay from TRAI, in early 1998, on an ISP license which DoT announced but which did not meet with our expectation of an open and consumer friendly ISP license. The result of next 6-7 months of work was the least restrictive and open License compared to any other Telecom licenses at that time, which came in November the same year.

During the entire pull and push process, engagement with govt, regulator and other industry segments and through a spate of litigations, it was V&D which provided us a highly effective platform and helped carry our voices, our issues and concerns from time to time. Lot of credit for our successful policy and regulatory interventions goes to V&D and to the extent of its outreach and impact, enabling us to be heard effectively by the powers that be.

Today, in comparison to earlier times, the internet eco-system is admittedly much more larger, more complex with issues ranging and emanating from the stupendous rise of social media, security, trust, privacy, data protection, abuse and so on. These need to be dealt with in a way that internet remains free, open and accessible to everyone. There are a larger number of stakeholders now including many civil society players and activists who make their presence felt through various internet governance platforms at least in the domestic arena. In short, it is a more robust eco-system than before but still a developing one and I think it needs to keep growing.

All stakeholders must remember that internet is still evolving and there are technical, policy and other management related developments being taken up, discussed, debated, considered and worked upon by a very large multi-stakeholder group globally on various regional and international platforms such as APNIC, APRICOT, IETF, ICANN, IGF, etc. Over the years, my observation is that even though a few people from India have started to visit these platforms, active involvement, participation and effective contribution from us is still pretty rare and nowhere in proportion to and reflective of the size, scale and economic and linguistic diversity of our internet user base. For example I see our presence in the Nomcom group (nominates and selects a few ICANN Board seats) and in the UASG group ( working on Universal Acceptance - related to the ability of users to be inter-operable and use all ASCII and non ASCII language gTLDs on any browser, email or web application. There are so many other constituencies where we need to develop our participation levels.

Somehow, we have to build this capacity for an increasingly robust participation, to be able to open up and share experiences, discuss and debate and in turn learn from others like the Americans, Europeans and other Eastern Asian countries and participants do at all these forums, regularly and frequently, so as to be seriously counted in the global Internet Multi-stakeholder Governance milieu.

This brings me to NIXI as India’s first set of Internet Exchanges and a critical internet infrastructure that I helped set up. There is no reason for it to remain insular after being there for almost 16 years. It could, along with newer exchanges now operating, connect to and with neighbouring countries Internet infrastructure to begin with. We have this latent capacity lying there to be a South Asian connectivity hub and subsequently a global internet peering hub. But, I don’t see anyone doing anything in that direction. No one really seems to represent NIXI at regional and global forums sharing technical or policy expertise or learning from others outside on how to better use and upgrade this infrastructure and a global resource for the benefit of the community at large. Globally, folks wonder about its role and function and why it remains in the state it does.

There is no reason why we should not build on what we have. Maybe it needs new and better stewardship to make that leap. I have, personally, made suggestions a few times in the past. I hope someday something will happen for the better and soon.