Airtel, one of the biggest Indian ISPs, is intercepting HTTP requests to display ads

ISPs in China have done this for years (3 years, as I can recall). Now, they found a more efficient way: intercepting http requests and injecting Google Adsense click in any web pages.

Sify has been doing something similar from years. There, for every GB or so of bandwidth one day of the package is reduced.

American ISPs have been doing this with failed DNS lookups for years.

In the US, some of the most egregious bandwidth users use the equivalent of $10K+/month in bandwidth.

This is not surprising. The concept of customer service in India is very different from what we accept as the norm in the States. Indian businesses have always treated consumers like crap. The socio-economic reasons for this are beyond the scope of this post, but I do want to point out some examples to illustrate the general attitude, and help align the frame of reference better.

My mother lives in New Delhi and often visits me in the States. She still can’t get over how easy it is to return stuff to stores here. In India, once you’ve purchased something, it’s yours for life. You can’t get a refund if you are not 'completely satisfied with your purchase’. Keep or trash; there is no ‘like’. This applies even if the product is defective. If you are lucky, or willing to yell at the store manager, you might get store credit.

You don’t like the movie selection on Delta? I once flew a ‘discount carrier’ from Bangalore to Delhi and had to stare at a 6" display ad for a refrigerator three hours straight, because it was pasted on the back of the headrest in front of me, and the seat next to me, and every other seat on the plane.

If your server in a San Francisco restaurant isn’t friendly, you give the restaurant two stars on Yelp. In India, if my server is friendly, I have reason to be suspicious. Surprisingly, I have seen this attitude towards customer service even in Indian stores and restaurants in the Bay Area. Note: if you’re white, your Indian server in an Indian restaurant is more likely to be friendly and hospitable. Not so much if you’re Indian, perhaps because they know you know, or perhaps because awe of the ‘white-skinned colonizing foreigner’ is still deeply entrenched in our culture.

Airtel, and pretty much all wireless carriers in India often send you ‘free’ text messages advertising their newest ring tones, pricing schemes and partner offers. "AT&T does that too!" you say, but not twenty-five times a day. I don’t know if people even understand the concept of opting out.

Let’s talk about less superficial issues - landlines stop working arbitrarily. There are times when I can’t reach my mother because her phone (and hence DSL) service has been knocked out by rain or wind or the latest ‘big dig’. Even when the phone lines work, DSL doesn’t work well and VoIP is spotty. Hour-long power outages are common. Four hour outages are even more common (and I'm talking big cities here). Running water around the clock? Only for the tiny new economic class that gets written about in the New York Times. I think it was the mid-nineties, when I heard about a week-long power outage in a Delhi neighborhood and the consequent lynching of local power grid officials by an irate mob.

Having grown up in the Indian middle-class, I am used to bad customer service, though I must admit the States is softening me. So when I see complaints about Airtel intercepting client HTTP requests, I can empathize, but it makes me wonder about much bigger customer service issues that never make it to the front page of HN.