Forcing web businesses to get licensed and requiring some apps to pay phone networks will ultimately hurt startups.
Andy Mukherjee is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies and financial services in Asia. Previously, he worked for Reuters, the Straits Times and Bloomberg News.
It’s the smaller players who’ll be hurt by this policy.
Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/BloombergAs payment gateways, Paytm, PhonePe and Razorpay are rivals. But they and more than 100 other internet startups — from a matrimonial site to a discount broker — have come together to sign an open letter to India’s telecom regulator, asking it to reject phone networks’ demand of additional charges on “large traffic generators” and the government’s desire to license online businesses.
The latter threat has loomed ever since New Delhi introduced a draconian draft telecom bill last year, through which it wants to retain sweeping powers of state surveillance while imposing a license requirement on everything from Gmail to FaceTime and Skype. In a nutshell, the world’s largest democracy wishes to move a little closer to a government-controlled internet.
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