Pathways to Higher Education

Digital native: Not only words

nishant — 2017-08-07T15:33:20Z

The article was published in the Indian Express on July 16, 2017.

Emoticons, or if you prefer the original Japanese word emojis, are everywhere. We are used to emoticons in all shapes and sizes — from animated gifs jumping out at us on our social media feed to yellow-faced smileys that we use to add tone and feeling, nuance and layers to our text-heavy conversations in the digital world. For many of the current users of digital communication, emoticons are pre-defined pictures that they select from a menu that gives them access to add a wink, a nod, a smiling or sad face to their messages. However, there are power users who, I am sure, still remember the times when emoticons were things that you created.

Before the emergence of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) that turned the computer into a box of cuteness, turning all of us into eternal children playing with the friendly faces of the digital platforms, the digital world was flat and largely textual. Emoticons were first proposed in 1982 to take away the density and the unforgiving monotone of text-based conversations on digital platforms. From that first proposal of a : ) and : ( sign to indicate the mood of a text, emoticons have had a fascinating history of evolution. Following the proposal of the basic emoticons by Scott Fahlman, a variety of early adopters of the web came up with a wide range of options. The smiley became a grin with : D and the sad face was made to weep with : ‘ (. The face became mischievous and winked with a ;) and swooned in love with a <3. It became silly with its tongue poking out :p and sprouted devil horns to show its inherent wickedness with >:D.

Early users will remember how, from that first explosion, the emoticons grew into forming extremely intricate art forms. In the world of text-based virtual realities, the shrugging emoticon was my constant companion when giving up on futile internet arguments : ¯\_(?)_/¯ . From there, we were only one step away from complex ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) art forms that made punctuation and critical marks the new tools for emerging artists to play with. The ASCII characters were keyboard symbols, letters and numbers mixed together to produce images ranging from flowers and animals to the globe and human bodies. In fact, ASCII became such a huge rage that there were special forums where people submitted their ASCII art. Even though we have now achieved high visual fidelity with our powerful computing devices, the ASCII messages still continue on our WhatsApp groups and discussion forums. So that we still tell people we love them in ASCII

(¯`v´¯)
`·.¸.·´ I Love
¸.·´¸.·´¨) ¸.·*¨)
(¸.·´ (¸.·´ .·´ You… or pledge friendship in punctuation
(‘,’)/\(‘,’)
<) )—( (>
_\\__//_

One of the lesser known histories of emoticons and ASCII, however, has been forgotten in the gentrified, cute and commodified mass produced usage that we have put them to. In many cultures and spaces in those early days of the web, emoticons were also ways of resisting censorship and circumventing supervision. As the web became more open and more people started signing up for digital conversations, there was also an increase in the monitoring and surveillance of things online. In more conservative cultures, there were immediate bans on conversations that were considered pornographic or obscene. In stricter work places, the system administrators were trying to filter messages which might have certain words or images in their content. ASCII and emoticons came to the rescue, because, using these characters which the computer only read as punctuation marks without content, people were able to communicate sexual content without the fear of censorship.

In the late ’90s, there were graphic and explicit ASCII images that were circulated, so that the content filters would not detect them, and, using just the characters, the earliest internet porn, or Pr0n as it was tagged, came into being. The emoticon-filled messages were not just about nodding and winking at each other but also a way for people to question authority and to find new modes of expression. Since those days of subversion, emoticons have come a long way, becoming appropriated in our everyday practice — they have been tamed and made mainstream.

I am sure that the ubiquity of the emoticons produces a sense of irritation sometimes, and you want to send a slapping emoticon when you find a work email with a smiley face at the end. But before you announce the death of the emoticon, you might want to know that digital natives are experimenting with the radical power of these emoticons. They are developing an entirely new language filled with exploding bananas, pulsating aubergines, peeking monkeys, dancing unicorns, and victorious roosters to communicate in ways that are not accessible to the parents, teachers and authority figures around them. The repurposing of emoticons by young users to chat, express, flirt, tease and engage with each other in ways that defy all conventional sense. I find this fascinating because it gives me hope that the web is not going to just produce all users as cheap copies of each other.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-july-16-2017-digital-native-not-only-words

Digital native: Ever on the go

nishant — 2017-08-07T15:54:46Z

It is time to insist that the infrastructure of digital India is accompanied by the infrastructure of care for the digital Indian.When the telephone was first introduced as a mass communication tool, one of the biggest fears was that it would allow people to lie and cheat at will.

The article was published in the Indian Express on July 30, 2017.

The social fabric of existence till then, was built on the idea that communication happens between two people who are in close proximity of each other, and thus, are careful of what they say, because there can be immediate consequences to their words. Editorials were written and codes were established trying to figure out how we will deal with this increased distance. When mobile phones came into the market, these fears were intensified. Because, the telephone, at least, had the individual tied to a location and fixed in a particular context. Whereas the mobile phone meant that you could be anywhere and lie about it.

In her hilarious book on modern day etiquette, Talk to the Hand, Lynn Truss describes how she spent hours in public spaces eavesdropping on people, hoping to catch them in the middle of spectacular lying. She was disappointed when people on the train, when called by their partners and bosses, honestly confessed that they were, indeed, aboard a train. In the hours spent lurking in public spaces, never once did she uncover a juicy story of somebody sitting in a park and trying to convince somebody else that they were in the middle of work on a hectic day. Disappointed as she was by the lack of imagination shown by her fellow human beings, Truss does remind us that this new condition of being mobile because we have a mobile phone is one of the most liberating moments of digital telecommunications. And, largely, it is true — our everyday communication now no longer takes for granted that we could know where people are when we are talking to them. Ubiquitous mobile coverage and ever-ready connections mean that we could be interrupting people in their most intimate moments — of making love or doing the morning needful in the loo, or, we could be reaching out to them in moments of such extreme boredom, that they have started tweeting back at celebrities in the hope of making a human connection.

This mobility has been celebrated as a part of our digital make up. Especially with high speed mobile data and almost a seamless access to the web, we now seem to think of this distributed and fragmented nature of our being as the new real. Conversations on apps like WhatsApp continue across spaces and time zones almost seamlessly. Our physical and contextual locations change rapidly even in the course of just one Twitter war. With streaming services like Netflix offering multi-device access to our favourite shows, binge watching is not just limited to the favourite couch at home. A series that starts on the laptop at home, might continue on the phone as we walk down to the cab or train, and then shift to the tablet as we switch from device to device.

Mobility has become such a celebrated way of life that we now presume that, to be truly digital, we have to be truly mobile — the figure of the millennial digital native as the global citizen who navigates geographies, cultures, distances and time easily has emerged as the face of the digital. In our quest for mobile information, we have also created ourselves as mobile people. Mobility is now equated with flexibility and is an increasing skill that is required in new workforces. Mobility is rewarded and also incentivised by the labour markets that are supported by gig economies like Uber. The mobile body in its interaction with the mobile devices is the new normal.

And yet, it is good to remember that the mobility we see as natural and desirable is a condition of privilege. The mobile phone might have penetrated the last mile in developing countries but it does not guarantee meaningful access or inclusion of large parts of underprivileged communities in the mobility networks. Even as new digital competition lowers the threshold of access and affordability, it is good to remember that having a mobile and being mobile are not the same thing. We are slowly witnessing different kinds of users beginning to get onto mobile networks, but their connectivity is always going to be undermined — the mobility expected from the mobile bearing bodies can be afforded only by those who can calibrate lives without the established social safety nets of static living. A mobile life is a migrant life which has uprooted individuals from families, communities and contexts, which might have supported them in times of crises.

The mobile individual has to form new connections, forge new support systems, and learn to cope with the precariousness of mobility in a way that is unprecedented. Otherwise, the continued reports of depression, burn-out, breakdown and mental health issues that we find increasing in digital migrant populations, is only going to get dire. If we make mobility the precondition of being digital, it is time to insist that the infrastructure of digital India is accompanied by the infrastructure of care for the digital Indian.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-july-30-2017-digital-native-ever-on-the-go-digital-india-mobility

Where's My Data? Submission for Knight News Challenge 2015

sumandro — 2015-10-05T15:00:16Z

We are very excited to be contribute to a join submission with DataMeet and Oorvani for the Knight News Challenge 2015. We are proposing "an application for users to search for locally-relevant data, discuss missing data, demand data, explore and respond to data demands by others, and start data crowd-sourcing exercises." Please go to the submission page and support our project. The text of the proposal is available below. It was prepared by Nisha Thompson of DataMeet, Meera K of Oorvani, and I. The 'Where's My Data' banner is created by Nisha using icons from the Noun Project.

Please support our project by visiting and 'applauding' it on the Knight News Challenge website: https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/data/entries/where-s-my-data. You will have to log in to the website though, apologies for that.

Where's My Data? Search, Demand, and Collect Data

In one sentence, describe your idea as simply as possible.

An application for users to search for locally-relevant data, discuss missing data, demand data, explore and respond to data demands by others, and start data crowd-sourcing exercises.

Full Description

The proposed application aims to solve two key problems in accessing reliable data faced by citizens, journalists, and researchers. The first problem is knowing where a required data set can be found, and the second problem is collecting the required data set if it does not exist in the first place.

Many individual initiatives have been developed to collect specific data. For example, Powercuts (http://powercuts.in/) was a Ushahidi installation to crowd-source data using Twitter, Kiirti (http://www.kiirti.org/) was used to map complaints about auto drivers, IChangeMyCity (http://www.ichangemycity.com/) is a platform that collects general complaints from around Bangalore. However, these apps were either short lived because they could not sustain their one premise or they do not give insight into what people want to know and what data is important to them. Also, they often did not open up this data to be used by others, beyond visualisations offered on the sites.

Citizens have many questions regarding their urban surroundings - how much water is coming to the neighbourhood daily, where are the waste pick up trucks, what is the status of a road repairing process, etc, the answers require data that either is difficult to get or doesn't answer their query in the way they want. Journalists and researchers are also interested in collecting and analysing these same data sets. A one off platform for one issue won't properly represent the demand for information in modern day (data starved) India.

For example, a local residents’ group wanted to impress on their elected rep the seriousness of the incidence of a disease, as the local government was not taking concrete steps to manage the emerging epidemic. In the absence of official data on suspected cases of illness, this application could help them to reach out through e-mails and social media networks to do a quick survey on how many residents or their family members have got affected.

The application will not only make it easier to undertake such crowd-sourcing efforts, but also to share the data back and make it open for usage by others, including journalists and researchers.

We are already building an Urban Open Data Platform for Bengaluru, India. The application will allow searching this portal and any other such portal, especially if any is developed by the municipality. It will also pipe the crowd-sourced data to this Urban Open Data Platform.

This tool will reduce duplication of data gathering, gives data a longer shelf life and acts as a source of public data that feeds into a city-wide urban Open Data Portal under development by a consortium that we are part of.

How will the Application Work?

The application will allow the user to search for data across the data catalogues connected to the application.
If the data is not found, the user can post details about the required data, which other users in her/his networks can see and comment on. They can either point the person towards an existing data set, or support the need to collect the data being demanded.
When the user finds out that the data set s/he needs does not exist, the application will allow her/him to start a crowd-sourcing exercise, using various channels such as e-mails, social media posts, web-based questionnaires, etc.
For each of these channels, a separate plug-in will be developed so as to open up the software development process. For this project, we will focus on developing plug-ins for two channels: 1) questionnaires integrated with the Citizen Matters website, and 2) use tweets to collect replies using a unique hashtag.
User can share the crowd-sourcing request within her/his own social networks, or use one of the groups (say, the Citizen Matters group focusing on local journalism, or the DataMeet group focusing on open data enthusiasts in the city) to share their calls for data collection.

Briefly Describe the Need that You're Trying to Address

A common cry in Indian cities is the lack of datasets required to understand issues, either at local or at national scales. This tool will be the place to voice demands, ask others about potential sources, or an easy way to create data sourcing activities.This will enable journalists, advocacy organisations, and researchers to search for data and help others to find the data they are looking for. It also records demands for non-existing data and helps take initiatives to collect such data.

What Progress have You Made so Far?

The team is already working on an Urban Open Data Platform, that will host public data, and a data catalog. We have already executed a few crowd-sourcing projects, and helped develop tools for journalists and researchers interested in civic issues.A data source search tool has been in development in the form of Open Data JSON <https://github.com/datameet/opendata.json>. A Bangalore focused data catalog has been in use for awhile as well and provides a base of data to use for people’s search <http://openbangalore.org>.

What would be a Successful Outcome for Your Project?

Success for this project means having a better understanding of what information is needed most by people and what data is required. We will gain detailed evidence regarding what kind of data people want. This entails a collection of questions, who is asking and from where, and what data gaps exist. The number of crowdsourcing projects initiated shows the intensity of the need, and how comfortable citizens are asking for data and proactively starting a data collection project.

