The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI ) has upheld the basic principles of an open and free internet in its recommendations on net neutrality. <br/><br/>Net neutrality means that telecom service providers must treat all internet traffic equally, without any regard to the type, origin or destination of the content or the means of its transmission. <br/><br/>TRAI today recommended prohibiting Internet service providers from making any discrimination in traffic while providing web access by either blocking or throttling some apps, websites and services or by offering fast lanes to others. <br/><br/>The telecom regulator's recommendations pave the way to end all sorts of discriminatory practices that telecom operators may exercise to differentiate among services. It has suggested changing licence terms of players to explicitly restrict any form of discrimination in Internet access based on content.<br/><br/>TRAI has also restrained service providers from entering into pacts with any person which discriminates on content, protocol or user equipment.It has recommended that the Department of Telecommunication (DoT) may identify specialized services. <br/><br/>However, the specialized services may be offered by the service provider only if they are not usable as a replacement of Internet access services. Internet of Things (IoT) as a class of services are not excluded from the scope of restriction on non-discriminatory treatment. <br/><br/>However critical IoT services identified by DoT would be automatically excluded. The other recommendations include reasonable measurement for traffic management by Internet access service provider. <br/><br/>In finalising these recommendations the TRAI issued a pre-consultation paper in May last year and followed it up with a detailed consultation paper on 4th of January this year focussing especially on questions of requirements, design, scope and implementation of net neutrality framework in India.