A leading ecommerce player got a rude shock recently when a top executive was arrested over a service tax notice. He spent the weekend behind bars before getting bail. The website, an aggregator, was not paying service tax on the final product that the service provider was supposed to pay. The tax man slapped a notice given the fact that the sales invoice is in the aggregator’s name. The matter is in court and the tax incidence will eventually be sorted out. What is surprising though is that the usually vocal start-up lobby did not go to town with this “tax terrorism” that had shades of the arrest of Baazee’s Avnish Bajaj in 2004. When a bunch of CEOs bumped into Amitabh Kant, the make-in-India man pulled them up for not making enough noise on the arrest.
Net neutrality advocates insist the battle to ensure a level playing field on the internet is far from over. Concerns have been raised about the fact that intranets—by nature private networks—are exempt from the telecom regulator’s guidelines. Operators have also been seeking clarifications that if there is a content transgression on any of their network, the onus of pointing it out rests with content companies. This could take time and effort, as these content companies cannot approach TRAI on the issue—the regulator’s mandate is to only look at pricing access.
