The whole argument about net neutrality was recently overshadowed by a ridiculous move by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), which made over a million email IDs of concerned people public. This eventually led to its website getting hacked, and even brought the regulatory body a lot of flak from both people and the press.
It has now gone on to say that it will not display the email IDs of people who do not want them to be shown. Today, the government body is supposed to stop receiving counter comments on the net neutrality issue, and those who wish their email IDs to remain a secret have been asked to enter the words ‘Do not display my id’ in the subject sections of their emails.
TRAI was earlier accepting responses from people on its consultation regarding the regulatory framework for OTT or internet based calling and messaging services like WhatsApp, Viber and more. A large number of emails which it received after that featured requests to be published on the regulator’s website.
Now, after much filtering and removing of duplicates, these emails were published by TRAI, but since a number of them had email IDs as their headers, they got uploaded to the site as well. This angered a lot of people, and it also resulted in hackers retaliating by getting TRAI’s website down, leading to it not functioning at all for a long period of time.
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TRAI is currently accepting counter agreements on the regulatory framework for OTT services, and will soon be publishing them as well. When that happens, let us hope that the situation is a pleasant one.