Barbara van Schewick is the director of the Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. Her research and papers on network neutrality shaped the US Federal Communications Commission’s work and rulings on the issue. In a Skype interview with Kim Arora, she spoke about the latest Trai decision and net neutrality around the world.

How would you compare the TRAI ruling in India with net neutrality legislations elsewhere in the world?

Regulators around the world are looking at how to deal with zero-rating right now. Trai is the first regulator to focus exclusively on issues of differential pricing and exempting applications from data caps. As a result, they could come up with a holistic approach to these practices. Part of the reason why we have seen other regulators in the US or the EU adopt case-by-case decisions is that they were thinking of the many aspects of net neutrality at once. They focused on rules for blocking and technical discrimination. When they got to zero-rating, they basically ran out of time and (decided to) deal with it case by case.

But India would have to look at those other issues later too.

Yes. The net neutrality regime is incomplete if it only addresses economic forms of discrimination like zero rating, or only technical forms of discrimination. The simple insight at the core of net neutrality is that we do not want companies that connect us to the internet to control what happens on the internet. If you only ban one practice and not the others, you haven’t really protected the open internet. What’s great about the Indian decision is that it provides a full set of rules for different types of zero rating. These give certainty to the market.