“We’ve become the bad gatekeepers,” lamented Sunil Mittal, CEO, Bharti Airtel. “When somebody watches YouTube on a mobile and ends up [with a] big bill, he curses under his breath at telecom operators. But YouTube is consuming a massive amount of resources on our network. Somebody’s got to pay for that.”
What Mittal suggested at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last year, and is gaining rapid popularity with service providers around the world, was an “inter-connect charge”, an effective Internet tax that would force companies such as Google and Facebook to pay network operators a levy similar to the termination fee that networks pay one another to complete a voice call.
This growing clamour for an Internet tax was obliquely backed by the Government at a U.N conference, held last month.
Internet tax, a flawed idea
What Mittal suggested at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last year, and is gaining rapid popularity with service providers around the world, was an “inter-connect charge”, an effective Internet tax that would force companies such as Google and Facebook to pay network operators a levy similar to the termination fee that networks pay one another to complete a voice call.
This growing clamour for an Internet tax was obliquely backed by the Government at a U.N conference, held last month.
Internet tax, a flawed idea
