The first and strong supporter of Airtel zero service, Flipkart is now flipped out after Net Neutrality topic become a hot one in public. It was trending on social media and people were speaking against Airtel and Flipkart both. People have also started taking steps against flipkat in app stores by rating it 1 star for its apps.
This started when Airtel has launched ‘Airtel Zero’ service which offered free internet access to specific mobile apps. This Airtel Zero service violates the principle of net neutrality. This violation of net neutrality can affect the whole internet market as this Airtel zero policy will divide the internet into two halves one Free and other Paid internet or big and small companies or may be in Indian and global.
Flipkart has backed off from this Airtel zero plan. Flipkart states that “We will be walking away from the ongoing discussions with Airtel for their platform Airtel Zero.”
This news is exclusively covered by ‘Nextbigwhat’ which recorded the official statement from Flipkart:
We at Flipkart have always strongly believed in the concept of net neutrality, for we exist because of the Internet. Over the past few days, there has been a great amount of debate, both internally and externally, on the topic of zero rating, and we have a deeper understanding of the implications. After reviewing implications of zero rating deeply, we reached the conclusion that it doesn’t meet our standards of net neutrality and violates the principles that we stand for
Based on this, we have decided on the following:
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We will be walking away from the ongoing discussions with Airtel for their platform Airtel Zero
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We will be committing ourselves to the larger cause of Net Neutrality in India. We will be internally discussing over the next few days, the details of actions we will take to support the cause
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We will be working towards ensuring that the spirit of net neutrality is upheld and applied equally to all companies in India irrespective of the size or the service being offered and there is absolutely no discrimination whatsoever.
Source: NextBigWhat