Questionaire For Commerce: Fill & Download for Free

It would almost certainly not be ruled unconstitutional. The lower courts that have issues stays preventing the Commerce Department from adding the question have not done so on constitutional grounds. Court found the Department violated the Administrative Procedure Act (a statute) in the way it added the question.

It depends on what kinds of expertise you are crowdsourcing. Its about finding a knowledgeable crowd sometimes--particularly when you talk about specific data sets. How can I find my crowd seems to be the first question--and then available tools and technologies enter the picture. Leveraging already existing people networks, organizations, events, and gatherings (and commerce/marketplace) may be your best bet.Mobile apps is pretty much the best way in the developing world or the developed world to crowdsource. For instance you can learn more here: Page on Mobileactive (This is Mobile Active--you may want to check out the Directory, which is a catalog or apps). They are various uses of mobile, primarily in the developing world.The second part of that question could be what is the best way to distribute the data. I would suggest:Bulletin board/ChalkboardMobile deviceQuestionaire/Market Research/Voting/EthnographyYou can obviously use all 3 types of devices to collect or distribute. I remember examples of both bulletin boards and chalkboards being used in development projects. For instance, one guy in Africa translated Google info on a bulletin board for local villages. Also, bulletin boards are easy to use.Paul Polack (formerly of International Development Enterprises) used conversational questions to gain feedback data from local farmers on his inventions.IDEO also has experience in this area. Their human-centered design kit might be thought of as an assortment of methods:http://www.ideo.com/work/human-centered-design-toolkit/ (its free with sign-up here)The decision might be based on:Available resources (based on energy constrains, money, etc..)Specific and contextual needs (for instance, time/speed constrains or needs for data accuracy and actually improving )* I can't seem to access Mobile Active right now--if thats the case for you. You could access it on the Wayback Machine at Archieve.org