Please List your Team Members and their Relevant Experience/Skills

Meera K, Oorvani Foundation, a media group who will provide editorial support to curate data, dissemination of data or queries, and audience reach. Nisha Thompson and Thejesh GN, from DataMeet, open data community, who will provide the technology and community aspects of the tool. Sumandro Chattapadhyay of the Centre for Internet and Society, will help planning the project and linking the effort with other Indian and global initiatives in open data and development.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/wheres-my-data-submission-for-knight-news-challenge-2015

September 2015 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2015-11-25T01:55:25Z

We are happy to share with you the ninth issue of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) newsletter (September 2015). It has been a significant month for public debates on the digital future of governance, citizenship, and economy in India, led by conversations around the draft National Encryption Policy, the Aadhaar number as a basis for provision of welfare services, the investigation of Google for potential abuse of market dominance by the Competition Commission of India, and the Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions released by the Indian Patents Office. We were busy engaging with these issues, and more.

The past editions of the newsletter can be accessed at http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters.

Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director

Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India
With great excitement, we are announcing the beginning of an annual conference series titled Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), the first edition of which is to take place in Delhi during February 25-27, 2016 (yet to be confirmed). We invite you to propose sessions for the conference by Sunday, November 15, 2015.

Highlights

CIS sent an Open Letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his US visit, requesting him to urge USA to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty. During the month, NVDA team organized training programmes for the visually impaired at Kullu, Bangalore and Ranchi. Nehaa Chaudhari in a blog post laid out a series of research questions, potentially seeking to apply actor-network theory as a research methodology. Recently, the Indian Patents Office released the Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions (“2015 Guidelines/ Guidelines”) in an attempt to clarify examination of software related patents in India. Anubha Sinha analysed the 2015 Guidelines. Read on to understand how the new guidelines will potentially lead to an increase in software patenting activity by expanding the scope of patentable subject matter – in negation of the legislative intent of section 3(k) of the Indian Patents Act, 1970. As a part of its content donation initiative, CIS has brought Nadustunna Charithra magazine under CC BY SA licence. CIS-A2K has received 74 issues as of now from the Telugu Jaati foundation. Sunil Abraham’s article titled Hits and Misses with the Draft Encryption Policy was published in The Wire on September 26, 2015. Vidushi Marda in a blog post titled Data Flow in the Unique Identification Scheme of India analysed the data flow within the UID scheme and highlighted the vulnerabilities at each stage. Vanya Rakesh in a blog post titled Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012 v/s 2015 Bill has analysed the Human DNA Profiling Bill introduced in 2012 with the provisions of the 2015 Bill. CIS sought information from ICANN on their revenue streams by sending them a second request under their Documentary Information Disclosure Policy. This request and their response have been described in a blog post by Aditya Garg. CIS has submitted a joint proposal with DataMeet and Oorvani for the Knight News Challenge 2015. We are proposing the development of "an application for users to search for locally-relevant data, discuss missing data, demand data, explore and respond to data demands by others, and start data crowd-sourcing exercises." CIS made its submission on CCWG-Accountability 2nd Draft Proposal on Work Stream 1 Recommendations to ICANN's CCWG-Accountability. Pranesh Prakash, on behalf of CIS, submitted comments to the Department of Telecom Panel’s report on net neutrality via MyGov. Prakash states that the report displays a far better understanding of the underlying issues than the TRAI consultation paper did, and is overall a good effort at balancing the different sides. Shyam Ponappa’s monthly column titled More on Those Dropped Calls was published by Business Standard.

Accessibility and Inclusion

Under a grant from the Hans Foundation we are doing a project on developing text-to-speech software for 15 Indian languages. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

NVDA and eSpeak

Monthly Updates

September 2015 Report (Suman Dogra; September 30, 2015).

Event Reports

Training in the use of eSpeak Hindi with NVDA (Organized by CIS and Lakshay for the Differently Abled; September 29 – 30, 2015; Ranchi). The event was conducted online by Dr. Homiyar over skype, with local support from Mritunjay Kumar and Zainab.
5 day TOT for Training in Use of eSpeak Kannada with NVDA (Organized by CIS, Mithra Jyoti, Enable India and NFB, Bangalore; September 21 – 25, 2015; Bangalore).
eSpeak Training in Hindi Language (Organized by CIS and National Association for the Blind; Kullu; September 3 – 4, 2015).
Training in eSpeak Marathi (Organized by CIS; Atmadepam Society; August 22 – 23, 2015). The report was published in the month of September.

Access to Knowledge

As part of the Access to Knowledge programme we are doing two projects. The first one (Pervasive Technologies) under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is for research on the complex interplay between pervasive technologies and intellectual property to support intellectual property norms that encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The second one (Wikipedia) under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

Pervasive Technologies

Blog Entries

Pervasive Technologies: Working Document Series - Research Questions and a Literature Review on the Actor-Network Theory (Nehaa Chaudhari; September 5, 2015).
FAQ: CIS Proposal for Compulsory Licensing of Critical Mobile Technologies (Rohini Lakshané; September 25, 2015).

Other (Copyright and Patent)

Submission

Comments on the Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions (CRIs) (Anubha Sinha; September 21, 2015).

Blog Entries

Open Letter to PM Modi on Intellectual Property Rights issues on His Visit to the United States of America in September 2015 (Pranesh Prakash and Nehaa Chaudhari; September 23, 2015).

Participation in Events

National Conference: WTO, FTAs and Investment Treaties: Implications for development policy space (Organized by Focus on the Global South, Institute for Studies in Industrial Development (ISID), Madhyam, MSF Access Campaign, National Working Group on Patent Laws and WTO (NWGPL), Public Services International (PSI) – South Asia, South Solidarity Initiative – ActionAid, Third Word Network (TWN), and Forum against FTAs; September 22 – 23, 2015; Institute for Studies in Industrial Development, New Delhi). Nehaa Chaudhari made a presentation on Copyright: Access to Knowledge in Free Trade Agreements?
IPEX 2015 (Organized by Confederation of Indian Industry, APTDC and TDPC; September 25 - 26, 2015; Chennai). Rohini Lakshané attended the event.

Media Coverage

Open letter from CIS to PM Modi on Intellectual Property Rights issues on his Visit to US (Apoorva Mandhani; LiveLaw; September 23, 2015).

Wikipedia

As part of the project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).

Blog Entries

CIS brings Nadustunna Charithra magazine under CC BY SA licence (Tanveer Hasan; September 2, 2015).
OCR and OER – update (Subhashish Panigrahi; Open Education Working Group; September 25, 2015).
As Odia Wikipedia turns 13, what happens next? (Subhashish Panigrahi; September 26, 2015). This was originally published on the Wikimedia Blog on August 21. The post was shared on Wikipedia's official Facebook page, and on Twitter handles [1 and 2].
Google's Optical Character Recognition Software Now Works with All South Asian Languages (Subhashish Panigrahi; September 26, 2015).
Wikimedia contributor shares his Linux story (Subhashish Panigrahi; September 27, 2015). This article is part of a series called My Linux Story. To participate and share your Linux story, contact us at: open@opensource.com. Read the original published by Opensource.com on September 3, 2015.

Events Co-organized

Annamaya Library edit-a-thon (Organized by CIS-A2K and Telugu Wikipedia Community; August 6, 2015; Andhra Loyola College; Vijaywada).
International Workshop on Digitization and Archiving (Organized by CIS-A2K and Wikipedia Community; August 19 – 21, 2015). Rahmanuddin Shaik was one of the trainers.

Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following:

Unable to read Odia on your android device? Don’t fret! (Ruby Nanda; Odisha Sun Times; September 28, 2015).

Openness

The advent of the Internet has radically redefined what it means to be open and collaborative. The Internet itself is built upon open standards and free/libre/open source software. Our work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software. We approach openness as a cross-cutting principle for knowledge production and distribution, and not as a thing-in-itself.

Open Data

Submission

As one of the general stewards of the process, CIS was invited to take part in the final drafting meeting of the International Open Data Charter held before Con Datos 2015 in Santiago, Chile, but we could not take part in it. Apart from organising two public consultations on the draft Charter in Bengaluru and Delhi, we also submitted our detailed comments on the document. The final version of the Charter document has been launched at the United Nation General Assembly meeting, on September 27.

Free Software

Blog Entry

Software Freedom Pledge (Pranesh Prakash; September 25, 2015).

Internet Governance

As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on studying the restrictions placed on freedom of expression online by the Indian government.

Privacy

Article

Hits and Misses With the Draft Encryption Policy (Sunil Abraham; The Wire; September 26, 2015).

Blog Entries

Data Flow in the Unique Identification Scheme of India (Vidushi Marda; September 3, 2015).
Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012 v/s 2015 Bill (Vanya Rakesh; September 6, 2015).
Open Governance and Privacy in a Post-Snowden World: Webinar (Vanya Rakesh; September 26, 2015).

Participation in Event

The Changing Landscape of ICT Governance and Practice - Convergence and Big Data (Co-organized by Innovation Center for Big Data and Digital Convergence, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan; August 24 – 25, 2015). Sharat Chandra Ram was granted the Young Scholar Award 2015 to attend the Young Scholar Workshop followed by main CPRSouth2015 conference (Communication Policy Research South) conference.

Free Speech and Expression

Submission

CIS Submission on CCWG-Accountability 2nd Draft Proposal on Work Stream 1 Recommendations (Pranesh Prakash; September 13, 2015).

Blog Entries

DIDP Request #11: NETmundial Principles (Aditya Garg; September 14, 2015).
DIDP Request #12: Revenues (Aditya Garg; September 14, 2015).
Peering behind the veil of ICANN’s DIDP (Padmini Baruah; September 21, 2015).

Participation in Event

Asian Regional Consultation on the WSIS+10 Review (Organized by The Internet Democracy Project, Bytes for All, APNIC, the Association for Progressive Communications, ISOC, Global Partners Digital and ICT Watch; September 3 – 5, 2015). Jyoti Panday attended the event.

IGF

The tenth annual IGF meeting will be held in João Pessoa, Brazil, on November 10 - 13, 2015. IGF's MAG has decided to retain the title “Evolution of Internet Governance: Empowering Sustainable Development” as the overarching theme. Sunil Abraham will be a panelist for the following workshops:

Understanding and Mitigating Online Hate Speech and Youth Radicalisation (Organized by Council of Europe, Oxford University, OHCHR, Google and ISOC; November 2015).
Transnational Due Process: A Case Study in Multi-stakeholder Cooperation (Organized by the United Nations; November 2015).

Cyber Security

Event Organized

Bangalore Chapter Meet of DSCI (Co-organized by DSCI and CIS; September 26, 2015). Melissa Hathaway, Commissioner, Global Commission for Internet Governance and Sunil Abraham gave a talk at this event.

Miscellaneous

Sustainable Smart Cities India Conference 2015, Bangalore (Vanya Rakesh; September 21, 2015).

Telecom

CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Submission

Comments on the DoT Panel Report via MyGov (Pranesh Prakash; September 26, 2015).

Op-ed

More on those Dropped Calls (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; September 2, 2015 and Organizing India Blogspot; September 3, 2015).

Researchers at Work

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by contemporary concerns to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It is interested in producing local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Submission

Where's My Data? Submission for Knight News Challenge 2015 (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; September 30, 2015). The text of the proposal was prepared by Nisha Thompson of DataMeet, Meera K of Oorvani, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay.

Blog Entries

The Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination (Divij Joshi; September 9, 2015).
The Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar (Sailen Routray; September 21, 2015).

News & Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Does this click with you? (Parshathy J. Nath; The Hindu; September 1, 2015).
Government may tieup with global police, Interpol to fight child pornography (Surabhi Agarwal; September 3, 2015).
Hiding behind rules on naming sites it banned, govt reveals fears (Harjeet Inder Singh Sahi; September 3, 2015).
Outrage before sharing (Nikhil Verma; The Hindu; September 9, 2015).
Faking a stand (Shweta T. Nanda; The Week; September 20, 2015).
Some Key Words Are Missing (Arindam Mukherjee; Outlook; September 21, 2015).
Open sesame (The Hindu; September 22, 2015).
India encryption policy draft faces backlash (Moulishree Srivastava; September 22, 2015)
Online outcry forces government to withdraw draft encryption policy (Naina Khedekar; First Post; September 23, 2015).
Encryption policy would have affected emails, operating systems, WiFi (Amrita Madhukalya; DNA; September 23, 2015).
Govt presses 'undo' button on draft encryption policy (Business Standard; September 23; 2015).
Huge outcry forces India to backtrack on social media data proposal (Today; September 24, 2015).
Facebook’s Free Internet Access Program in Developing Countries Provokes Backlash (Newley Purnell and Resty Woro Uniar; The Wall Street Journal; September 24, 2015).
Ahead of hosting Modi, Facebook rebrands internet.org as Free Basics (Business Standard; September 26, 2015).
‘By weakening our security, govt is putting us at risk of espionage’ (S. Raghotham and Mayukh Mukherjee; Asian Age; September 27, 2015).
ভারতে পাঁচশোরও বেশি স্টেশনে ফ্রি ওয়াই-ফাই চালু হবে (BBC; September 28, 2015).
Do you agree with our fee hike? Press 1 to answer Yes; or 2 for Yes (Kieren McCarthy; The Register; September 29, 2015).
Indian PM Narendra Modi’s digital dream gets bad reception (Amanda Hodge; September 29, 2015).
What Bengaluru Thinks of the Big Tech Announcements in Silicon Valley (Maya Sharma; NDTV; September 29, 2015).

