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Broadband India Forum (BIF) asserted that Over-The-Top Telecom (OTT) service should be excluded from the items mentioned in the definition of telecom services, as the industry body made its submissions on the telecom bill.
BIF said that many strong and objective reasons sharply differentiate OTTs from contacts.
By putting OTTs under a scope Telecommunications Licensing, means that the government will only have the exclusive rights and privileges to decide, build, develop and operate OTT applications. Such a situation would be extremely vague, extremely impractical and lead to the collapse of the entire application ecosystem, affecting innovation and the growth of the economy.”
The BIF argued that the bill includes OTT telecom services, even though these players do not have a telecom network.
It argued that sectors other than telecommunications, such as broadcasting and OTT communications (or which have any other designation instead of OTT communications) could not be within the scope of the bill.
“OTT connections/OTTs are basically that Apps Not telecommunications services, and like any application, they use the Internet, and do not own or operate in a telegraph/telecom network.”
The BIF noted that there were some arguments claiming OTT communications should be subject to the draft bill, and went on to add that “such claims are not true, either by law or policy.”
“More of these differences may be driven by commercial goals,” the forum added.
According to the forum, the commercial argument that OTT is a free service is “neither valid nor relevant” in the current context.
OTT service providers and users pay TSPs (Telecommunication Service Providers) for the costs of using the network.
Moreover, the business models of OTTs and TSPs are very different and they never go beyond OTT and cannot simply go beyond broadband/telecom infrastructure to provide OTT services to their users.
The BIF added: “It is recognized that OTT communications service should be excluded from the elements in the definition of telecommunications services in the bill.”
Regarding spectrum management, the industrial research team said that satellite spectrum should continue to be distributed administratively.
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