Imagine coming home one hot summer day, and as soon as you enter your home, you turn to switch on the air conditioner. And while you are just about to press the switch of the Air Con, you are reminded of the date, and that it being almost the end of the month. You also realise that you have already exhausted the entire budget you had set for using the air conditioner this month, and you settle for the fan instead, because using a fan for rest of the month will be cheaper than using the air conditioner and you still have some money left on the fan expense.In another example, maybe you switch on the conventional tube light instead of the LED bulb, because using the LED bulb will cost per unit more than using the tube light. You might want to argue how that is possible because, LED bulbs are supposed to be more energy efficient than the conventional tube light. This is because the Discom might have put a higher per unit charge on usage of LED bulb compared to conventional tube light.Today, however you do not have to worry about a variable per unit cost of electricity depending on which appliance you use, simply because electricity is a neutral entity. You pay for what you use, irrespective of how you use it. The only difference is in the slab rates, which becomes necessary so as to subsidise it for those who cannot afford this necessity.Now imagine this similar scenario with the internet, having to pay a different rate for accessing different websites or apps. Watching videos on youtube is cheaper than watching them on Vimeo. Shopping on Flipkart is free of data charges, but shopping on Jabong or Snapdeal will incur data charges.Just like your DTH, having to buy different packages for different types of apps and websites you wish to access. In fact, it could also lead to ascenario, where one particular site you wish to access has its speed throttled down by your ISP and the same is available at normal speed on another ISP.All of the above are worst case scenarios. But in a scenario of Airtel Zero, the following is what will occur. Assuming an e-commerce giant like Flipkart(Disclaimer: Flipkart has already withdrawn from Airtel Zero, just citing an example here had it happened) ties up with Airtel Zero and agrees to pay them Rs. 1000/- per GB of data for its clients accessing its website or app. The clients are so far happy that they are able to do their shopping online without incurring any data charge. All of them start running to Flipkart. Airtel is happy that its coffers are being filled with every click on flipkart’s website. And flipkart is happy that more and more users on the Airtels network will shop on flipkart because accesing their site and not that of other e-commerce players is free on the network. Sounds like a Win-win situation for all, but in the short term.The following long term consequence of such an arrangement is one possibility.Users of Airtel continue to access flipkart for free, and because other e-commerce sites come at a data usage cost, a lot of them stop accessing other e-commmerce sites. In the long run, this translates into other e-commerce sites losing out to business from Airtels huge Client base, and Flipkart having a sort of Monopolistic rule on Airtels Network. If the same arrangement is extended by the Cash Rich Flipkart on other ISPs, with a condition that they will not allow other similar businesses on their networks to allow free access to users (a possibility as there are no regulations to control this), one might end up killing all the other e-commerce sites in the long run with just Flipkart then monopolistically dictating the e-commerce market in India.For Flipkart, what guarantee does it have that all the data access done on its site and apps are by genuine clients and not dummies that Airtel might have setup to just increase bandwidth usage from Flipkarts servers, thus increasing Airtels billing.Also, let’s rewind a few years, when Flipkart was just a baby, and did not have much revenues to pay for the users accessing its website. In fact if there were a situation, where a behemoth like Reliance was in the e-commerce space and had tied up with Airtel by paying them huge data charges for clients accessing its site, just to create an entry barrier for other new e-commerce players, would it have been possible for Flipkart to grow to what they are now?Citing Wikipedia, ‘Net neutrality (also network neutrality, Internet neutrality, or net equality) is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or mode of communication. The term was coined by Columbia University media law professor Tim Wuin 2003, as an extension of the longstanding concept of a common carrier’.When ISPs or TSPs(hereinafter Carriers)start differential pricing for different data accessed on the Internet (giving away free access to certain sites and not others results in differential pricing), they are violating the principal of Net Neutrality.One needs to understand that both, the Internet, and the spectrum on which the voice and data packets are carried, belong to the people and not the Carriers(If the internet ever belonged to anyone, it was its inventor Tim Berners, who gave it to the people for free, wherein he could have minted millions by just tying up with some corporate). The Carriers merely act as enablers who provide the technological infrastructure to support the same. The Carriers pay a price to the Government under an auction to purchase spectrum. This translates into people receiving their share of money for a resource that belongs to them. In turn, the carriers build up the requisite infrastructure enabling the use of this air space to transmit voice and data and charge us a fee to recover their costs of infrastructure and running the show and make reasonable profits. Needless to say that the pricepaid at these auctions and the pricing done thereafter; accommodate current costs and decent profits, because if they didn’t, a lot of these Carriers would have shut shops.With the amazing growth that startups and innovative new (Internet based) businesses have seen in the recent years, the carriers seemingly want a share of that pie citing ownership of the network. They may own the infrastructure that enables that network, but the network itself belongs to the people, for its them who have created it. Every node on this network is a user like you or me. It’s us who create the data, either as SMEs, bloggers, Social Media Users, Youtube Uploaders, App developers or e-commerce giants like Flipkart. It’s our Ideas and Inventions, our inputs and our hard work that has made the Internet what it is today.When we allow Carriers differential pricing, we are giving them the key to decide what we can or cannot access on the Internet. What is the guarantee that cash rich companies would not increase subscription rates for zero rating of their services so much that small companies or startups cannot afford to pay those fees? If such a thing happens, no startup will ever be able to bring out their innovation to the world through a widely accessed and currently cheapest medium of communication. We will end up killing all innovation. In fact it becomes worse for us in India, because there is net neutrality practiced in a number of developed countries, our innovators and startups lose out to the competition there, as they have much easier access of clients to their products, services and innovations than we would have here. And as users of Internet Services, we will end up in the hands of monopolistic behemoths, who would ultimately recover these additional data costs from us through increased product and service prices. As they say, there are no free lunches. The free data rides on the backdoor recovery of the additional costs companies would pay to get exclusive access to the networks user base.The Carriers cite use of OTTs like Skype and Whatsapp eating away into their traditional revenue streams, a fleeting look at their press announcements would show a YoY growth in revenues and Net Profit ,a good percentage of it riding on data alone. The fact that there is increase in usage of data through use of such OTTs, adds to revenue from data for the carriers. Every bit of data transferred on the networks results into revenue for the carriers, including your bandwidth capped so called unlimited data plans.An excerpt from Airtel’s consolidated IFRS result for year ending March 2014Highlights for the fourth quarter ended March 31, 2014~ Overall Customer base stands at 295.9 million across 20 countries, up 9.1% Y-o-Y~ Consolidated total revenues at 22,219 crore, up by 13.5% Y-o-Y~ India up 11.6%; International up 17.2% (INR terms) Y-o-Y<p>~ Mobile Data revenue up by 93.4% Y-o-Y; growth across geographies</p>~ Consolidated EBITDA at 7,307 crore, up by 20.6% Y-o-Y, EBITDA margin up 1.9%~India EBITDA margin at 36.8%, up by 3.0%<p>~ Net Income at 962 crore, up by 89.1% Y-o-Y. ₹</p>Highlights for the year ended March 31, 2014<p>~ Consolidated total revenues at 85,746 Crore, up by 11.5% Y-o-Y</p>~ Consolidated EBITDA up by 19.4%, EBITDA margin up 2.2% Y-o-Y<p>~ Net Income at 2,773 crore, up by 21.8% Y-o-Y</p>~ Board proposes final dividend of ₹ 1.80per share (PY: ₹ 1.00 per share)The TRAI had released a highly technical Consultation Paper and a list of 20 highly technical questions asking your feedback on differential pricing. Needless to say, the wordings of these questions are biased against net neutrality.However,the whole thing was simplified by the guys at www.savetheinternet.in wherein you could access the questionaire with ready and editable answers and send an email to TRAI.TRAI has again asked for our comments on NET NEUTRALITY. Its the same way to respond to them as before. Do look at the answers as there are some very good methods in which internet can be made available to those who do not have access to them.Go to Save The Internet! and email TRAI to save our internetFor a funnier explanation of Net Neutrality check out the following videos by John Oliver and AIBhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfY1NKrzqi0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU