Telecom regulator TRAI faces flak over public release of names & email ids of people posting suggestions over net neutrality

Telecom regulator Trai today faced flak on the social media including Twitter for making public names and email ids of one million people who have submitted their comments on Net Neutrality.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on March 27 had floated a consultation paper on putting in place a regulatory framework for over-the-top (OTT) services and April 24 was the last date to submit comments.

The Authority has received over 10 lakh petitions on the matter and as usual practise in place, Trai uploaded all the comments on its website. Due to huge traffic, the Trai website also went down.

As the number of comments was huge, Trai has divided the comments under three categories -- comments from service providers, comments from service providers associations and comments from other stakeholders.

However, the Authority drew the ire of people for exposing the privacy of people.

"Congrats TRAI on releasing the mail ids of everyone who mailed you about net neutrality. Now we know how well you protect internet users," Vir sanghvi said on Twitter.

"So if you wrote to TRAI to #SaveTheInternet, you are now at the mercy of every spammer in the country? Bizarre.

#NetNeutrality," Vikram Chandra said.

Another person on Twitter said: "Hi TRAI, it is NOT okay for a govt. regulator to expose 1M+ email id's of respondents to your "OTT" paper! Do please note, Shri @rsprasad."

Rajeev Chandrasekhar said "@PranavDixit reports on @httweets tht TRAI hs publishd email ids of all respondents on its website https://bit.ly/1JJVzye #NetNeutrality."