Finally good news for Net Neutrality supports hit the web when Flipkart confirmed that they have Back out of the Airtel Zero program. Co-Founder & CEO of Flilpkart, Sachin Bansal confirmed this in an Interview with NextBigWhat as well as on his twitter account today.
Being one of the largest Ecommerce portals in India, Flipkart would have been a huge support for Greedy Bharti Airtel to apply Airtel Zero program and make the internet worse for most of the business and Internet users. But thanks to Flipkart who said “We do not support anything that could discriminate one company or service over the other by creating roadblocks that compromise the experience that they promise to offer.”
Sachin Bansal also added, “We exist because of the Internet, and hence we always strongly believed in the concept of net neutrality. We will be committing ourselves to the larger cause of Net Neutrality in India.” This decision of Flipkart has really shocked Airtel, which now made them say that “Airtel Zero is not a tariff proposition, it is merely an open platform for content providers to provide toll free data services.”
Well, what I have to say on this statement of Airtel is “Stop it dude. Go to @#%&”.
Let’s have a look at the complete statements Flipkart put in the interview:
We at Flipkart have always strongly believed in the concept of net neutrality, for we exist because of the Internet. Over the past few days, there has been a great amount of debate, both internally and externally, on the topic of zero rating, and we have a deeper understanding of the implications. After reviewing implications of zero rating deeply, we reached the conclusion that it doesn’t meet our standards of net neutrality and violates the principles that we stand for
Based on this, we have decided on the following:
1. We will be walking away from the ongoing discussions with Airtel for their platform Airtel Zero
2. We will be committing ourselves to the larger cause of Net Neutrality in India. We will be internally discussing over the next few days, the details of actions we will take to support the cause
3. We will be working towards ensuring that the spirit of net neutrality is upheld and applied equally to all companies in India irrespective of the size or the service being offered and there is absolutely no discrimination whatsoever
