For those of you that have been hearing the news about net neutrality and all that, well, our very own NCC is not on our side. For those who haven’t, lemme give a quick background history:
In simple terms, net neutrality is the right/privilege of an internet user to have complete privacy; i.e his dealings on the net should not be monitored by his ISP, the government or anyone else for that matter. There are pros and cons to this though.
If net neutrality is granted, terrorists and the likes would communicate freely without hinderance or screening. On the other hand, if we are willing to forgo this thingy called net neutrality and the government and ISPs could “spy on us”, who knows who could eavesdrop?
Anyways, all that is by the way since NCC is obviously not doing this for humanitarian reasons. They believe that these OTT players(strange term? I’ll get to that in a minute) providers are meant to pay a levy or better put “a token” for providing the internet data bundles their users utilize for these services/apps.
OTT(Over The Top) players are platforms that deliver digital media over the internet without the interference of a middle man(especially an ISP). Examples of these platforms are your chat platforms – WhatsApp, BBM, to name but a few. In other words, all the messages you send on WhatsApp, BBM, and the likes are more or less invisible to your ISP; and even if they could see it I’m pretty sure they have complex encryption algorithms for it(don’t worry, it’s just a fancy way of saying it’s coded).
I personally, don’t think these OTT guys ought to pay a dime to NCC, I mean we already pay for the data we use. This would just be a case of NetFlixing where you’d have to pay for your NetFlix subscription and still pay for data subscription; why I used this metaphor? I’m pretty sure if NCC finally gets them to pay royalties or whatever they want to call it, they’ll make us make up for that cost(pardon the gram.). Fingers crossed(again), let’s see what the future holds. God bless Nigeria!
Source: Nigerian Guardian
Image credit: http://ncc.gov.ng
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