Time to innovate

To ban or not to ban?

- RISHI RAJ [e-mail]

THE PROMOTION AND Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, 2025, passed in Parliament, has generated a lot of sound and fury, something India's corporate and regulatory history is familiar with. Between 2002 and 2004, the then Reliance Infocomm began offering full mobility services using a technology licensed only for limited mobility. Telecom companies that had paid heavily for proper full mobility licences cried foul. They accused Reliance of gaming the system, exploiting regulatory haze, and undermining a level playing field. Reliance's defence was what one often hears in such situations. Millions were using its services, cancelling its licence would be a disservice to them. The argument was not about legality but scale, about the impossibility of rolling back something that had become too big to ignore. Finally, rather than punish Reliance or roll back its services, the issue was settled by legalising it via a new framework called the unified access service licence.

In 2008, then telecom minister A Raja distributed licences to a dozen new firms throwing processes and rules to the wind. When the Supreme Court cancelled the licences in 2012, a section of critics and the companies involved argued that investments worth billions of rupees and thousands of jobs were at stake. But the sector today is definitely healthier.

These episodes unfolded in a sector that was already regulated by a statutory body. Yet companies, ministers, and bureaucrats found ways to operate in grey zones. The moment tough regulatory or judicial action came, the industry's first reaction was to invoke fears of investment loss, job destruction, and the call for regulation rather than prohibition. But regulation often provided a shield behind practices of convenience. Rules were bent, licences gamed, and innovation was made to appear inseparable from exploitation.