Ed. Note: This post by Ashwin Murthy is a part of the TLF Editorial Board Test 2016.
Net neutrality in its most basic understanding is the principle that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and the Government regulating the Internet must treat all data of the Internet the same. In a situation however where these bodies can increase the productivity of the provision of Internet to the consumer by discriminating between different sites and their data packets, the question arises as to whether this too would be against the principle of net neutrality and thus should be rendered unviable. Perhaps the clearest example of the same would be slowing down certain sites in exchange for speeding up other sites, a process known as throttling and fast-laning. Each site is essentially a collection of data packets (packets of information transmitted via Internet). By distributing data packets of different sites at different speeds, a level of optimisation can be reached that cannot be provided by distributing the data packets of each site at the same speed. Thus more data intensive sites could be given priority over less consuming sites – multimedia sites over text-based sites is the simplest form of distinction to understand. This could be extended even further, where ISPs divide which sites to speed up, thus allowing the consumer to choose which is most beneficial for their personal use. In the Indian context, this could be understood in the example where Airtel would ‘speed up’ all multimedia sites (YouTube, Vimeo, Netflix, etc.) and ‘slow down’ all other sites while BSNL would do the same with news sites (The Hindu, Times of India, Al Jazeera, etc.) and so on.