Free riders vs piggy-riders: A tale of two cities caught in an OTT debate

The debate over whether over-the-top services should pay telcos user revenues bids fair to overlap with the issue of net neutrality

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In this chicken-and-egg tale on who should pay whom and who’s exploiting whom, the regulator and the government have been in wait-and-watch mode — for years

Nivedita Mookerji New Delhi

6 min read Last Updated : Dec 05 2022 | 10:54 PM IST

On the face of it, New Delhi and Riga, capital of Latvia, may have little in common. But recently, over-the-top or OTT has been a heavily debated point in the tech and media circles in both cities. The question being raised by the traditional telecom firms and related ecosystem is the unfairness of OTT firms having a “free ride” atop the infrastructure created and paid for by telcos. The other side’s argument is that telecom operators have been piggy-riding on OTT content to drive their own data usage. And that telcos are able to garner substantial ARPUs (average revenue per user per month) derived from the wide popularity of content and communication services offered by OTTs.

At the recent 5G