Cyber Citizens

As the debate over net neutrality sparks up again in the West, Nikhil Pahwa, co-founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, talks victories of the past and the new challenges of keeping the Web-wide open.

- Ajachi Chakrabarti

Nikhil Pahwa was drawn into the battle to preserve net neutrality, a battle that would come to consume and define his life, because he “was afraid we were about to be disconnected from the rest of the world.”

Sitting at his Civil Lines residence in Delhi one evening in May, Pahwa, co-founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation – a volunteer-driven organisation that advocates and educates on Internet-related issues – is recounting how he came to spearhead one of the largest mass movements to defend the internet as we know it in India. As founder and chief editor of MediaNama, a popular website for news and analysis on digital media in the country, Pahwa had been observing, with increasing alarm, the actions of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) as it considered allowing certain Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to charge users for accessing specific online services.

The internet is basically an interconnection of ISPs across the world, he explains. “ISPs are the route to that public sphere. If the ISPs control what you can and can’t access in that public sphere, and if they start favouring a Google or an Apple or a Microsoft or an Amazon over you and me, we lose out on the opportunity to participate.” In other words, from being creators and consumers – aka users – we become only consumers.

For Pahwa, the stakes were personal. Having dropped out of engineering college, it was the internet that provided him gainful employment: He began writing for ContentSutra, another media analysis website, soon rising to chief editor. When he went into business for himself, establishing MediaNama in 2008, all it took was buying a domain and setting up a WordPress site. “It barely cost me anything,” he says. “I want everyone else to have that ability to participate, the way I did.”