About CIS

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with diverse abilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the mediation and reconfiguration of social and cultural processes and structures by the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

CIS - Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Access to Knowledge - Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Access to Knowledge - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
Access to Knowledge - E-Mail: a2k@cis-india.org
Researchers at Work - E-Mail: raw@cis-india.org
Researchers at Work - Mailing List: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of ‘The Centre for Internet and Society’ and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru – 5600 71.

► Request for Collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge, at tanveer@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/september-2015-bulletin

Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India: Call for Sessions (Extended to Nov 22)

sumandro — 2015-11-15T07:48:17Z

With great excitement, we are announcing the beginning of an annual conference series titled Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), the first edition of which is to take place in Delhi during February 25-27, 2016 (yet to be confirmed). This first conference will focus on the theme of 'Studying Internet in India.' The word 'study' here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation. We invite you to propose sessions for the conference by Sunday, November 22, 2015. Final sessions will be selected during December and announced by December 31, 2015. Below are the details about the conference series, as well instructions for proposing a session for the conference.

Call for Sessions document: Download (PDF)

Call for Sessions poster: Download (PNG)

Internet Researchers’ Conference

The last decades have seen a growing entanglement of our daily lives with the internet, not only as modes of communication but also as shared socio-politico-cultural spaces, and as objects of study. The emergence of new artifacts, conditions, and sites of power/knowledge with the prevalence of digital modes of communication, consumptions, production, distribution, and appropriation have expectedly attracted academic and non-academic explorers across disciplines, professions, and interests. Researchers across the domains of arts, humanities, and social sciences have attempted to understand life on the internet, or life after the internet, and the way digital technologies mediate various aspects of our being today. These attempts have in turn raised new questions around understanding of digital objects, online lives, and virtual networks, and have contributed to complicating disciplinary assumptions, methods, and boundaries.

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is very excited to invite you to take part in the first of a series of annual conferences for researchers (academic or otherwise) studying internet in India. These conferences will be called the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), with the abbreviation reminding us of an early protocol for text-based communication over internet. The first edition will be organised around the theme of ‘studying internet in India.’ The word study here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation.

This conference series is founded on the following interests:

Creating discussion spaces for researchers studying internet in India and in other comparable regions.
Foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India.
Accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India.
Exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) forms of objects of power/knowledge.

Studying Internet in India

The inaugural conference will be held in Delhi (to be confirmed) on February 25-27, 2015. It will comprise of discussion and workshop sessions taking place during the first two days, and a writing sprint and a final round table taking place during the third day.

The conference will specifically focus on the following questions:

How do we conceptualise, as an intellectual and political task, the mediation and transformation of social, cultural, political, and economic processes, forces, and sites through internet and digital media technologies in contemporary India?
How do we frame and explore the experiences and usages of internet and digital media technologies in India within its specific historical-material contexts shaped by traditional hierarchies of knowledge, colonial systems of communication, post-independence initiatives in nation-wide technologies of governance, a rapidly growing telecommunication market, and informal circuits of media production and consumption, among others?
What tools and methods are made available by arts, humanities, social science, and technical disciplines to study internet in India; how and where do they fail to meet the purpose; what revisions and fresh tool building are becoming necessary; and how should the usage of such tools and methods be taught?
Given the global techno-economic contours of the internet, and the starkly hierarchical and segmented experiences and usages of the same in India, how do we begin to use the internet as a space for academic and creative practice and intervention?

Sessions

The conference will not be organised around papers but sessions. Each session will be one and half hour long. Potential participants may propose sessions that largely engage with one of the questions listed above.

Each proposed session must have at least two, and preferably three, co-leaders, who will drive the session, and prepare a session document after the conference. The proposed session can either involve a discussion, or a workshop.

In a discussion session, the co-leaders may present their works (not necessarily of the academic kind), or invite others to present their works, on a specific theme, which will be followed by a discussion, as structured by the co-leaders.

In a workshop session, the co-leaders will engage the participants to undertake individual or collaborative work in response to a series of questions, challenges, or provocations offered by the co-leaders at the beginning of the session. The proposed work may involve writing, searching, copying, building, etc., but not speaking.

Both the kinds of sessions are open to presentations and collaborations in the textual format or in other formats, including but not limited to code-based works and multimedia installations.

Writing Sprint

At the writing sprint, on the third day morning, all the participants will collaboratively put together the first draft of a handbook on tools and methods of studying Internet in India. It will be created as an online, open access, multilingual, and editable (wiki-like) book, and will be meant for extensive usage and augmentation by students, researchers, and others.

Final Round Table

This will take place after the lunch on the third day to wrap-up the conversations (and propose new initiatives, hopefully) emerging during the previous days of the conference, to make plans for follow-up works (including the first IRC Reader), and to speculate about the shape of the next year’s conference.

IRC Reader

The IRC Reader will be produced as documentation of the conversations and activities at the conference. The Reader, obviously, will have the same theme as the conference, and will largely comprise of the session documentation (not necessarily textual) prepared by the co-leaders of the session concerned. Once all the session documentation is shared by the co-leaders and is temporarily published online, all the participants will be invited to share their comments, which will all be part of the final Reader of the conference.

Proposing a Session

To propose a session, each team of two/three co-leaders will have to submit the following documents:

The name of the session: It should be created as a hashtag, as in #BlackLivesMatter, or #RefugeesWelcome.
A plan of the proposed session that should clarify its context, the key questions/challenges/provocations for the session, and how they connect to any one of the four questions listed above. Write no more than one page.
If it is a discussion session: Mention what will be presented at the session, and who will present it. Share the abstracts of the papers to be presented (if any). Each abstract should not be longer than 300 words.
If it is a workshop session: Mention what you expect the participants to do during the session, and how the co-leaders will support them through the work. Write no more than one page.
Three readings, or objects, or software that you expect the participants to know about before taking part in the session.
CVs of all the co-leaders of the session.

We understand that finding co-leaders for a session you have in mind might be difficult in certain cases. One possible way for you to find co-leaders is by sharing your session idea on the researchers@cis-india.org mailing list. Alternatively, you may keep an eye on the list to see what potential topics are being discussed. If you are facing any difficulty subscribing to the mailing list, please write to raw@cis-india.org.

All session proposals must be submitted by Sunday, November 22 (extended), 2015, via email sent to raw@cis-india.org.

Selection of Sessions

All proposed sessions, along with related documents, will be published online by November 30. All co-leaders of proposed sessions will be invited to vote for 8 sessions before December 15. The sessions with maximum votes will be selected for the conference, and the list of such sessions will be published on December 31, 2015.

Venue, Accommodation, and Travel

The conference is most likely to take place in Delhi on February 25-27, 2016. The place, dates, and venue will be confirmed by December 31, 2015.

The conference organiser(s) will cover all costs related to accommodation and hospitality during the conference.

Unfortunately, we are not sure if we will be able to pay for travel expenses of the participants. We will confirm this by December 31, 2015.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-call

Pinning the Badge

nishant — 2015-05-08T12:34:23Z

In a world of competition, badging provides a holistic way of grading and learning, where individual talents are realised and the knowledge of the group is used.

The article by Nishant Shah was published in the Indian Express on March 18, 2012.

I write this column fresh out of being a judge at the Digital Media and Learning contest on “Badging for Life-long Learning” in San Francisco. While the contest focused largely on the American education system and its future, the idea of badging that each person brings a set of skills to a study or workplace is useful to think about, in connection with India. We have now spent some time, in India, hearing about how education in the country has been ruined. There is a constant narrative of the university in shambles, where we seem to lack competent teachers, engaged students, and the resources to build efficient infrastructure for learning. This argument also positions employment as the only aim of education, reducing our humanist and social sciences legacies to skill-based information transmission.

Digital technologies emerge as a cure for the problems that contemporary education seems to be facing. The availability of resources at affordable costs for anybody online, has been one of the biggest promises of the internet, and it hopes to build a better learning environment and better learners. The condition of being connected to a much larger network of educators and learners, also offers us the possibilities of producing better and innovative knowledge structures. There is also an inherent ambition that the introduction of new digital competencies and skills will encourage both students and teachers to integrate their learning and pedagogy with their lived reality, producing responsible people and citizens. However, in all these expectations around the role of the digital technology in transforming learning, the idea of grading and evaluation remains unquestioned.

Even in the most radical restructuring of education systems, grades remain an absolute form of quantifying and measuring skills that the student is supposed to demonstrate. Grading might take up different forms — numbers, letters, percentile, etc — or it might take up different methods — continuous grading, take-home exams — but it eventually becomes the only badge that the student takes into the “real world”.

The idea of a badge as an alternative to this particular kind of quantification oriented learning that sees the grade as a final evaluation and in some ways, a termination of the learning process, opens up huge possibilities for how we understand learning. The badge is not imagined as yet another kind of grading, but instead it is recognition of certain skills and competences that we bring to and build in classrooms with our peers. A badge allows the students to recognise their own investment in the learning process, enabling them to realise their particular skills on the way to learning. In any learning environment, students play many roles. Some are good as connectors, some serve as conduits of information, some are good in specific areas and need help with others, some are mentors, some are translators of knowledge, some help in creating new forms of knowledge. Unfortunately, most of our grading patterns refuse to acknowledge and credit these skills which are crucial for surviving the academic world. The ability of the students to badge themselves, and others in their peer groups, acknowledging their contributions to their collective learning, might be the motivation and encouragement that we are looking for.

A peer-2-peer system of badging, which enables learners to be critically aware not only of their own interaction with knowledge, but also recognises the ways in which larger communities of knowledge — including the peers and teachers — opens up an extraordinary way of thinking about education. It disrupts the competitive modes of cut-throat modes of education systems we are building and allows us to re-think the function of education and the role of learners in educational environments. The digital systems of social networking and reputation management, already perform some of these tasks, which is why, a student who might not do well in class might be a YouTube sensation, finding thousands of followers worldwide. Or a student who might not show research aptitude in class might be editing complex Wikipedia entries on subjects that high-level researchers are engaging with. All these digital systems acknowledge the roles that people play in learning and knowledge production, and in that reward of recognition, provide incentives for learners to re-examine their role within knowledge systems.

Such a system of badging, that exceeds the static classroom, allows for students to become stakeholders in their own education, building connected communities of learning. It hints at what the future of education is going to look like. More importantly, it offers a new way of thinking about technology and its role in redesigning education, which is not merely about introducing technologies into classrooms and continuing with the traditional modes of learning through new technology skills. Instead, we have a model for what learning means, how we interact with conditions of knowledge consumption and production, and how, we can form global communities of learning which might find an anchor in the classrooms but also transcend the brick-and-mortar institutions of learning as we understand them.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/pinning-the-badge

Understanding Feminist Infrastructures: An Exploratory Study of Online Feminist Content Creation Spaces in India

Puthiya Purayil Sneha and Saumyaa Naidu — 2024-03-25T13:02:28Z

This report explores the growth of feminist infrastructures (including the various interpretations of the term), through research on feminist publishing, content creation and curation spaces and how they have informed the contemporary discourse on feminism, gender, and sexuality in India. The rise of online feminist publications, and related digital media content creation and curation spaces, has engendered new forums for debate, networking, and community-building. This report looks at some of the challenges of developing such publications and platforms, and the role of digital infrastructures in mediating contemporary feminist work and politics.

Click here to download the full report.

The internet and digital media technologies have played an important role in contemporary feminist practice – in addition to social media activism, their growing prevalence in academia, advocacy, and creative expression illustrate how digital media contributes to efforts to question asymmetries of power and knowledge. In the last few years, the concept of a feminist internet and forms of feminist infrastructures have emerged as crucial entry points to understand the affordances of the digital and its many challenges, especially for women and other structurally disadvantaged communities.Feminist content creation has been integral to contemporary feminist work in India, and is an entry-point into discussions on what could be a feminist internet. The growth of online feminist publications, and related digital media content creation and curation spaces, has engendered new forums for debate, networking, and community-building. This study looks at the development of feminist infrastructures (including various interpretations of the term) through an exploration of online feminist publishing, content creation and curation spaces, and their impact on the contemporary discourse on feminism, gender, and sexuality in India.

