Net neutrality: Avoid a collusion course

The plot between Airtel, Reliance and Facebook to steal the Internet from a majority of Indians under the guise of helping them has collapsed. An outpouring of effective truth-telling by media and civil society organisations has doomed this particular scheme, but ‘zero rating’ will recede into the shadows only to return in another form unless we learn the lesson from this fiasco: Any effort to present a ‘walled garden’ of the Internet to India’s less well-off majority on the false ground that this is ‘all they can afford’ is in fundamental conflict with any rational policy of social development through innovation.

What citizens should resent, government should also prohibit as an obstacle to social development. The Internet is not a basket of media websites we ‘consume’ any more than ahighway is a collection of stores along the side of the road we could shop at. The Internet is the possibility of unlimited interconnection, a social condition in which we can all be connected to everyone else everywhere, with rich technical connections that can allow us to produce services for one another.

The integrity of the network — that it provides one indivisible opportunity for everyone connected to it — is its most important feature. As a tool of social development, the Internet allows people with little capital equipment but plenty of ingenuity to build effective businesses from zero. But only if other people can ‘find’ them on the Internet and receive the services they are offering.

Acollusion between one or more local telecommunications oligopolists and a big service platform incumbent to price a small basket of websites at zero, and to deliver network integrity only to those who will pay more for it, destroys this immense value of the Internet in realising human potential. If most people cannot see the ‘real’ Internet, startup businesses will become invisible, and the colluding platform companies will be protected against any developing competition, at the expense of wiping out hundreds of thousands of potential businesses representing India’s economic future. Such collusion is, therefore, directly antithetical to any Digital India worthy of the name.

History reflects the role corruption by telecommunications oligopolists played in the death of the last government. The government now has an opportunity to undo the harms caused by the past. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) should be given a mandate to regulate telecom providers so as to ensure network integrity for everyone, everywhere and cease attempts to find a lopsided ‘middle path’. In doing so, the government will put paid to the patently false argument that ‘this is what we can afford to give them’.

There is no cost savings whatever in providing access only to some addresses on the Internet. The telecom provider is connected to the larger world by the same universal technical protocols — developed and maintained by consensus among all users as equals — through which all computers on the Internet can locate and exchange services with one another.

The provider doesn’t increase its costs by providing the same integrity of universal interconnection to all users further downstream. On the contrary, it incurs costs by artificially restricting the normal interconnection between parties downstream and the Net as a whole. It profits wildly from those investments, by selling at a high additional price what it could, at no additional cost, have provided to everyone in the first place.

Everything in a digital network, whether part of a phone conversation or data moving according to Internet protocols, is broken into ‘packets’, short bursts of data in a standard envelope. Your smartphone sends and receives millions of packets a day. Whether a packet is ‘voice’ or ‘data’ — and if it is data whether it’s being exchanged with a website in California or Mumbai — the cost of moving it on the local telecom network is the same.

Everywhere in India where a device is connected to the telecommunications carriers’ network, it can profitably be served at current rates for ‘phone calls’ or ‘data’. Everything else charged is mere economic rent to the telecom company. This is the sort of pricing behaviour that telecom regulators exist to prevent.

It’s good that the ‘zero rating’ proposal has collapsed. We must remain vigilant. Violating network integrity is as wildly profitable as it is socially destructive. Our real task is helping to change the regulatory culture so that the real Digital India, where ordinary people can make extraordinary businesses from nothing, can flourish, rather than being strangled in the crib.

Eben Moglen and Mishi Choudhary are Founding Director and Legal Director of Software Freedom Law Center, respectively

The best employers in the U.S. say their greatest tool is culture

As we read through thousands of employee comments and survey results, we noticed three trends.

First, the best workplaces are getting better. Because Great Place to Work has used the same rigorous methodology to identify the nation’s best employers for nearly two decades, we can make comparisons. Take education and development, for example. In 1998 the average amount of training for managers and professionals was 41 hours, while hourly and administrative staffers received 33 hours. This year the numbers were 78 and 94 hours, respectively, which is nearly 80% higher.

But it’s not just specific programs that are more generous. The primary tool used to select and rank candidates is Great Place to Work’s Trust Index survey, which is distributed to a sample of employees at each company. In effect, the workers vote their companies onto the list using criteria related to the quality of their workplace cultures. Looking at this year’s data, we discovered that 2015’s 100 Best Companies scored an average of 13% higher than their worthy counterparts nearly two decades ago. That means the happiest employees have gotten even happier.

Why? That leads us to our second trend: The best employers are better because more business leaders are focused on workplace culture as a competitive tool. You will see that most of these firms are winners in the marketplace as well as in the workplace. Prime example: Google, which occupies the top spot for the sixth time in eight years. Google’s leaders explicitly attribute the company’s financial performance to its benevolent people practices.

Also consider the 12 companies that have made this list every year since we published the first list in 1998. Over the past 17 years they have collectively created a net total of 341,567 jobs, for a whopping average increase of 172%. The top job creator: Whole Foods, with a 784% jump, from 8,681 team members to 68,045.

