A few of us, Kiran Jonnalagadda, Apar Gupta, Raman Chima and Pranesh Prakash met outside Sanchar Bhawan, which houses India’s Department of Telecommunications (now Ministry of Communications) on April 28th 2015. The security guards checked our names with a list and let us through. We were there for a meeting with the Net Neutrality committee that the DoT had put together.
The committee, we were informed when we received an invite on April 23rd, intended:
1. To examine the pursuit of net neutrality from a public policy objective, its advantages and limitations.
2. To examine the economic impact on the telecom Sector that arises from the existence of a regulated telecom services sector and unregulated content and applications sector, including over-the-top (OTT) services.
3. To examine, assess and specify qualifications on the applicability of the principal of net-neutrality from the security, traffic management, economic, privacy and other stand-points.
4. To recommend overall policy, regulatory and technical responses in the light of examination and assessment of the issues in the first three terms of reference
We had been invited because the “Committee has decided to have interaction with Civil Societies / Academia representatives”, and “it has been decided to have one participant from each invitee organisation in the interaction.” I didn’t know which organisation they meant, because we were a loose collective, and this invite came to my personal email ID. I wasn’t working on MediaNama work anyway, and hadn’t been doing that since the campaign went live.
The security guards checked our IDs and whether we were on the list. Naresh Ajwani, who said he was with APNIC, the regional Internet address registry for the Asia–Pacific region, walked in after us. I didn’t know know him well, but I knew him by face and had heard his name before at the various telecom related meetings I had gone to.
The telecom policy space is full of grey haired folks who have been around for decades, but frankly don’t bring much to the conversations apart from the relationships they have built over the years. I didn’t think much of his being there, but in hindsight it did feel like an anomaly: I don’t remember any of the usual telecom policy suspects being there. However, he represented APNIC, and I thought he would bring in a global interconnection perspective to it.
We went up to the 5th floor, I think, and via a narrow passage, entered what looked like a conference room. It was fairly dimly lit, there was, from what I remember, only one row right at the end. I took my place next to Pranesh Prakash of CIS, whom I had been sparring with online about Net Neutrality, but we were, and still are, friends. We still disagree on many things.
Pranesh had an Ubuntu laptop, and an intriguing notetaking app which I asked him about during the consultation. We took turns to speak, and after some of us had spoken, Naresh Ajwani piped in. He slipped in one line at the end that pissed me off: he said that these people running the campaign are funded by Ford Foundation.
I had a decision to make then and there, and I took a call: this has to be shut down immediately and harshly. Instead of addressing the DoT committee, I turned to him and told him off, yelling at him: asking him for proof, saying he can’t have any proof because there isn’t any, and that I’m sick of these unfounded claims being thrown at us by people who don’t understand the issue, and are are trying to politicise something that’s of deep importance to us, and casting aspersions on our integrity by making such personal remarks. I reiterated that we hadn’t taken any money and asked him for proof again.
He appeared to be taken aback, as were the folks from DoT: no one had yelled at a regulatory meeting any more. The DoT folks jumped in and told him to refraining from making any unfounded claims and to stick to the substance. After the meeting ended, as we were walking out, someone from the DoT came to placate me. I told them it’s not a problem. Near the elevator, Ajwani put his hand on my shoulder and said something conciliatory. I ignored him and pushed his hand away. He continued making conciliatory statements and I walked on.
Losing my cool was worth it. We never heard that Ford Foundation jibe again.