Through conversations with select online feminist publishing, content creation, and curation spaces, this study outlines motivations for choosing certain media, nature of content, languages and design, and how such choices inform practice and politics. In addition to the above, we also conducted two workshops on feminist infrastructure wishlists, and feminist principles of design and infrastructure. These conversations have offered several insights on the landscape of feminist content creation in India, and the affordances and challenges of digital technologies in facilitating contemporary feminist work. An overarching aim of the project is to unpack the term ‘feminist infrastructure’ and its interpretations in the context of the transition to digital content creation and publication. We aim to continue these conversations with a focus on the larger, often invisible role of digital infrastructures in the development of discourse on human rights, free speech and safety, to understand what are challenges to, and efforts being undertaken to create an inclusive, accessible and feminist internet.

Contributors

Research and Writing Puthiya Purayil Sneha and Saumyaa Naidu

Review Dr. Padmini Ray Murray, Design Beku

Design Saumyaa Naidu and Yatharth

Copy Editing The Clean Copy

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/understanding-feminist-structures

Digital Markets and India: Demystifying the Draft DCB

Abhineet Nayyar and Isha Suri (in alphabetical order) — 2024-04-15T06:15:21Z

This document summarises the proceedings of the Roundtable on the draft Digital Competition Bill (DCB) [hereinafter referred to as ‘the Roundtable’]. The Roundtable was conducted online on April 1, 2024, and included representation from academia, law, civil society, and policy organisations. The primary objective of the Roundtable was to discuss the recent report published by the Committee on Digital Competition Law (CDCL) in March 2024 along with the draft of the DCB.

The event was organized by Abhineet Nayyar and Isha Suri.

The Roundtable began with a brief presentation by Abhineet Nayyar (Centre for Internet and Society - CIS) providing an overview of the various important themes identified by CIS during the course of their research. This introduction was followed by Roundtable discussions moderated by Isha Suri (CIS), focusing on important areas identified by CIS for the course of this discussion.

This summary seeks to crystallise the learnings that emanated from this Roundtable to inform the discourse and contribute to the ongoing public consultation for the draft DCB, due by April 15, 2024.

I. Ex-ante or ex-post

The initial parts of the discussion focused on the shift from a largely ex-post model to an ex-ante model to competition regulation in India. It was briefly summarised during the discussion that while the extant Competition Act of 2002 relied on ex-post methods to recognise anti-competitive practices, the proposed DCB adopts an ex-ante approach similar to what has been adopted or is being deliberated in other jurisdictions. Few participants highlighted the benefits and costs of switching from the former to the latter and highlighted specific learnings for digital markets in India, while some were sceptical of this shift towards an ex-ante model, given its potentially detrimental impact on MSMEs and lack of enforcement capacity in India.

The discussion began with the participants highlighting the gaps in the extant ex-post regulatory framework, including delayed enforcement and disposal of appeals, and its under-reliance on private enforcement techniques that increase the ecosystem’s dependence on CCI as a central node. Simultaneously, however, several participants also warned against potential issues in the ex-ante approach proposed under the draft DCB. While some of these concerns related to the general ineffectiveness of ex-ante regulations – as highlighted, for example, in data protection and broadcasting – many participants deliberated on specific sections of the draft DCB. It was also pointed out that telecom regulation does have ex-ante provisions to address competition concerns within the sector. One participant, for instance, highlighted the proposed bill’s wide scope and the risk it poses for an under-resourced regulatory regime.

Overall, the group emphasised the need to carefully consider the particulars of the ex-ante approach proposed under the draft DCB. While there was a broader consensus that this approach may address some issues with digital markets particularly, the discussion brought to the fore many concerns with how this approach is currently being articulated. In addition to the bill’s wide scope, the Roundtable also discussed the necessity for an impact assessment study to understand its effects better. Other concerns regarding the proposed threshold values and the draft DCB’s focus on ‘contestable’ markets were also tabled during the discussion.

II. Building Regulatory Capacity

The participants discussed existing regulatory capacity in light of the proposed ex-ante approach under the draft DCB. Several participants highlighted factors that currently inhibit CCI’s capacity, the foremost of them being the Commission’s reliance on enforcement by bureaucrats with time-bound deputations affecting continuity and sustained capacity. In the absence of professional capacity, particularly in digital markets, the wide scope proposed by the draft DCB is only likely to further test CCI’s ability to deliver on its mandate. Moreover, in discussing how to build CCI’s professional capacity, a participant also highlighted the risk of regulatory capture by the private sector if one were to follow a ‘revolving door’ approach.

Participants then delved into potential solutions for CCI’s constrained capacity. In addition to staffing the Commission with subject matter experts, a participant also stated that given the political economy, it may be prudent to design the regulatory ecosystem to work around the problem of legacy issues of lack of professional capacity and independence. The participants also briefly discussed the role of impact assessment in resolving this problem, specifically by including the effect of the draft DCB on CCI’s already strained capacity.

III. Proposed Threshold Values

Deliberations began with the rationale for the Threshold Values (TVs) proposed by the draft DCB. Several participants shared their reservations about the bill’s reliance on international standards, especially for metrics such as market capitalisation and global turnover. Some also identified certain areas where the proposed bill seeks to identify TVs that are more relevant to the Indian market. For example, a participant highlighted that the draft DCB, in Section 3(4) chooses to identify and calculate business users and end users for each of the core digital services separately.

In addition to discussing the rationale behind TVs, many participants also suggested avenues for potential improvement. For instance, one of the participants recommended the identification of threshold values for each of the core digital services, as opposed to the current service-agnostic thresholds. It was posited that the expedited timeline of three months may have constrained the committee from recommending nuanced thresholds suited for Indian contexts since that would require market studies or commissioned (independent) research for evidence gathering and analysis.

Some participants were optimistic that the currently open consultation process may leave room for further negotiation on the prescribed TVs. This includes, among other things, identifying more representative calculation methods for arriving at appropriate values and incorporating global best practices.

IV. Remedies and Penalties

The participants sought to ascertain the effectiveness of penalties in the form of fines as a tool for deterring abusive conduct by dominant entities in general, and digital behemoths, more specifically. On one hand, some participants highlighted the lack of evidence to support the assumption that currently imposed fines deter such abuse in the market. For instance, one of the participants referred to a recent incident where the Dutch competition regulator imposed a €5 million fine for every week Apple failed to comply with an antitrust decision by the regulator. In the end, Apple had accumulated fines worth €50 million, instead of allowing dating app providers to use alternative modes of payment, ostensibly indicating how companies perceive penalties as yet another operating cost.^{^[1]}

On the other hand, a few participants also underlined the need to look at ‘penalties’ as a part of a larger toolkit and not as a standalone deterrent. In this context, the draft DCB’s focus on settlements and commitments, and criminal penalisation were also highlighted by some attendees; while others pointed out the need for an institutional redesign – for example, by reviewing the current appellate process, or by potentially reintroducing the Competition Appellate Tribunal (COMPAT).

Additionally, the question of penalties led to a discussion on the calculation of the quantum of fines and the process followed therein. Stressing the need for more elaborate penalisation guidelines, one participant questioned CDCL’s choice of capping penalties at 10% of the enterprise’s global turnover, especially for industries that have comparatively higher profit margins. It was also pointed out that there is no empirical evidence suggesting the efficacy of the 10% cap, as a sufficient amount.

The discussion also briefly delved into the issue of structural remedies as a tool for correcting harms in digital markets, given the presence of strong network effects and winner-take-all outcomes. Even though there was not a deep dive into the issue of structural remedies, per se, a participant indicated that certain obligations under the DCB, such as the one on tying and bundling comprise a form of structural reform.

V. Digital Mergers and Acquisitions

Unlike the Competition Act 2002, the draft DCB explicitly excludes combination review from its scope, instead relying on the 2023 amendment to the Act. It was pointed out during the discussion that recent amendments in the merger review process such as the inclusion of deal value thresholds should check anticompetitive mergers. However, as highlighted by a few participants during the Roundtable – even though the amendment would potentially enable CCI to investigate digital M&As, the Commission would still have to rely on theories of harm established under the extant Act, which largely examines price-based effects of mergers. For instance, one participant highlighted the role of price-based assessments informing CCI’s working in many merger review cases and pointed out the limitations of these assessments in examining combinations in the digital market.

On the other hand, many obligations identified and elaborated under the proposed DCB are, in fact, better suited to support CCI’s regulation of such digital M&As. Another participant pointed out that while sections 3 and 4 of the extant Act can still, theoretically, allow CCI to borrow from the draft bill, the proposed regulatory landscape does not ensure this synergy between the two pieces of legislation.

VI. Gaps in the Consultation Process

Finally, the discussion highlighted the consultation process adopted by the CDCL during the drafting of this bill. While there was a general agreement that the process was not very representative, different participants brought up diverse perspectives. One participant, for instance, underlined the importance of including MSMEs in the drafting process, given their deep reliance on digital tools and technologies. Other attendees also echoed this viewpoint, highlighting that although the CDCL incorporated inputs from BigTech companies and industry associations, the perspectives of consumers, technology experts, and platform workers were missing from the list of stakeholders consulted during the process.

There was cautious optimism in the room that subsequent drafts of the Bill might address some of these concerns by including a diverse set of stakeholders and incorporating a bottom-up consultative process.

^{^[1]} https://www.reuters.com/technology/dutch-regulator-rejects-apples-objections-against-fines-2023-10-02/

To download the PDF, click here and the Presentation here

This report has been authored by (Abhineet Nayyar and Isha Suri)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-markets-and-india-demystifying-the-draft-dcb

Online Gender Based Violence on Short Form Video Platforms

Divyansha Sehgal and Lakshmi T. Nambiar — 2024-04-11T03:24:55Z

An inquiry into platform policies and safeguards. This report explores how short-form video platforms in India address online gender based violence (oGBV) by analysing their terms of service, community guidelines (CG), and reporting workflows.

Executive Summary

Being a woman or from a gender minority online is a harrowing experience. From early instances of sexual harassment in text-based internet communities in the 1990s, to apps such as Bulli Bai, and harassment in the Metaverse more recently, online gender-based violence (oGBV) is a pervasive problem, affecting 23 per cent of women globally. In India, nearly half of the women surveyed reported facing online harassment, leading to reduced online participation. Other consequences of oGBV include mental health issues, withdrawal from online spaces, and, offline violence.

In 2018, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women & girls, and its causes and consequences recognised online violence against women and the need to counter it, defining it as "any act of gender-based violence against women that is committed, assisted or aggravated in part or fully by the use of ICT, such as mobile phones and smartphones, the Internet, social media platforms or email, against a woman because she is a woman, or affects women disproportionately."

This report explores how short-form video platforms in India address oGBV by analysing their terms of service, community guidelines (CG), and reporting workflows. Recognising the role of intermediaries is crucial in understanding challenges and developing effective strategies to combat oGBV. We selected three Indian video-sharing platforms based on their download numbers, as well as Instagram reels (given their popularity in India).

The CG and terms of use of these platforms were measures against a typology of oGBV we put together based on a literature review.

The guidelines of the platforms included in the study demonstrated minimal recognition of the gendered effects of potential behaviours related to oGBV. None of the platforms had a separate policy or section dedicated to oGBV, and the policies were found to be ambiguous at several points, leaving them open to interpretation by moderators. Josh was particularly noted to have extremely poor coverage overall. Certain forms of oGBV, such as harassment, non-consensual information sharing, and extortion, were addressed to a slightly higher degree in the guidelines of Instagram, Moj, and Roposo. Some exemplary aspects are highlighted in our findings section. However, other forms, such as attacks on communication channels, omissions by regulatory actors, surveillance and stalking, and online domestic violence found little to no mention across policies, despite the likelihood of these issues manifesting offline as well. Further, policy provisions failed to address the needs of gender minorities. Reporting mechanisms were found to be lacking or inconsistent, and failed to consider the networked nature of harassment.

The harms of gendered violence are well-known and documented. The lack of clarity on implementation and policy is no longer an oversight but an active choice to disregard users.

Attributions

Co-authors: Divyansha Sehgal and Lakshmi T. Nambiar
Conceptualisation: Ambika Tandon, Torsha Sarkar
Review: Amrita Sengupta and Divyank Katira
Research Assistance: Cheshta Arora
Design: Anagha Musalgaonkar

The report can be downloaded here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/online-gender-based-violence-on-short-form-video-platforms

The Platform Economy’s Gatekeeping of Class and Caste Dominance in Urban India

Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi — 2024-04-19T03:11:44Z

Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi contributed an essay on how gated society management apps like MyGate and NoBrokerHood feed on caste and income inequalities in new datafied forms. The essay features in The Formalization of Social Precarities, an anthology edited by Murali Shanmugavelan and Aiha Nguyen and published with Data & Society.

Ashrit is an experienced platform worker. He has been a delivery worker for three years, job-hopping frequently. Ashrit has worked as a package delivery worker for three platforms: two courier services and a hyperlocal grocery delivery company, which promises compressed ten-minute deliveries over short distances. While navigating the city, he often deals with omnipresent surveillance tools deployed in apartment complexes owned by upper-class and dominant-caste homeowners. Ashrit is used to being screened at every apartment complex he enters, including having his picture taken and verifying details such as his name, mobile number, and the platform he is delivering for. The everydayness of constant identity verification means that Ashrit is not bothered much by it — he said he doesn’t mind the process so much as the delay it causes when customers forget to approve his entry.

