If the existing medium is the most expensive, content creators may be forced to look at other medium, including kiosks, memory sticks, pre-embedded handsets.

“If you think of the mobile network as a system of wireless toll roads, you should be paying at the toll booth, an amount proportionate to the size of your load,” Popli says. “The toll booth operator does not open your boot, examine its goods and demand a share.”

If the ISP did that on the internet, the immense wealth of content would not have been possible, he points out.

The current regime lacks transparency, according to him: there is no access to records, no published revenue-sharing regime and no price lists. The exception to the rule is BSNL.

The ideal alternative is for the operator is to publish one charge for 1 KB of content and another charge for billing services, regardless of the content.

Popli has been an advocate for creating diverse and quality content as a way of driving audiences to access entertainment over the mobile. He questions the skewed objectives of mobile operators in increasing their revenues.

“If you have a choice between growing caller ringback tones in your walled garden and encouraging subscribers to call more, it should be the latter,” he says. “Incentivizing 50 million subscribers to call one more minute a day can yield Rs. 50 million more per day.” At the mobile operators’, value-added services have become a revenue function, rather than a source of ideation. “VAS should be the domain for new and differentiated functions, not for holding on to technology,” is his view.