Or you can look at stock performance. Since 1998 the 100 Best Companies have outperformed the S&P 500 index by a ratio of nearly 2 to 1, according to a study by the Russell Investment Group. Companies on this list are shining examples of a different way of doing business that puts to rest the old notion that treating employees well might hurt the bottom line. Indeed, most would agree with the Marriott philosophy: “Take care of associates, and they will take care of the customers.”

Third trend: Each of the 100 Best Companies has leaders who genuinely listen to their employees and craft distinctive policies and programs that suit today’s workforce. The perks listed in our brief descriptions of these firms are only the tip of the iceberg in workplace cultures where every employee is considered important. We like the observation of Scott Scherr, founder and CEO of Ultimate Software: “The true measure of a company is how they treat their lowest-paid employees.”

As you read the company profiles in the list, we invite you to think about taking an idea back to your workplace. If enough employees insist that their companies emulate the 100 Best Companies, the winners will be the companies and the people who work there. Our list is proof that it can be done.

Funniest Short Job Descriptions Ever (Don't write in your CV)

                                        My Job Is To…      

                                                              

1. Read things that don’t matter, then write papers saying they do matter, for points that don’t matter, in order to get a job doing something totally unrelated: Student
2. Take numbers on pieces of paper, rearrange them and put them on different pieces of paper: Tax Accountant
3. Explain big words to sales people and then cower before customers while trying to convince them that the sales people really didn’t say what the customers understood: Customer Solutions Engineer
4. Learn laws created ages ago so that I can tell engineers why I’m smarter than they are while complaining how it’s a travesty that they get paid more: Physics major
5. Show you innovative ways to burn money in the spirit of patriotism: Fireworks Stand Manager
6. Help people lie consistently to their bosses: Business Intelligence Consultant
7. Teach your kids enough to complain but not enough to make a difference: College Teacher
8. Pass poisonous gas on command: Research Assistant in solid state ammonia storage
9. Make people who are already filthy rich somewhat richer by duping poor people into buying stuff they don’t need: Corporate Software Engineer
10. Find as many synonyms for “explosion” as possible: Novelist for Teenage Boys
11. Supervise the guys and gals who try to protect the good people from the bad, only to be hated by the good people AND the bad: Police Sergeant
12. Make corporate propaganda feel like folksy truthisms: TV Ad Director
13. Manage waste recycling, promotion & sales: Antiques Dealer
14. Arrive after the battle and bayonet all the wounded: Auditor
15. Sell gas: Energy and Telecom Business Analyst
16. Tell forty year-old men it’s okay to behave like fourteen year-old school girls: Printing Press Production Coordinator
17. Provide arcane information on a need-to-know basis: Chief Accountant
18. Shepherd clients through the process of setting their products on fire: Consumer Products Tester
19. Manage urban renewal and pest control: B-52 Bomber pilot
20. Persuade kids that it’s really fun being wet, cold and scared out of their minds: Sailing Instructor
21. Draw up plans for something that will not be built according to those plans: Civil Engineer, Transportation Design
22. Teach kids to be evil…or so they say: Video Game Creator
23. Ensure that stupid people stay in the gene pool: Lifeguard
24. Spend most of the day looking out the window: Pilot
25. Wear a tuxedo and smash metal plates into each other: Musician
26. Go to strange people’s houses and take their money: Pizza Delivery Boy
27. Sell gluttony: Cinema Concession Stand Attendant
28. Tell people that they can’t spend money they thought they had: Government Analyst
29. Take pictures of the unlucky and the stupid: X-ray Technician
30. Profit from the misfortunes of others: Cops and Courts Reporter
31. Take a simple two-way promise and turn it into several complicated one-way promises which neither side can understand or hope to fulfill: Lawyer
32. Bring a little rain into the lives of flood victims: Government Debt Collector
33. Have people spend far more than they estimated: Building Inspector
34. Make sure nothing ever happens: IT Security
35. Move things from one tube to another: Microbiologist
36. Try not to kill the baby: Housewife
37. Misinterpret the universe: Astronomer
38. Be a human napkin: Stay-at-home mom of three
39. Run away and call the police: Security Guard
40. Copy and paste the Internet: Student

                              The Top 10

1. Help people hate each other: Divorce Lawyer (Scott Adams’ favorite)
2. Stand on a field and get yelled at for hours: Baseball Umpire
3. Talk in other people’s sleep: College Professor
4. Call people who know what they’re doing and ask them what they’re doing: Incident Manager
5. Show people how beautiful the Earth would be without them: Mountain Landscape Photographer/Climber
6. Make people feel bad about their work: Quality Assurance Tester
7. Repeatedly fix what you repeatedly break: IT Director
8. Clean up an animal that makes more money then me in a year: Assistant Horse Trainer
9. Write words that no one wants to read: Technical Writer
10. Make food that is as healthy before it goes in your body as when it comes back out: Fast Food Employee