MyGate is one such company offering “gated community management,” claiming to service over 25,000 gated societies in India. A competing application, NoBrokerHood, services over 18,000 societies. Apps of this nature have sprung up across urban India in the past five years, offering “society management” services to a niche market of gated societies. Their bouquet of services includes everything from property listings with a commission rate for the platform, security services, accounting services for maintenance and related expenses, and in-app discussion forums for residents. These apps market digital security, which allows residents to regulate entries and exits and make a database of all non-resident visitors in the society. The objective of these apps is to legitimize surveillance as a way of ensuring safety in gated societies. Through a preliminary search online, we found over 20 different companies specializing in digital solutions for gated societies. The industry even had a business exposition in Mumbai on “Housing Society Management,” focused on technology solutions for gated societies.

This study uses the framework of platform urbanism to understand surveillance platforms. Platform urbanism analyzes the growing power of digital platforms in cities. Urban geographers have argued that platforms are a symptom of current models of capitalism, which exploit “idle resources” to produce new forms of urban spaces and value where they might not have existed earlier. Airbnb and Uber are often used as examples of this new form of extraction and value creation from existing assets by monetizing empty rooms and car seats. We argue that platforms offering surveillance services are another instance of this wider landscape of platform urbanism, manufacturing the need for surveillance systems in elite urban enclaves. We use this case study to show that platforms monetize not just idle resources but social inequality and stratification to generate value and capital.

Click to download the full essay

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/the-platform-economys-gatekeeping-of-class-and-caste-dominance-in-urban-india

That Is Not A Livelihood – That Is Helplessness”: Field notes from the Fraazo Delivery Workers Strike in Noida, Greater Noida, and Ghaziabad

Rikta Krishnaswamy — 2024-04-24T02:05:03Z

In this essay, Rikta Krishnaswamy of the All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU) narrates her experiences of organising and supporting delivery workers’ collective action against Fraazo (a now-defunct platform for produce and grocery delivery). Her essay sheds light on the challenges workers face in organising for better conditions of work. She describes how platforms hide behind legal smokescreens and threats of police action to shirk their responsibility as employers. To make matters worse, obscure employment terms and work management systems make it harder for workers to seek redress from the government through labour dispute resolution processes. The essay is illustrative of how digital platforms have exploited and violated freedoms of the gig workers they employ, while facing no accountability. For this to change, gig workers have to be guaranteed employment rights along with collective rights to their data.

We have observed that over time, Indian gig workers across platforms almost certainly face a decrease in overall wages, an increase in working hours, and ever-worsening working conditions. The rhetoric of ‘large-scale employment’ is a false one, as corporates do not consider the gig workers as employees and the workers do not come under the aegis of the country’s labour laws. But the gig workers on these platforms don’t share the corporate and government view at all.

Unlike the capital city of Delhi, the suburbs of Noida, Greater Noida, and Ghaziabad have fewer opportunities even for gig work. Delivery workers across platforms regularly face theft and petty crimes, especially during late-night deliveries. Housing societies prevent them from taking their bikes to customers’ apartments and, in some cases, deny them access to building lifts to carry out deliveries. Despite its dehumanising nature, gig work provides some means of survival in this epoch of rampant unemployment.

On 30 May 2022, striking delivery workers in Noida, Greater Noida, and Ghaziabad—all of whom work for an app-based, fresh produce and grocery delivery platform called Fraazo —approached the All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU). Many of these delivery workers, who are usually referred to as ‘partners’, had lost jobs at banks, data or telecom companies, and call centres during the pandemic, and had joined Fraazo after it started operations in December 2021. They were initially paid a daily wage, called a minimum guarantee (MG) payout, of INR 500 for a 10-hour work shift during which they delivered vegetables, fruits, and groceries to residences near them. Alongwith the MG payout that was disbursed weekly into their accounts, they were also given a petrol surcharge of four rupees for every kilometre they travelled.

The workers told us that on 28 May 2022, the Fraazo head office in Mumbai decided to replace their daily MG payout with a piece-rate payout of INR 45 per delivery. At a time of sky-rocketing fuel prices and inflation, the company decided to remove the petrol surcharge for delivery distances of less than five kilometres (which constitute a bulk of the orders that these delivery workers service). The delivery workers were apprised of these changes the next day by the Fraazo Store Managers, with a promise that the new piece-rate system would bring in more earnings.

The delivery workers rejected this new system outright and demanded that Fraazo restore the earlier payout system with an assurance that in the future, Fraazo will take the consent of the workers before introducing any drastic changes to their service conditions. In addition, they demanded that all delivery riders be provided with accident insurance and paid leaves.

The workers did not view themselves as merely freelance delivery partners. When the store’s operations had just begun, the company faced a lot of challenges in ensuring consistent service. Some delivery partners would help with unloading and sorting produce at the store during or after their work shifts. Even after operations stabilised, many worked overtime (with no pay) at the behest of the store managers to ensure that deliveries were completed to the customer’s satisfaction. A significant portion of deliveries involved carrying 10 kilos of produce to customers’ homes. Delivery workers were entrusted to escalate and resolve complaints as well. Fraazo’s customers complained that the store managers were lackadaisical when it came to providing appropriate support and often called the delivery workers directly to get items replaced.

Anywhere between 25–40 workers were tied to a store, according to the size of the operations, and helped Fraazo set up and smoothly run its services across its various stores in Noida, Greater Noida, and Ghaziabad in the first half of 2022. They usually worked through the week, had no paid sick leaves, and were allowed to take just one unpaid day off during a work week (they often incurred penalties if they took more than one leave). While there were problems with their previous time-wage system, they were dead against the new system of a piece-rate payout. The latter meant that their employer could potentially hire hundreds of workers for a store with no minimum guarantee pay, thereby annihilating the earnings of all the workers.

Click to download the full essay

Contributors

Author: Rikta Krishnaswamy

Images: All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU)

Design: Annushka Jaliwala

Copy edit: The Clean Copy

About the All India Gig Workers’ Union

The All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU) is a registered trade union for all food delivery, logistics, and service workers that work on any app-based platforms in India.

Contact: contactaigwu@gmail.com

Connect: Twitter; Facebook

The views and opinions expressed on this page are those of their individual authors. Unless the opposite is explicitly stated, or unless the opposite may be reasonably inferred, CIS does not subscribe to these views and opinions which belong to their individual authors. CIS does not accept any responsibility, legal or otherwise, for the views and opinions of these individual authors. For an official statement from CIS on a particular issue, please contact us directly.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/that-is-not-a-livelihood-2013-that-is-helplessness201d-field-notes-from-the-fraazo-delivery-workers-strike-in-noida-greater-noida-and-ghaziabad

‘Future of work’ or 21st–century oppressed labour?: Findings from an AIGWU survey with 50 Urban Company housekeeping workers in Bengaluru

Nihira Ram — 2024-05-16T15:29:58Z

n this essay, Nihira Ram shares findings from a survey done by the All India Gig Workers Union with more than 50 migrant workers living in a slum in Bengaluru. The workers primarily provided cleaning and domestic services on the platform, Urban Company (previously UrbanClap).

Nihira highlights the impact that diluted rights and rising exploitation have had on the workers. The workers’ experiences show how they faced mounting costs merely to access work on the platform. Once they joined, the workers faced oppressive working conditions and stringent control by the platform, where rules and processes are designed in favour of the platform, at the expense of its workers. Not only were the workers from highly marginalised backgrounds and more vulnerable to this exploitation, a paucity of alternative jobs and their tenuous position as migrants meant that they were trapped by the platform’s unfair practices for years.

When workers join Urban Company as housekeeping services ‘partners’, they first pay INR 16,000 as ‘joining fees’. After undergoing an uncompensated training programme, which costs them INR 1,000, workers are rebranded as ‘professionals’ who are now eligible to provide the services for which they have been trained.

However, the provision of services comes at a huge cost to the workers. They have to pay INR 6,000 per month in order to receive a number of guaranteed jobs as part of the Minimum Guarantee plan (MG Plan) – or, as the workers refer to them – leads. Urban Company terms this a ‘subscription’.

In essence, Urban Company does not qualify people from whom they generate profit as workers. They consider them ‘professionals’ who are ‘subscribing’ to the platform in order to ‘market’ their ‘services’ to earn an income. Workers are cunningly portrayed as another set of ‘customers’ who buy guaranteed jobs from the platform on a monthly basis, essentially having to ‘pay to work’.

Apart from this monthly subscription, workers are made to pay GST on each job. They are required to purchase company-branded uniforms and bags costing around INR 2,000. Further, they must also buy all cleaning supplies relevant to their work from Urban Company at higher costs than those sold elsewhere (INR 10,000 per month or above). This is despite the fact that workers find these supplies to be of poor quality and thus hazardous to their safety.

The framing of Urban Company ‘partners’ as non-workers is inaccurate for a number of reasons. A majority of the housekeeping workers with whom we spoke were not previously employed in the services sector. Urban Company targeted their slum as part of its recruitment drives in 2018. Knowing that their cleaning and housekeeping services vertical faced a deficit of labour supply despite a perceived spike in demand in Bengaluru, Urban Company aggressively onboarded men from this slum to undergo their training programme and join the company as cleaning and housekeeping ‘professionals’. How, then, is Urban Company merely a platform from which pre-existing workers gain business, and not an employer hiring labour with particular skills for its supply chain?

Click to download the full essay

Contributors

Author: Nihira Ram
Images: All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU)
Design: Annushka Jaliwala
Copy edit: The Clean Copy

About the All India Gig Workers’ Union

The All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU) is a registered trade union for all food delivery, logistics, and service workers that work on any app-based platforms in India.

Contact: contactaigwu@gmail.com

Connect: Twitter; Facebook

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/future-of-work-21st-century-oppressed-labour-findings-from-aigwu-survey-with-50-urban-company-housekeeping-workers-in-bengaluru

August 2015 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2015-10-27T00:25:02Z

We are happy to share with you the eighth issue of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) newsletter (August 2015). The past editions of the newsletter can be accessed at http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters.

Highlights

Researchers at Work programme has published a book titled Digital Activism in Asia Reader exploring in detail digital activism in Asia. The Reader was edited by Nishant Shah, P.P. Sneha, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay with support from Anirudh Sridhar, Denisse Albornoz, and Verena Getahun. The pre-publication drafts of two sections written by Sumandro Chattapadhyay for the third volume (2000-2010) of the Asia Internet History series edited by Prof. Kilnam Chon have been posted for open-review process. As part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series, RAW published blog entries on Governing Speech on the Internet and Mock-Calling - Ironies of Outsourcing and the Aspirations of an Individual. NVDA team conducted a workshop at Jeevan Jyoti School for the Blind, Varanasi from August 26 to 28, 2015. Eighty five students and 13 teachers took part in the training programme. NVDA team had conducted another workshop earlier in Nashik. The workshop was conducted in June. A batch of 17 Special Educators and teachers of the blind attended the workshop. Maggie Huang, Arpita Sengupta and Paavni Anand as part of the Pervasive Technologies project co-authored a research paper that seeks to compare the publicly available information on the websites of music collective management organizations ("CMOs") operating within India, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Amulya Purushothama, Nehaa Chaudhari and Varun Baliga in a blog entry have delved into the question of what the mandate of the Sectoral Innovation Council is, what its activities are, and what vision for IPR development in India has it put forth. An RTI Application has been filed by CIS to attain information on these issues. In a blog post, Amulya Purushothama announced our new MHRD IPR Chair Series and has charted the sequence of events, starting from the establishment of MHRD IPR Chairs, to discussions surrounding their purpose and functioning, to concerns surrounding the lack of information about the IPR Chairs, the first round of RTIs that CIS had filed in regard to this and the responses it solicited. Subhashish Panigrahi interviewed Prateek Pattanaik. Prateek has not just digitized as many as 54 Odia-language poetry dating early 18th century but has also annotated, both poetic and prosaic translation in his blogs "Sri Jagannatha" and "Utkal Sangeet". He has also published a complete book "Kisora chandranana champu" on Odia Wikisource. A recent entrant into the Odia Wikimedia community, Prateek is also the youngest Odia Wikimedian. Rohan George and Elonnai Hickok in a blog post analyzed consent, big data and data protection that examines in detail why the principle of consent is providing us increasingly less of an aegis in protecting our data. Elonnai Hickok, Vipul Kharbanda and Vanya Rakesh on behalf of CIS submitted a clause-by-clause comments on the Human DNA Profiling Bill that was circulated by the Department of Biotechnology on June 9, 2015. Sunil Abraham, Elonnai Hickok and Tarun Krishnakumar co-authored an article titled Security: Privacy, Transparency and Technology. The article was published by Observer Research Foundation, Digital Debates 2015: CyFy Journal Volume 2. Elonnai Hickok in a blog post titled A Review of the Policy Debate around Big Data and Internet of Things has done an analysis as to how regulators and experts across jurisdictions are reacting to Big Data and Internet of Things. The Supreme Court of India has deemed it fit to refer the question of the very existence of a fundamental right to privacy to a Constitution Bench to finally decide the matter, and define the contours of such right if it does exist. Vipul Kharbanda analyses this in a blog entry. Experts and regulators across jurisdictions are examining the impact of Big Data practices on traditional data protection standards and principles. This will be a useful and pertinent exercise for India to undertake as the government and the private and public sectors begin to incorporate and rely on the use of Big Data in decision making processes and organizational operations. Elonnai Hickok has provided an initial evaluation of how Big Data could impact India's current data protection standards. Elonnai Hickok has provided a comparison of Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012 vs. the Human DNA Profiling Bill 2015, CIS's main recommendations vs. the 2015 Bill, Sub-Committee Recommendations vs. the 2015 Bill, and the Expert Committee Recommendations vs. the 2015 Bill. CIS submitted its comments to the non-paper on the UNGA Overall Review of the Implementation of the WSIS outcomes, evaluating the progress made and challenges ahead. In a policy brief, Vipul Kharbanda has analyzed the different laws regulating surveillance at the state and central level in India and calls out ways in which the provisions are unharmonized. The brief then provides recommendations for the harmonization of surveillance law in India. Hardnews interviewed Sunil Abraham about the future of the internet in India. The article was published in their August edition. Shyam Ponappa in an Op-ed published by Business Standard has given an analysis on the reasons of the number of dropped calls on our mobile phones.

