India's New Open Internet Law Is Stronger Than the United States'

India’s landmark new open Internet policy, which was hailed by network neutrality advocates around the world on Feb 8, increases the pressure on American regulators to address a glaring loophole in US federal policy that allows telecommunications companies to sidestep rules designed to preserve the Internet’s open and freewheeling nature. Open Internet advocates argue that this practice, known as “zero-rating,” poses a serious threat to net neutrality—the principle that all content on the Internet should be equally accessible—because it allows telecom companies to favor certain online services by not counting those services against monthly data caps.

One year after the Federal Communications Commission approved the strongest open Internet protections in US history, zero-rating has emerged as the latest battlefront in the decade-long war over how best to regulate Internet service providers. India’s new policy, which bans zero-rating and the related practice of differential pricing, represents a dramatic defeat for Facebook. “The FCC should have just come out and banned zero-rating in the first place,” said Vishal Misra, a professor of computer science at Columbia University who helped lead the fight against zero-rating in India. “Now that the FCC has seen the world’s biggest democracy take this clear stand, it gives them cover to act, and I think they will. I think this will have a domino effect.”