Flipkart pulls out of Airtel Zero due to social media backlash; says it strongly supports Net Neutrality

The battle fornet neutralitygot a boost on Tuesday with the e-commerce giant Flipkart pulling out of the Airtel Zero platform, with which it was in talks to partner with.

Airtel Zero will allow customers to access certain apps and websites without paying data charges as long as the makers of those apps and services pay certain revenue to Airtel for this free access.

Experts argue that this is going against the concept of net neutrality, which demands that all data on the internet is equal and should not be discriminated against.

Flipkart pulls out of Airtel Zero due to social media backlash, Flipkart strongly supports Net-Neutrality

Flipkart has announced its decision after awidespread backlashagainst the firm on social media and users voting down its app on the Android and Apple stores after its CEO, Sachin Bansal, tweeted in support of Airtel Zero.

Flipkart has issued the following statement:

We at Flipkart have always strongly believed in the concept of net neutrality, as we exist because of the Internet.

Over the past few days, there has been a great amount of debate, both internally and externally, on the topic of zero rating, and we have a deeper understanding of the implications.

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Based on this, we have decided on the following:

The anti net neutrality debate had gained huge momentum in India with the savetheinternet website getting more than 3 million signatures since the debate started.

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source: www.techworm.net