Accessibility and Inclusion

Under a grant from the Hans Foundation we are doing a project on developing text-to-speech software for 15 Indian languages. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here. The project on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India got over and the compilation has been printed.

NVDA and eSpeak

Monthly Updates

August 2015 Report (Suman Dogra; July 31, 2015).

Event Reports

Training in eSpeak Marathi (Organized by NVDA team; National Association for the Blind; Nashik; June 22 - 23, 2015). The workshop was held in the month of June but the report got published later in August.
Training in eSpeak Hindi (Organized by NVDA team; Jeevan Jyoti School for the Blind; Varanasi; August 26 - 28, 2015).

Access to Knowledge

Pervasive Technologies

Blog Entries

Methodology: Patent Landscaping in the Indian Mobile Device Market (Rohini Lakshané; November 10, 2014). This blog post published last year has been recently updated.
Comparative Transparency Review of Collective Management Organisations in India, United Kingdom and the United States (Maggie Huang, Arpita Sengupta and Paavni Anand; August 1, 2015).

Other (Copyright and Patent)

Blog Entries

CCI Participation at the Upcoming 3rd International Conference on IPR and Competition (Amulya Purushothama; August 5, 2015). CIS wrote to the Competition Commission of India Chairman on August 5, 2015 about participation at a conference organised by Ericsson and concerns regarding conflict of interest. We also had several other NGOs sign on to the letter.
MHRD IPR Chair Series: Introduction (Amulya Purushothama; August 10, 2015). Aditya Garg assisted in research and writing.
National IPR Policy Series: What Have the Sectoral Innovation Councils Been Doing on IPR (Nehaa Chaudhari and Varun Baliga; August 13, 2015). Amulya Purushothama assisted with research and writing.

Media Coverage

Competition Commission of India chariman's participation in Assocham conference raises conflict of interests (Rema Nagarajan; The Times of India; August 6, 2015).
Assocham event sparks row over conflict of interest by CCI (Dilasha Seth and Deepak Patel; Business Standard; August 6, 2015).

Wikipedia

Blog Entry

Odia Wikisource has a new Wikisourcer, and he is the youngest in the Odia Wikimedia community! (Subhashish Panigrahi; August 21, 2015).

Events Co-organized

Annamaya Library edit-a-thon (Organized by CIS-A2K and Telugu Wikipedia Community; August 6, 2015; Andhra Loyola College; Vijaywada).
International Workshop on Digitization and Archiving (Organized by CIS-A2K and Wikipedia Community; August 19 - 21, 2015). Rahmanuddin Shaik was one of the trainers.

FOSS

Participation in Events

Workshop on digital collaborations in Tamil-language, Tamil Virtual Chennai (Organized by Tamil Virtual University, Anna University Campus, Chennai; August 8 - 9, 2015). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja atttended this event.
Open Innovation, entrepreneurship, and our digital future (Organized by iSpirit; Bangalore; August 13, 2015). Rohini Lakshané attended the event. Rohini wrote a report on this .

Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following:

Telugu Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at ALC (Eenadu; August 6, 2015)
Telugu Wiki Edit-a-thon in ALC (Eenadu; August 6, 2015)
Rare Telugu religious and historical work preserved at Annamacharya library to come on Wikisource! (The Hans India; August 7, 2015).
ಗ್ರಾಮೀಣ ಪ್ರದೇಶದ ಆರ್ಥಿಕ ಪ್ರಗತಿಯಿಂದ ದೇಶದ ಆರ್ಥಿಕ ಪ್ರಗತಿ ಸಾಧ್ಯವಾಗುತ್ತದೆ. (Mangalorean.com; August 13, 2015).
ವಿಕಿಪಿಡಿಯ ಮುಕ್ತವಾಗಿ ಬಳಸಿ: ಡಾ.ಪವನಜ (Karavali Karnataka; August 14, 2015).
ಬೆಳ್ತಂಗಡಿ:ಎಲ್ಲಾ ಕಾಲಕ್ಕೂ ಲಭ್ಯ ಇರುವ ಸ್ವತಂತ್ರ ಹಾಗೂ ಮುಕ್ತ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯಾ-ಪವನಜ (SahilOnline; August 14, 2015).
Talamaddale on August 23 (Hindu; August 16, 2015).

Internet Governance

Privacy

Article

Security: Privacy, Transparency and Technology (Sunil Abraham, Elonnai Hickok and Tarun Krishnakumar; Observer Research Foundation, Digital Debates 2015: CyFy Journal Volume 2 ; August 19, 2015).

Submission

CIS Comments and Recommendations to the Human DNA Profiling Bill, June 2015 (Elonnai Hickok, Vipul Kharbanda and Vanya Rakesh; August 27, 2015).

Blog Entries

Policy Paper on Surveillance in India (Vipul Kharbanda; August 3, 2015).
Comparison of the Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012 with: CIS recommendations, Sub-Committee Recommendations, Expert Committee Recommendations, and the Human DNA Profiling Bill 2015 (Elonnai Hickok; August 10, 2015).
Right to Privacy in Peril (Vipul Kharbanda; August 13, 2015).
Responsible Data Forum: Discussion on the Risks and Mitigations of releasing Data (Vanya Rakesh; August 26, 2015).
Are we Throwing our Data Protection Regimes under the Bus? (Elonnai Hickok and Rohan George; August 29, 2015).
Supreme Court Order is a Good Start, but is Seeding Necessary? (Elonnai Hickok and Rohan George; August 29, 2015).

Big Data

Blog Entries

Big Data and the Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and Procedures and Sensitive Personal Data or Information) Rules 2011 (Elonnai Hickok; August 11, 2015).
A Review of the Policy Debate around Big Data and Internet of Things (Elonnai Hickok; August 17, 2015).

Participation in Event

The Changing Landscape of ICT Governance and Practice - Convergence and Big Data (Co-organized by Innovation Center for Big Data and Digital Convergence, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan; August 24 - 25, 2015). Sharat Chandra Ram was granted the Young Scholar Award 2015 to attend theYoung Scholar Workshop followed by main CPRSouth2015 conference (Communication Policy Research South) conference.

Free Speech and Expression

Submission

CIS submission to the UNGA WSIS+10 Review (Jyoti Panday; August 9, 2015),

Cyber Security

Upcoming Event

Bangalore Chapter Meet of DSCI (Co-organized by DSCI and CIS; September 26, 2015). Melissa Hathaway, Commissioner, Global Commission for Internet Governance and Sunil Abraham will be speaking at this event.

Telecom

Op-ed

Those Dropped Calls (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; August 5, 2015 and Organizing India Blogspot; August 6, 2015).

Researchers at Work

Books

Digital Activism in Asia Reader (edited by Nishant Shah, P.P. Sneha, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay, with support from Anirudh Sridhar, Denisse Albornoz, and Verena Getahun; August 8, 2015).

Books Chapters

Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in Asia - Open Review (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; Asia Internet History Vol. 3, edited by Prof. Kilnam Chon). Comments are invited.
Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in India - Open Review (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; Asia Internet History Vol. 3, edited by Prof. Kilnam Chon). Comments are invited.

Accepted Paper Abstract

Studying the Emerging Database State in India: Notes for Critical Data Studies (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; August 2, 2015). The paper has been provisionally accepted.

Blog Entries

Mock-Calling - Ironies of Outsourcing and the Aspirations of an Individual (Sreedeep; August 6, 2015).
Governing Speech on the Internet: From the Free Marketplace Policy to a Controlled 'Public Sphere' (Smarika Kumar; August 28, 2015).

News & Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Why the DNA Bill is open to misuse: Sunil Abraham (Kanika Datta; Business Standard; August 1, 2015)
Porn ban: People will soon learn to circumvent ISPs and govt orders, expert says (Karthikeyan Hemalatha; The Times of India; August 2, 2015).
Indian government orders ISPs to block 857 porn websites (John Ribeiro; IDG News and PC World; August 2, 2015)
India blocks access to 857 porn sites (BBC; August 3, 2015).
India launches crackdown on online porn (James Crabtree; Financial Times; August 3, 2015).
Proxies and VPNs: Why govt can't ban porn websites? (Siladitya Ray; August 3, 2015; Hindustan Times)
Nanny state rules porn bad for you (Anahita Mukherji; The Times of India; August 4, 2015).
Ban on pornography temporary, says government (Business Standard; August 4, 2015)
Porn block in India sparks outrage (Australian; August 5, 2015).
Indian Porn Ban is Partially Lifted But Sites Remain Blocked (Sean Mclain; Wall Street Journal; August 5, 2015)
Genetic Profiling: Is it all in the DNA? (Ullekh N.P.; The Open Magazine; August 7, 2015)
India partially lifts Porn Ban? (Nazhat Khan; DESI blitz; August 7, 2015)
Net Neutrality: India is a Key Battleground (Abeer Kapoor; Hardnews; August 10, 2015)
Stats from 2014 reveal horror of scrapped section 66A of IT Act (Aloke Tikku; Hindustan Times; August 20, 2015).
The seedy underbelly of revenge porn (Sandhya Soman; The Times of India; August 23, 2015).
The new tattler in town (P. Anima; Hindu Businessline; August 28, 2015).

About CIS

► Follow us elsewhere

CIS - Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Access to Knowledge - Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Access to Knowledge - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
Access to Knowledge - E-Mail: a2k@cis-india.org
Researchers at Work - E-Mail: raw@cis-india.org
Researchers at Work - Mailing List: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.

► Request for Collaboration:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/august-2015-bulletin

The Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination

Divij Joshi — 2015-09-09T05:26:50Z

This post by Divij Joshi is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Divij is a final year student at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore and is a keen observer and researcher on issues of law, policy and technology. In this essay, he traces the history of the Internet in India through the lens of judicial trends, and looks at how the judiciary has defined its own role in relation to the Internet.

Introduction

On the 14th of August, 1995, the eve of the 48th anniversary of Indian Independence, India began a new, and wholly unanticipated tryst with destiny - Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) launched India's first full Internet service for public access [1]. In 1998, just a few years after VSNL introduced dial-up Internet, around 0.5% of India’s population had regular Internet access. By 2013, the latest estimate, 15% of the country was connected to the Internet, and the number is growing exponentially [2]. As the influence of the Internet grew, the law and the courts began to take notice. In 1998, there were four mentions of the Internet in the higher judiciary (the High Courts in States and the Supreme Court of India), by 2015, it was referred to in hundreds of judgements and orders of the higher judiciary [3].

The revolutionary capacity of the Internet cannot be understated. It has played a critical part in displacing, creating and enhancing social structures and institutions – from the market, to ideas of community – and its potential still remains unexplored. The Internet has also unsettled legal systems around the world, because of its massive potential to create very new forms of social and legal relationships and paradigms which extant law was unequipped for. The dynamism of the Internet means that legislation and statutory law, being static and rigid, is inherently ill suited for the governance of the Internet, and much of this role is ultimately ceded to the judiciary. In a widely unregulated policy background, the role played by this institution in identifying and dealing with the peculiar nature of regulatory issues on the Internet – such as the central role of intermediaries, the challenges of intellectual property rights concerns, the conflicts of law between different jurisdictions, and the courts’ own role in being a regulator – is tremendously important. In this article, an attempt is made to weave a thread through judicial decisions as well as judicial obiter (or peripheral text) regarding the Internet, to explain how the judiciary has captured and defined the Internet and its capacities, potentials and actors, and what effects this has on the Internet and on society. Inter alia, this article examines how judicial disputes have shaped internet policy in India.

