BackNet neutrality and click-based campaigns
A survey shows it is clear that many supporters of both the Net neutrality and Free Basics campaigns were not really aware of the issues they were supporting
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The issue of Net neutrality first came to public consciousness in India in April this year when the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) issued a draft notification on its policy for regulating so-called over-the-top services on the Internet. The notifications, along with the zero-rating policy announced by prominent Indian telecom companies, led to the formation of the Save The Internet campaign in India, in order to promote Net neutrality.
Net neutrality refers to the concept that every packet on the Internet should be treated equally and that telecom service providers should not favour one kind of transmission over the other. For example, my telecom service provider should treat my data the same irrespective of whether I’m downloading some data or streaming a movie.
Save The Internet ran a massive public campaign to promote Net neutrality and to get ordinary citizens to write to Trai indicating their support for the principle. The campaign was wildly successful, with over a million messages being sent to Trai in favour of Net neutrality.
The issue once again came to public consciousness this month when Trai issued a fresh set of draft notifications and called for public comments. This time, Facebook, which is promoting its Free Basics programme (where a limited set of websites can be accessed for free by mobile phone customers without a paid data connection) got into the act with heavy advertising in national media (including this newspaper), and notifications on the Facebook website and app urging people to write to Trai in favour of Free Basics.
The common thing about both the Save The Internet campaign and Facebook’s Free Basics campaign is that they enabled ordinary citizens to express support for the respective campaigns with only a handful of clicks, and without too much effort. While this led to both campaigns receiving significant support, this also raised the possibility that people who have expressed support for these campaigns did so without really understanding what they were signing on to.
In order to test this hypothesis, Mint commissioned FourthLion Technologies’ instaVaani to conduct a survey on people’s attitudes to Net neutrality and the two campaigns. While the survey wasn’t large (only 265 people answered all five questions we asked), the large number of rather contradictory cross-tabulations suggests that the support for both the campaigns (Save The Internet and Free Basics) should not be taken at face value.
The most telling statistic from our survey is the number of people who have extended support for both the Save The Internet and Free Basics campaigns. As the table below shows, the number of respondents who supported both campaigns (71) is more than the total number of people who have supported only one of the two campaigns (66). If people had truly understood what they were signing on when they supported these campaigns, we would expect the support groups for these two campaigns to be mutually exclusive.
The other cross-tabulations from the survey also don’t make intuitive sense. We would expect, for example, that people who are aware of Net neutrality would be more critical of the Free Basics campaign than those who are not. According to our survey, however, 83% of those who are aware of Net neutrality think that Free Basics is a good idea, while only 69% of those who are not aware of Net neutrality think so (this difference is statistically significant at a high degree of confidence).
Then, only taking people who professed an awareness of Net neutrality into consideration, whether someone supported the Free Basics campaign or not had no bearing on whether they thought Facebook was abusing its position in using its platform to draw support for its campaign.
Given the aggressive wording of both the Save the Internet and Free Basics campaigns, we might expect that people who supported these campaigns would be aware of the issue of Net neutrality. However, our survey suggests that only about three-fourths of the respondents who had supported the Save the Internet campaign were aware of Net neutrality. The number was similar among those who had supported the Free Basics campaign, reinforcing the hypothesis that a significant number of people who had supported either of these campaigns did not really think through what they were supporting.
Based on the results of this survey, it is clear that a large number of campaign supporters were not really aware of the issues that they were supporting through their campaigns. In this context, Trai should not be swayed by the sheer volume of responses (in support of either campaign), but instead make its decision by considering the relative merits of the arguments.
The two campaigns and the responses they generated also indicate that a call for public opinion on any issue can be overwhelmed by campaigns that allow people to express their opinions with a handful of clicks. In this context, it is important to use algorithms that can filter out such automatically generated responses; else, genuine responses can get crowded out. It will be interesting to see how future calls for opinions on controversial issues will play out.
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