The Broadband Forum of India (BIF) has affirmed that Over-The-Top (OTT) communication services should be excluded from the elements mentioned in the definition of telecommunications services, when the public authority industry submitted its submission on the draft telecommunications law.
BIF gives many strong reasons and is actually very divergent OTT from telecommunications.
“By bringing OTTs into the range of telecommunication license, which means that the government will only hold and have the exclusive right and privilege to decide, build, develop and operate OTT applications. Such a situation would be extremely ambiguous and very unrealistic, and lead to the collapse of the entire app ecosystem, thereby affecting innovation and growth of the economy,” BIF said. know in a recent submission to the government on the draft legislation.
The draft law includes OTT communication services, although such players do not have telecommunications networks, the BIF argued.
It argues that sectors other than telecommunications, such as broadcasting and OTT media (or have any other nomenclature instead of OTT Communications) cannot be covered by the draft law.
“OTT/OTT communication is basically application and not telecommunications services, and like any application, they use the internet and they do not own or operate a telegraph/telecommunications network,” it argued.
The BIF noted that there were some arguments that OTT communication should be included in the draft law and went on to add that “such arguments are not correct, both by law and by policy”.
“Moreover, such disputes may be motivated by commercial objectives,” the forum added.
According to the forum, the commercial argument that OTT is a free ride-hailing service is “not true nor appropriate” in the current context.
The OTT service provider and the user pay TSP (Telecommunications Service Provider) for the cost of using the network.
Moreover, the business models of OTT and TSP are very different and OTT never ignores and simply cannot ignore the telecommunications/broadband infrastructure to provide OTT services to its users. , it said.
“We respectfully submit that OTT communication services should be excluded from the elements of the definition of telecommunications services in the Draft Law,” the BIF added.
Regarding spectrum management, the industry advisory group said that satellite spectrum should continue to be administratively allocated.