The Internet and the Role of the Courts

The relationship between the law and technology is reminiscent of the famous paradox posed by the greek philosopher Zeno – Achilles and a tortoise agree to race. The tortoise has a head start, and, by the logic of the paradox, Achilles is never able to catch up to him. Every time Achilles covers the distance between himself and the tortoise at any point, the tortoise has moved ahead some distance, which need to be covered once again. As Achilles covers that distance, the tortoise has once again moved a distance away, and so on, to infinite progression, proving that Achilles can never catch up to the tortoise [4].

The legal regulation of the Internet follows a similar path. The Internet was not an immediate concern for law and policy, which meant that its evolution was largely determined in a space free from centralized governmental regulation. By the time parliaments and courts began to understand the implications of Internet regulation, it was apparent that such regulation would be constrained by the very features of the Internet. The core feature of the Internet is decentralization of control, which is necessarily antithetical to creating a centralized legal regulation with. Moreover, the constant mutation in the function and use of the technology renders statutory law incredibly ineffective in being an adequate regulator. Even where legislatures determined a need to step in and draw special regulations for the Internet, they need to be either so broad or vague that they cede much of the regulatory space to interpreters – the courts – or be so specific that much of the regulation quickly becomes obsolete. Most importantly, the final authority to determine matters of constitutional import such as the content and scope of fundamental rights rests with the higher judiciary. In this scenario, the courts become the de facto policy makers for regulating technology. In light of our current political and social context, where the level of legislative debate on issues of public importance and constitutional import is negligible, the judiciary’s analysis of Internet regulation becomes even more important [5].

The judiciary is thus in a unique position to decide Internet policy and governance. The preliminary question is whether there is even a need to talk about the Internet as a special system with distinct policy concerns. The regulation of the Internet is certainly fundamental to the development of knowledge and education in societies, but do its unique features merit a departure from traditional law? The second and connected question is whether the law can actually play a role in determining how the Internet is shaped, i.e. how does technology respond to the law? The architecture of the system that defines the functionality of the Internet – like the TCP/IP protocol – has embodied certain values such as decentralization, autonomy, openness and privacy [6], which have to a large extent underlined the social and ethical implications of the Internet – the way it is used, the way it functions and the way it grows. These were the values explicitly introduced into the systems we use today to communicate and interact on the Internet [7]. However, there is no a priori, fixed nature of the Internet. The form the technologies that make up the Internet take, depend upon its architecture and its design, which are malleable, and to which laws contribute by incentivizing certain values and encumbering others. The legal regulation of the Internet, therefore critically affects the architecture of the system, and promotes and secures certain values.

Recognizing the effect of law upon the architecture of the Internet is critical to any balancing exercise that the judiciary has to conduct when it decides disputes about the Internet. The Internet is a unique public resource, in that its participants are (mostly) private actors pursuing a vareity of goals and interests. The values outlined above emerged in this context, where control was decetnralized and regulation depended to a large extent upon how these disparate parties act. However, the same values also disturb existing structures to control information for legitimate causes - such as protecting intellectual property rights or preventing hate speech. Adjudicating these values, often in the absence of any explicit social or political moral framework (with respect to lack of legislative or constitutional guidance on these values), the judicial responses end up as policy directions that shape the Internet. Seen outside a broader, progressive social context, which takes into account the impact of shaping technologies to reflect values, interests on the Internet are generally adjudicated and enforced as proprietary rights between private actors, which ultimately results in changing the dynamics and relative distribution of control over the technologies that make up the Internet. This proprietory conception of interests on the Internet is highly insular, and tends to undermine the intersts of the public as a stakeholder in the regulation of the Internet. This can play out in many ways – from regulation being overwhelmingly determined according to private interests like restricting new technologies in order to protect intellectual property; or with private actors imputed as the focal point of regulation, and therefore given massive control over the Internet. However, the courts can take a different approach to regulating the Internet. The judiciary, especially the Indian Supreme Court, has a generally activist trend, especially in environmental matters [8]. One of the most elegant principles invoked by the courts for the protection of the common environment, has been the public trust doctrine, which postulates that certain (environmental) resources exist for the public benefit and can only be eroded upon to ensure that they develop in the most beneficial way for the common resources [9]. A commons approach to the Internet would require a comprehensive evaluation of the roles played by different actors across different layers of the Internet and how to regulate them [10], but would be principally similar, in that rules of private property would be constrained by potential spillover effects on intellectual information resources.

As a prelude to examining the judicial analysis of the Internet, it is interesting to examine the judiciary’s own perception of its role in Internet regulation. Courts are constrained in their exercise of power by rules of jurisdiction, which become incredibly convoluted on the Internet. A broad assertion of state power over the net can potentially fragment it, which is an obvious problem. At the same time, state sovereignty and protection of the interests of its citizens and laws has to be balanced with the above concerns [11]. The judiciary in India first attempted to grapple with the problem by exercising ‘universal jurisdiction’ over all actions on the Internet, which allowed the Court to claim jurisdiction over a defendant as long as the website or service could be accessed from within its jurisdiction [12]. This broad-reaching standard was antithetical to the development of a harmonized, unfragmented Internet and created problems of jurisdictional and sovereign conflict. As the implications of such a direction became clear, the court evolved different standards for jurisdiction which were based on whether the Internet service had some connection with the territorial jurisdiction of the court in question. The judiciary began to develop caution in its approach towards exercising personal jurisdiction in Internet cases, first applying the ‘interactivity test’ and then the ‘specific targeting’ standards for questions of jurisdiction [13]. However, the judiciary continues to adhere to a ‘long-arm’ standard for copyright and trademark violations, which allows it to extend its jurisdiction extra-territorially under those laws, through rather specious analogies with pre-internet technologies. For example, in WWE v Reshma [14], the Court explicitly analogized sale of services or goods on the Internet with contracts concluded over the telephone. Although analogies provide a comfortable framework for analysis, they also shield important distinctions between technologies from legal analysis. Problems arising from Internet cases – where many actors across many jurisdictions are involved in varying degrees – are unique to Internet technologies and such analogies ignore these important distinctions. Morever, in all the above cases, the judiciary’s assertions of power over the Internet seems to be restricted only by pragmatic regulatory concerns (such as whether personal obedience of the defendant can be secured) and its evolving understanding of questions of jurisdiction are explicitly linked to changes in the use and perception of the Internet and an understanding of interactivity and communication on the Internet.

The Early Internet and Judicial Perceptions

The Internet crept into the judicial vocabulary in 1996; a year after public access was made available, when the Supreme Court first took cognizance of ‘Internet’ as a means of interlinking countries and gathering information instantaneously [15]. Several other cases in the High Courts also spoke of the ‘Information Highway’ [16] and the various services that companies were offering, which could be availed by individuals on the Internet [17]. This corresponded with the popular understanding of the ‘first wave’ of the Internet, mostly relating to business providing services and information to users on the World Wide Web or as a space for limited personal interaction (such as through email) [18].

Some of the earliest cases where the Courts had the opportunity to examine the nature of the Internet were related to Intellectual Property on the Internet, specifically trademark and copyright in the online world. The Domain Name System, which serve to identify devices accessible on the Internet, was one of the first regulatory challenges on the Internet. Domain name disputes were unprecedented in the analog world of intellectual property, since domain names were uniquely scarce goods due to the limitations of the DNS technology. In India, the Delhi High Court in the case of Yahoo v Akash Arora first took cognizance of regulatory challenges of the DNS system on the Internet, a space which it conceptualized as a large public network of computers, and held that domain names serve the same functions on the Internet as trademarks. This case saw the recognition of the Internet as a separate, regulable space, which the Court defined as “a global collection of computer networks linking millions of public and private computers around the world.” The Court recognized some of the core, democratic features of the Internet: “The Internet is now recognized as an international system, a communication medium that allows anyone from any part of the lobe with access to the Internet to freely exchange information and share data.” In this case, the Court upheld traditional trademark rights in the case of use of domain names. The Court’s first recognition of trademark on the Internet heralded the imputation of proprietary interests on the decentralized, shared network that was the Internet, and was a precursor to the many such cases, which mostly focused on private commercial concerns. Even as the Court understood the importance of the Internet commons, i.e. the information and architecture that makes up the Internet, it chose to ignore concerns of public interest in the openness of those commons, in its balancing of proprietary rights for trademark cases. The commercial significance of the Internet was echoed in the Rediff case, where the Bombay High Court opined that “Undoubtedly the Internet is one of the important features of the Information Revolution. It is increasingly used by commercial organisations to promote themselves and their product and in some cases to buy and sell” [19]. Moreover, in these early cases, the law of the analog age was applied wholesale to the Internet, without examining in-depth the possible differences in principle and approach, providing no precedent for the development of an ‘internet law’ [20]. Overly focussed on the proprietary nature of Internet interests, the conception of the Internet as a non-commercial space for collaboration at a decentralized or an individual level is absent from the judicial vocabulary at this stage.

Private Actors and Public Interest

The Internet permits decentralization in the hands of several private actors, which makes control of information over it so difficult. However, the information and technology that makes up the Internet are also highly centralized at certain nodal points, such as the services which provide the physical infrastructure of the Internet (like ISPs) or intermediaries which create platforms for distribution of information. Since the Internet has no centralized architecture to enable governmental control, these private intermediaries fall squarely in the crosshairs of regulatory concerns, specifically concerning their liability as facilitators of offensive or illegal content and actions. Facebook, Ebay, Twitter, Myspace, YouTube and Google are examples of private actors that have emerged as dominant service providers that host, index or otherwise facilitate access to user-generated content. Other forms of intermediaries, such as software like Napster or torrent databases like The Pirate Bay, are responsible for driving the growth of Internet-based technologies, like new modes of information sharing and communication. These services have emerged as the most important platform for sharing of information and free speech on the Internet. Most of the interaction and communication on the Internet takes place through these intermediaries and therefore they are in a position to control much of the speech that takes place online. The implications of regulating such actors are quite enormous, and its context is unique to the Internet. These private actors now control the bulk of the information that is shared online, and many of them have almost monopolistic control over certain unique forms of information sharing – think Google in the case of search engines. Developing an adequate regulatory mechanism for them is therefore critical to the future of the net. If the laws do not adequately protect their ability to host content without being liable for the same, it is likely that these actors will lean towards collateral censorship of speech beyond that which is prohibited by law, simply to protect against liability. Secondly, such liability would tend to disincentivise the creation of new platforms and services that increase access to knowledge, which have been integral to innovation on the Internet [21]. The issue of intermediary liability at this scale is unique to the Internet. The court has to adequately frame policy considerations which strike at the fundamental nature of the Internet, such as intellectual property and access to information. At the same time, concerns about legal accountability need to also be addressed. The approach that courts have taken towards the role of intermediaries is therefore critical towards any examination of Internet regulation [22].

In India, the first court to explicitly examine the public importance in issues of online intermediary liability was in the context of regulation of pornography, specifically child pornography, which has been a mainstay of regulatory concerns on the Internet. The case prompted legislative action in the form of creating rules to secure intermediary immunity. In this case the Court imputed liability for the listings of certain offensive content upon the owners of the website, Bazzee.com. Hard cases make bad law, and the same was true of this case. Referring to the challenges of regulating content on the Internet, due to the inability of methods to screen and filter such content, the Court held that intermediaries must be strictly liable for all offensive content on their site. The Court held that:

The proliferation of the internet and the possibility of a widespread use through instant transmission of pornographic material, calls for a strict standard having to be insisted upon. Owners or operators of websites that offer space for listings might have to employ content filters if they want to prove that they did not knowingly permit the use of their website for sale of pornographic material…even if for some reason the filters fail, the presumption that the owner of the website had the knowledge that the product being offered for sale was obscene would get attracted.

Intermediaries, therefore, were imputed with the liability of controlling ‘obscene’ speech – a vague and over-broad standard which did not account for the realities of online speech [23]. The above analysis reflects the judiciary’s refusal to take into account the technical concerns on the Internet which ultimately shape its architecture – and the limitations of the judiciary in reflecting upon their own role in policy making on the internet. Ultimately, the decision was overturned by a legislative act, which invoked different standards of liability for intermediaries.

In Consim Info Pvt. Ltd vs Google India Pvt. Ltd [24], the Madras High Court considered “Keyword Advertising” and the liability of search engines and competitors for ‘meta-tags’ that resulted in search engine results which may divert a trademark holder’s traffic. Google’s AdWord programme, which allows purchase of certain ‘keywords’ for the search engine results, and can potentially enable certain forms of trademark infringement, was at issue [25]. Trademarks as AdWords or search terms fulfil and important social utility of information access [26]. However, the Court’s reasoning was conspicuously missing an analysis of the public interest in protecting and promoting search engines, which were important concerns taken into account when these issues were deliberated in other forums [27]. The Court saw this dispute only taking into account private property interests and not public interest considerations, such as the general public benefit of technology which enables new forms of searching and indexing. In fact, an argument by the defendant based on the fundamental right to free (commercial) speech was raised and ignored by the court. The Court therefore ignored the public importance of search engines in favour of protecting proprietary interests which arose in a different context.

