'Fair share' charge on OTTs will not violate net neutrality: COAI

Retd Lt Gen SP Kochhar said that OTT players have twin sources of revenues and that they should pay towards network cost incurred by telecom companies

Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) on September 14 said that their recommendation that over-the-top (OTT) players pay telecom companies towards network cost does not violate the principle of net neutrality.

This comes at a time when a debate over net neutrality has erupted over telecom companies such as Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone Idea suggesting that OTT players pay a "fair share" charge toward network cost based on the number of users they have, the traffic they generate and so on.

At a media briefing, COAI's director general (retd) Lt Gen SP Kochhar said, "

Net neutrality concerns unbiased treatment of content and is completely unrelated to the fair share charge to be paid by OTTs to TSPs (telecom service providers). It is worthwhile to emphasise here that our member TSPs are committed to following the net neutrality principle as per their licensing conditions."

COAI's members include Jio, Airtel, and Vodafone Idea.

Also read: MC Explains: Debate over net neutrality rears its head again

"While telcos have been carrying the massive investment burden for deploying networks and delivering connectivity across the country entirely by themselves, OTT players have emerged offering bandwidth-heavy services and generating disproportionately high traffic, compelling further upgrades and capacity enhancement of the networks, but contributing nothing to the network expenses," Kochhar said.

Notably, OTT, as the name suggests, can mean any content provider that works on top of existing internet services provided by telecom companies. This includes all major platforms such as Google, WhatsApp, Meta, and any other platform that depends on the internet.