The net neutrality wars got a little more serious on Monday. India's telecom regulator, which had provoked the neutrality campaign in the first place by putting out a consultation paper on the need for added regulation, put up the response of all those who had opinions on the question of net neutrality in India. In the process, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India also put out email addresses of more than a million citizens who had written in. And then the regulator's website promptly went down.

The site appeared to have been hit by a Denial-of-Service attack, which effectively means TRAI's website – including the responses of companies, industry bodies and citizens offering their opinion of net neutrality – was briefly not accessible to anyone. Credit for the attack was taken by a person with the twitter handle, @opindia_revenge. The account, called AnonOpsIndia, suggests a connection with the Anonymous movement and links to the Quora page of Ashok Kumar, who claims "anarchism/minarchism" is the solution to India's problems.

"TRAI down!" tweeted AnonOpsIndia, linking to the inaccessible site, and abusing them "for releasing email IDs publicly and helping spammers."  "You will be hacked soon!" it warned. More tweets followed, trolling TRAI.

The stated reason for the attack was TRAI's decision to put out the email addresses of all those who had responded to the regulator about its consultation paper, which covered net neutrality and the need for further regulation in India. The vast majority of those were people who had sent in their responses through SaveTheInternet.in, a pro-neutrality campaign that logged in more than a million emails. But the responses also came from telecom companies, industry bodies and others, including citizens opposed to neutrality.

The responses of many telecom companies as well as internet firms had been made public for the first time, prompting pro-neutrality activists to make a crowd-sourced document indexing these replies. The documents also produced interesting insights, such as all the telecom companies insisting that they want software companies like Skype and Viber, which offer voice services online, to be regulated by the government. MTNL, for example, said that they shouldn't be allowed to offer those services at all. Where the telecom companies differed was the question of net neutrality.

Now that the site is down though, citizens have no way of knowing what the responses were. Although there was outrage over the release of email addresses online, with many believing it will unleash plenty of spam for those who replied, others insisted that this was routine. TRAI tends to make public the email addresses of all those who write in to consultation papers, the only difference was that this time there were more than a million responses.

 

But just because it was routine doesn't make it okay. And as Medianama's Nikhil Pahwa pointed out, TRAI didn't put out everyone's email address.

Still, not everyone is happy with the DDoS attack on the TRAI website taking it down. Some posted on twitter that it seemed a petty move to grab attention rather than a principled response to TRAI revealing the email accounts.