It looks like you might be watching too many YouTube videos on your mobile phone, at least too many as far as Bharti Airtel chairman Sunil Mittal is concerned. Fortunately for YouTube addicts, Mittal doesn’t want you to pay extra to watch your favourite videos. Instead, he wants YouTube, owned by US internet and mobile giant Google, to pay. Speaking to the Economic Times at the recent Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, Mittal said:
“We’ve become the bad gatekeepers. When somebody watches too many YouTube videos on mobile phone and then has a big bill, he curses the telecom operators. But YouTube is consuming a massive amount of resources on our network. Somebody’s got to pay for that.”
[caption id=“attachment_223906” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Some estimate that 22 percent of all of the traffic on the Internet is taken up by people watching YouTube videos. Reuters”]  [/caption] Mittal is highlighting the fact that video applications like YouTube use a lot of data, and for pay-as-you-go subscribers that can mean a nasty shock when the bill comes. Rather than put the burden on his customers, he wants YouTube, owned by US internet giant Google to pay up. Mittal argued in the same interview that getting new revenue from high-bandwidth providers such as Google’s YouTube would help fund the cost of building new infrastructure. Mittal added:
“Operators are under extreme pressures. If we are going to build the highways, there has to be a tax on the highways. I’m in favour of the customer feeling that the network providers are doing a great service. I don’t want him to curse me. We are charging him to make our business viable.”
Who pays for big bandwidth apps? This sets up a similar showdown to the net neutrality battle that raged for years in the US. American internet providers said they wanted greater control over bandwidth- hogging applications. As broadband became more common in the US, internet providers usually sold uncapped plans, very unlike plans common in other countries such as the UK, where internet users were forced to pay surcharges if they used more than, say, 5GB. Just like Mittal, American internet providers wanted to charge some high-bandwidth services extra for what they often referred to as priority access. YouTube is a huge user of bandwidth. It’s estimated that 60 hours of video is uploaded to the site every minute and that number has been rising at an exponential rate over the last several years. Some estimate that 22 percent of all of the traffic on the Internet is taken up by people watching YouTube videos. However, free speech advocates believed that being able to control high-bandwidth applications or charge for priority access would give too much control over content to telecommunications companies. Critics also worried that cable television companies that provide internet access and video on demand services could give their own services priority, giving their services an unfair competitive advantage. It’s important to note that Google does pay for the bandwidth to serve up all those hours of YouTube videos watched. And that was the case that Google and other internet content companies made during the years-long net neutrality battles. Last year, it looked like the US communications regulator had finally agreed to rules settling these issues. Companies would have to be transparent in how they managed traffic and also agree not to block any lawful content. However, the rules are different for mobile companies, and they can “throttle or even block certain apps”, according to Nate Anderson of tech site ArsTechnica. However, the details don’t really matter because almost as soon as the rules were published, mobile companies unleashed their lawyers and the lawsuits began. Who do you think should pay for all that bandwidth, YouTube, you or a bit of both? Mittal’s comments might be the first salvo in India’s own battle over control and on the issue of who pays the costs for the mobile internet.