Indian e-commerce company Flipkart's chief executive officer Mukesh Bansal on Tuesday announced that the online retailer would not participate in the Airtel Zero Platform deal, opining that such a arrangement could lead to violation of the participles of net neutrality.
The debate on the issue was triggered off after Indian multinational telecommunications services company Bharti Airtel announced that it would charge additional rates for making voice calls (VoIP) on its network.
"We evaluated the Airtel zero rating program, we tried to understand whether it's good for our consumers or not and after studying it, we decided to not participate in it. We felt that the deal could later on lead to violation the principles of net neutrality," Bansal told ANI.
Earlier in the day, Bansal announced that Flipkart has always been in favour of net neutrality and will continue doing so, terming it 'extremely important' for both consumers and services providers.
"There is something that we have been thinking about in fact for a long while, we are absolutely committed to the principles of net neutrality. We believe in the long term democracy of internet. Equal access to internet is extremely important both from consumer's point of view and all the players who are providing services on that," Bansal had said.
Net neutrality is a principle whereby internet service providers and governments are expected to treat all internet websites and services as equal, without discriminating or charging differential tariff based on users, content, websites, services or mode of communication.
Amidst the debate on net neutrality, Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad had earlier said that a six-member panel has been constituted and will submit its recommendations regarding the same by early next month.
At present, India has no laws with respect to net neutrality.