One of the laws under which India regulates its telecommunications industry dates back to 1885 – when Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone was not even a decade old. If the colonial-era Indian Telegraph Act is hopelessly chronological, its proposed replacement could also be problematic: The Telecom Bill seeks to retain broad powers of state surveillance and apply them to encrypted Internet messages as well.
If the draft law is passed in its current form, citizens of the world’s largest democracy would lose another corner of an already rapidly shrinking space for privacy and free speech. Activists, dissidents and whistleblowers will find themselves particularly exposed; The pressure will come on services like Meta’s WhatsApp, which has sued the Indian government for asking it to break end-to-end encryption. Eventually, India will get a little closer to a Chinese-style, controlled internet.
The proposed telecommunications law is actually about the Internet. It wants to bend the industry to the will of the government by requiring licenses on everything from Gmail to FaceTime and Skype. Licensed Services must “clearly identify” their customers. Similarly, the sender of the message would have to be identifiable to the recipients. These provisions essentially take away the user’s right to remain anonymous, said the Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation, a think-tank. fails to prioritize.
Just last month, the government scrapped a personal data protection bill that had been in place for five years, and decided to replace it with “a broader legal framework.” For leaning towards European-style privacy safeguards. Both the public and private sectors are happy to see everything from banking services to state subsidies linked to the controversial national repository of biometric identification. Monitoring the daily lives of 1.4 billion Indians with the database—the power to reap or wield—is a leaf pulled straight from Beijing’s playbook.
Given the general lack of awareness of digital pitfalls, [the model may not be hard to fit], Recently, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi, 5 crore Indians geo-tagged their homes and uploaded their photos along with phone numbers to the website of the Ministry of Culture. [urged them to in celebration] On the completion of 75 years of India’s independence. Only security researchers found the idea outrageous.
On the other hand, when Bengaluru-based online payment gateway RazorPay was recently forced by the police to provide confidential user data that could be used by the authorities to harass the Alt News payers, it was opposed was. Website that increasingly finds itself at odds with the right-wing Modi government. As a regulated financial services provider, Razorpay had no choice. Now tech service firms can be brought at the same risk of being fined or losing their right to operate.
When it comes to controlling the world wide web, India is already a world leader: there have been more than 660 instances since 2012 when mobile or fixed-line internet was shut down in one part of the country. Software Freedom Law Center, an advocacy group. The draft Telecom Bill only seeks to formalize this arbitrary power, which is now used by various state governments – not only to prevent the spread of misinformation during riots but also to prevent students from cheating in exams. For also.
This could hardly be the right blueprint for an increasingly modern economy, where the private sector aspires to lead the world in digital businesses ranging from retail to finance and entertainment. But having seen and harnessed the power of social media to win elections, the Modi government is unlikely to go hand-in-hand – not when the model of heavy Chinese control already exists.
Business interests will support what works for them. Twitter, which is suing the Indian government for its “arbitrary” and “irregular” instructions to block the handle or remove content, would not want its fortunes in the country to hang from the license it granted at any time. may be lost.
But in industries such as social media, messaging and e-commerce, new domestic players may have rushed to support New Delhi. They may declare nationalist motivations though Chinese-style firewalls. [protectionism might serve business interests and ambitions so that they can aspire to] Be the Alibaba or Tencent of India.
In this confusing cross-connection of power and profit, the voices of the consumer and the citizen, whose interests are best served by a free and open Internet, must struggle to be heard.
Andy Mukherjee is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies and financial services in Asia.
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