Net Neutrality: TRAI faces flak for releasing names

TRAI website crashes; Anonymous says it did it

Telecom regulator TRAI,  on Monday, faced flak from netizens for making public names and email ids of one million people who have submitted their comments on Net Neutrality.

Even Anonymous hacker group claimed that it has brought down the regulator’s official website and also warned that the site will soon be hacked.
As the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) received over 10 lakh petitions from public on over-the-top (OTT) it has uploaded all the comments on its website as usual practice.

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 from social media including Twitter 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."

Hacker’s warning

Rajeev Chandrasekhar said "@PranavDixit reports on @httweets tht TRAI hs publishd email ids of all respondents on its website http://bit.ly/1JJVzye #NetNeutrality." Interestingly the TRAI website went down. Though the regulator said website down due to heavy traffic, hacker group Anonymous India claimed it has brought down website to protest against the public release of email IDs from which the body received responses regarding net neutrality. The hacker group has warned that it would soon hack the website.

However, TRAI claimed that the website was down because huge traffic and its website was not hacked. Besides, senior official in the regulator also said that revealing comments and petitioners email ids a usual practice by it. Separately, telecom operators have proposed a licensing regime for over-the-top (OTT) players like WhatsApp and Skype, a view which is opposed by internet firms and associations.The telecom operators said they should be allowed to offer services based on mutual agreements with the OTT players.