Making Zero Rating work without disruption

The Net Neutrality debate in India has seen a large number of analogies being raised, in order to help people understand and frame the debate. Internet services have been variously compared to television, postal services, highways, markets and what not. Things got so bad that that at some point in time people had to collectively denounce all analogies, for they were simply taking away from the debate.

One of the analogies that were being drawn in an argument in favour of Zero Rating was to compare it to e-commerce companies that provide free shipping, for example, or the deep discounts provided by services such as Uber or Ola. If you ban zero rating, other legitimate activities such as free shipping will be next, critics of net neutrality argued, arguing that there would be no end to this. The counter-argument is that free shipping doesn’t disrupt the basic structure of the market while zero rating does. Here is a way in which zero rating can be made to work without disrupting the market.

And it is a rather simple one – cash transfers. Rather than an e-commerce company subsidising your browsing of their website directly (by paying the telecom provider to make your access free), they can instead refund your costs of browsing their sites in terms of a discount. Going back into the analogy space, this is similar to malls that charge you heavily for parking but then offset your parking fees against any purchase you make in the mall.

So Flipkart, for example, can estimate the amount of bandwidth a particular user would have spent in browsing their app (not hard to track at all, especially if the user uses the app), and any purchase on their site can be appropriately discounted to that extent (and maybe a little more to cover for browsing that didn’t lead to a purchase).

This works in several ways. In the current proposed model of Zero Rating, the e-commerce company doesn’t know how many users will access it, using each ISP, so there is uncertainty in the amount that they have to pay the ISPs for such access. By moving to a user-wise subsidy model, they know exactly what users are using how much, and this enables them to target the subsidies much better. Another way in which it helps the retailer is that it doesn’t waste money spending on bandwidth for people who only browse the website without buying (of course, if they wish to, they can subsidise such usage also, but since it can be so obviously gamed, they won’t do it).

More importantly, what such a system ensures is that the internet is not broken. You might recall my earlier post on this topic that zero rating results in “walled gardens” that leads to a broken internet which reduces the overall value of the internet. With a cash transfer scheme (rather than direct subsidy), such distortions are avoided, and the internet remains “free” (of any barriers, not free of cost) and maximum value of the internetwork is realised.

So as described above it is well possible for e-commerce players to subsidise users’ browsing of their apps without distorting the internet, and without using zero rating. And as shown above, doing so is in their interest.

PS: This post also came out of the same discussions from which my earlier post on 2ab had come out.

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