As
India’s Internet unites to save Net neutrality in response to Airtel’s
Zero platform, Flipkart and its CEO Sachin Bansal unfortunately found
themselves on the wrong side of the fence. The social media response to a
statement by Bansal that he didn’t see the problem with net neutrality
has created a social media disaster for the company, that seems to have
trumped even the ‘big billion day sale’ fiasco, that prompted it to send
a very apologetic public email.
Flipkart
retweeted three tweets by Bansal, arguing that the outrage against
Airtel was hypocritical, because similar initiatives by ‘foreign
companies’ were termed ‘innovation’, in what seemed to be a reference to
Facebook introducing Internet.org to India in collaboration with
Reliance, which in truth, isn’t really that different to what Airtel is
proposing.
But
Bansal’s timing and his three part defence on Twitter didn’t find any
takers. While he may have a point in comparing Airtel’s zero platform to
Internet.org, his stance seems to be “well, if Facebook is doing it,
why not Airtel”. This completely missed the point that both initiatives
essentially allow ISP’s to direct net traffic to their benefit. His
argument that ‘choice always wins’ and that such an initiative could not
be sustained for an unlimited time also falls flat.
If
ISP’s only allow traffic to certain sites or apps, there is firstly,
nothing to stop them from charging companies to enable free or faster
access to their sites, which will make the initiative sustainable in the
long run. Secondly, it paves the way for the creation of monopolies
that threaten smaller startups and sites.
Soon however, both Flipkart and Bansal learnt a quick lesson in what it meant to get on the wrong side of the Twitter mob.
A
tweet by journalist Shiv Aroor that he was going to boycott the
e-commerce site until they embraced net neutrality got retweeted almost
500 times and paved the way for a flood of tweets by users, all
declaring that they were boycotting Flipkart and had uninstalled the app
from their phones.
Users
went even further. There has been a sustained campaign on both Android
and iOS to downvote the app to a one star rating and mention the
company’s stance on net neutrality as the reason. At the time of
writing, this did not seem to have affected them much on the Google Play
store where they still had a rating of 4.2. On iOS however, they only
had three stars.
In
its tweets following the outrage, Flipkart has stuck to tweeting out
business as usual and has played no further part in the net neutrality
debate. Perhaps they’re hoping it will all blow over. And right now it’s
true that the Internet has bigger things to worry about. Like trying to
stop Airtel.
The
Times of India reported that “in a span of 24 hours, over 27,000 emails
have been sent to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India through the
website savetheinternet.in, responding to the regulator’s call for
public consultation.”
Additionally,
TOI said that “an online petition on change.org has nearly 150,000
supporters petitioning Union minister for communication and information
technology , Ravi Shankar Prasad, the department of telecom, and Trai to
act against the violation of internet neutrality by corporate
interests.”
But
Twitter and indeed all social media has an inconveniently long memory.
Even if Flipkart is not targeted as much in the coming days, you can bet
on the fact that it’s going to be brought up at inopportune moments,
most likely when the company is trying to launch a new product or
initiative.
Airtel
has meanwhile come out with an official clarification, in an effort to
firefight all the outrage. They insist that the outrage is all based on
ignorance and is being championed by people who have no idea what net
neutrality is:
“In
the end, the debate over the past few days has brought out one thing
clearly – a large number of people are still not clear on what Net
Neutrality is all about. This gives an opportunity to the so called
experts to make various as well as baseless arguments. While their point
of view is important, we should have a more informed and nuanced debate
without painting a picture that is based on rhetoric rather than
reason,”
“There
is also a high level of misinformation surrounding the product, which
is not surprising since the very concept of Net Neutrality is a bit
misunderstood.” The statement claimed “over 150 start-ups – with
majority being small start-ups – have contacted to enquire about the
product. For the record, every one of them told us what a great platform
we will be providing to them and for a change they will have an “equal
opportunity” to run with the big boys”.
Posted by : Gizmeon
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