Copyright law also has tremendous implications on the Internet. As the Internet became the primary mode for the distribution of different kinds of information and creative content, the very ease of sharing that contributed to its popularity made it prone to violations of copyright, and this created a conflict between the interests of traditional rights holders and the development of the Internet as a means of better sharing of information and knowledge. The problem of holding intermediaries liable for conduct has been compounded in cases where the Court ordered ex-parte ‘John Doe’ orders against unknown defendants likely to be infringing copyright, and imputed the liability for removal of such content on the intermediaries or ISP’s, effectively issuing wide blocking orders without considering their implications or even providing a fair hearing [28]. In RK Productions [29], for instance, when holding that ISPs could be liable for failure to follow blocking orders against infringing content, the Madras High Court described the role of ISPs, such as Airtel and VSNL, as “vessels for others to use their services to infringe third party works.” Once again, the court took a particularly pessimistic view of the Internet’s capabilities, limiting its analysis to the ISP’s function in facilitating infringement and holding that “Without the ISPs, no person would be in a position to access the pirated contents nor would the unknown persons be in a position to upload the pirated version of the film.” In Myspace, the Delhi High Court held that no different standard for secondary infringement (by intermediaries) applied on the Internet, and imputed the same standard as in the 1957 Copyright Act. (In fact, it explicitly compared Myspace to brick and mortar shops selling infringing DVD’s or CD’s) [30]. The Court held that the principles of immunity under the IT Act were overridden by the provisions of the Copyright Act, and then went on to impute a strict standard for intermediaries seeking safe harbor for infringing material, including, inexplicably, that provision of some means to tackle infringement would be sufficient proof of knowledge of actual infringement, and therefore implicating mere passive platforms as infringers. Further, the Court expressly rejected a post-hoc solution for the same, and held that the intermediaries must ensure prior restraint of infringing works to escape liability. The claims that arise in cases of infringement of intellectual property on the Internet, specifically in the liability of intermediaries, are unique, and have unique implications. The inability or refusal of the judiciary to identify claims of freedom of speech and freedom of information of the larger public within the internet commons, in response to broad censorship orders for preventing infringement means that implicitly, policy takes a direction that favours private interests.

An analysis of the above cases shows that important implications of intermediary liability such as the effect on the public’s access to information and the freedom of speech in the context of the Internet did not play a role in the Courts decisions. In particular, the examination of cases above shows that private disputes are now at the forefront of issues of public importance. The Courts have unfortunately taken an insular view of these disputes, adjudicating them as inter-party, without considering the public function that private players on the Internet provide, and how their decisions should factor in these considerations.

However, the recent case of Shreya Singhal v Union of India [31], decided by the Supreme Court this March, hopefully announces a departure from this insular examination of the Internet towards a constitutional analysis, where framing an appropriate public policy for the Internet is at the forefront of the Court’s analysis.

Shreya Singhal and Constitutionalizing the Internet

In March, 2015, the Supreme Court of India struck down the notoriously abused Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, which criminalized certain classes of speech, and hopefully heralded a new phase of Internet jurisprudence in India, which imports constitutionalism into matters of cyberspace. Section 66A, premised on the pervasiveness of the Internet, criminalized online speech on vague grounds such as ‘grossly offensive’ or ‘menacing’. The Court’s examination of the nature of the Internet is particularly important. While dismissing a challenge that speech on the Internet should not be treated as distinct from other speech, the Supreme Court opined that “the internet gives any individual a platform which requires very little or no payment through which to air his views”, and by this reasoning concluded that to a limited extent, specific offences could be drawn for online speech. However, this understanding of the features of the Internet – the democratization of knowledge sharing by making it cheap and expansive, was implicit throughout the Court’s judgement, which upheld the idea of the Internet as a ‘marketplace of ideas’ and a space for free and democratic exchange, and struck down the impugned restrictive provisions as unconstitutional, in part because of their vagueness and likelihood to censor legitimate speech, bearing no relation to the constitutional restrictions on free speech under Article 19(2). Moreover, the Court understood the importance of collateral censorship and intermediary safe harbor, although only briefly examined, and read down expansive intermediary liability terms under the IT Rules to include prior judicial review of takedown notices [32].

Hopefully, the Shreya Singhal judgement marks the beginning of constitutional engagement of the judiciary with the Internet. At this moment itself, the Supreme Court is grappling with questions of limitations of online pornography [33]; search engine liability for hate speech [34]; intermediary liability for defamation [35]; and liability for mass surveillance. How the Supreme Court takes cognizance of these cases, how they ultimately proceed, and how they take into account the principles sounded by the Shreya Singhal court, will have a tremendous impact on the internet and society in India.

Conclusion

This article was an attempt to study the Internet in India, and look at the relationship between the judiciary and the Internet. But ‘the Internet’ is not some fixed, immutable space, and any study has to take this into account. The function of the Internet depends upon the values built in to it. These values can be in favor of free speech, or enable censorship. They can protect privacy, or enable mass surveillance. The growth of the Internet as a medium of free speech and expression has been fuelled to a large extent in the spaces free of legal regulation, but the law is perhaps the most important regulator of the Internet, in its ability to use state power to create incentives for certain values, and to change the nature of the Internet. This study, therefore, charted the dynamic relationship between judicial law and other factors responsible for the regulation of the Internet.

For a technology which is so pervasive in our daily lives, and growing in importance day by day, it is surprising that the Supreme Court of India has only recently taken cognizance of constitutional issues on the Internet. While important internet-specific issues have arisen in disputes before the judiciary, judicial examination has generally ignored technical nuances of the new technology, and furthermore ignored the wider implications of framing Internet policy by applying rules that applied in other contexts, such as for copyright or trademark. Without a clear articulation of political and moral bases to guide Internet policy, a clear policy-driven approach to the Internet remains absent, and the regulatory space has been captured by fragmented interest groups without an assessment of larger interests in maintaining the Internet commons, such as allowing peer-based production and sharing of information.

There is, however, reason to be optimistic about the courts and the Internet. The Supreme Courts reaffirmation and identification of the freedom of speech on the Internet in Shreya Singhal, will, hopefully, resonate in the policy decisions of both the courts and legislators, and the internet can be reformulated as a space deserving constitutional scrutiny and protection.

References

[1] VSNL Starts India's First Internet Service Today, The Indian Technomist, (14th August, 1995), available at http://dxm.org/techonomist/news/vsnlnow.html.

[2] Internet Statistics by Country, International Telecommunication Union, available at http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/stat/default.aspx.

[3] Source: http://manupatra.com/.

[4] Nick Huggett, Zeno's Paradoxes, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), available at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/paradox-zeno/.

[5] See: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/a-little-reminder-no-one-in-house-debated-section-66a-congress-brought-it-and-bjp-backed-it/; Publicly available records of Lok Sabha debates also show no mention of this controversial law.

[6] I take values to mean certain desirable goals and methods, which could be both intrinsically good to pursue and whose pursuit allows other instrumental goods to be achieved. See Michael J. Zimmerman, Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), available at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/value-intrinsic-extrinsic/.

[7] Hellen Nissenbaum, How Computer Systems Embody Values, Computer Magazine, 118, (March 2001), available at https://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/embodyvalues.pdf.

[8] S.P. Sathe, Judicial Activism: The Indian Experience, 6 Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, 29, (2001).

[9] M.C. Mehta v. Kamal Nath and Ors., 2000(5) SCALE 69.

[10] Yochai Benkler, From Consumers to Users: Shifting the Deeper Structures of Regulation Toward Sustainable Commons and User Access, 52(3) Federal Communications Law Journal, 561, (2000).

[11] Thomas Shultz, Carving up the Internet: Jurisdiction, Legal Orders, and the Private/Public International Law Interface, 19(4) European Journal Of International Law, 799, (2008); Wendy A. Adams, Intellectual Property Infringement in Global Networks: The Implications of Protection Ahead of the Curve, 10 Int’l J.L. & Info. Tech, 71, (2002).

[12] Casio India Co. Limited v. Ashita Tele Systems Pvt. Limited, 2003 (27) P.T.C. 265 (Del.) (India).

[13] Banyan Tree Holding (P) Ltd. v. A. Murali Krishna Reddy & Anr., CS(OS) 894/2008.

[14] World Wrestling Entertainment v. Reshma Collection (FAO (OS) 506/2013 (Delhi).

[15] Dr. Ashok v. Union of India and Ors., AIR 1997 SC 2298.

[16] Rajan Johnsonbhai Christy vs State Of Gujarat, (1997) 2 GLR 1077.

[17] Union Of India And Ors. Vs. Motion Picture Association And Ors, 1999 (3) SCR 875; Yahoo!, Inc. vs Akash Arora & Anr., 1999 IIAD Delhi 229 – “The Internet provides information about various corporations, products as also on various subjects like educational, entertainment, commercial, government activities and services.”

[18] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks.

[19] Rediff Communication Limited vs Cyberbooth & Another, 1999 (4) Bom CR 278.

[20] Even when the Supreme Court finally recognized these concerns a few years later, when the Internet had morphed into a massive commercial platform and an important forum for free speech, in the Satyam Infotech case (2004(3)AWC 2366 SC), it discussed the unique problem of domain name identifiers and scarcity of domain names, yet went on to hold that an even higher standard of passing off for trademarks should apply in domain names, disregarding the prior standard of an ‘honest concurrent user’.

[21] Jack Balkin, The Future of Free Expression in a Digital Age, 36 Pepperdine Law Review, (2008)

[22] Id.

[23] Avnish Bajaj v. State (NCT of Delhi), 3 Comp. L.J. 364 (2005).

[24] 2013 (54) PTC 578 (Mad)

[25] The judgement also reveals the predominance of Google’s search engine service. The Court defines the operation of “search engines” as synonymous with Google’s particular service – including adding elements like the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ option as defining elements of search engines.

[26] David J. Franklyn & David A. Hyman, Trademarks As Search Engine Keywords: Much Ado About Something?, 26(2) Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, 540, (2013).

[27] Id.

[28] Reliance Big Entertainment v. Multivision Network and Ors, Delhi High Court, available at http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/john-doe-order-reliance-entertainment-v-multivision-network-and-ors.-movie-singham; Sagarika Music Pvt. Ltd. v. Dishnet Wireless Ltd., C.S. No. 23/2012, G.A. No. 187/2012 (Calcutta High Court Jan. 27, 2012) (order); See Generally, Ananth Padmanabhan, Give Me My Space and Take Down His, 9 Indian Journal of Law and Technology, (2013).

[29] R.K. Productions v. BSNL Ltd and Ors. O.A.No.230 of 2012, Madras High Court.

[30] Super Cassetes Industries Ltd. v. Myspace Inc. and Anr., 2011 (47) P.T.C. 49 (Del.)

[31] Shreya Singhal and Ors. V Union of India and Ors., W.P.(Crl).No. 167 of 2012, Supreme Court, (2015).

[32] The courts refusal to address important questions of intermediary responsibility has also been criticized, see Jyoti Pandey, The Supreme Court Judgment in Shreya Singhal and What It Does for Intermediary Liability in India?, Centre for Internet and Society, available at http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/sc-judgment-in-shreya-singhal-what-it-means-for-intermediary-liability.

[33] See: http://sflc.in/kamlesh-vaswani-v-uoi-w-p-c-no-177-of-2103/.

[34] See: http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/search-engine-and-prenatal-sex-determination.

[35] See: https://indiancaselaws.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/google-india-pvt-ltd-vs-visaka-industries-limited/.

The post is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, and copyright is retained by the author.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-internet-in-the-indian-judicial-imagination

Procurement Through Digital Platforms

SEWA Cooperative Federation and Centre for Internet & Society — 2022-07-26T14:35:47Z

Procurement policies, both public and private, can play a significant role in determining inclusive market participation, particularly for informal women workers and their collective enterprises.

Executive Summary

Various factors, including pricing, compliance and transparency in systems, can determine how and upto what extent women are able to utilise procurement platforms. With the emergence of a new, digital economy, procurement platforms (public and private) too have adopted technology-enabled systems. For informal women workers and their collective enterprises, the ability to engage with these interfaces also determines if and to what extent they can link with the supply chain.

In this report, we map the experiences of women’s collective enterprises (owned by informal women workers), particularly their capacities to use digital procurement platforms and the concurrent challenges that they face. The challenges highlighted in this report present an opportunity for procurement policies to deliberate and adapt, so that women workers can also utilise these platforms.

As a Women’s Enterprise Support System, SEWA Cooperative Federation was able to study eight women’s collective enterprises - owned, managed and used by informal women workers - with respect to procurement.

We interviewed board members, managers, and members of these collective enterprises, across sectors: agriculture, manufacturing, services, transport, and were able to understand key issues that emerged.

Click to read the full report

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/procurement-through-digital-platforms