Centre for Internet and Society

Oppose Software Patents

pranesh — 2010-01-15T12:20:55Z

Oppose software patents

Oppose software patents.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/software-patents/campaign/overview

Opening India's Spectrum

pranesh — 2012-01-19T11:07:40Z

India's Government monopolised the radio spectrum until the mid-1990s and even now, non-governmental use of wireless is more limited than in other democracies. Restrictive policies constrain the growth of mobile telephony, broadcasting, wireless broadband and many other services important to India's social and economic development. Can anything be done to change this? Robert Horvitz, director of Open Spectrum Foundation suggests changes.

Robert Horvitz, director of the Open Spectrum Foundation (http://www.openspectrum.info

), and author of the Local Radio Handbook, is visiting India to study this question and suggest strategies for citizen action to reform radio regulation. On Thursday, 14 January, at 18:00 he will discuss some of his preliminary findings at the Centre for Internet and Society.

VIDEOS

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/opening-spectrum

Opening Government: A Guide to Best Practice in Transparency, Accountability and Civic Engagement across the Public Sector

pranesh — 2012-12-14T10:26:42Z

The Transparency & Accountability Initiative has published a book called “Opening Government: A Guide to Best Practice in Transparency, Accountability and Civic Engagement across the Public Sector”. We at the Centre for Internet & Society contributed the section on Open Government Data.

Cross-posted from the Transparency & Accountability Initiative blog.

Download the full report (PDF, 440 Kb)

Open Government Partnership

In January 2011, a small group of government and civil society leaders from around the world gathered in Washington, DC to brainstorm on how to build upon growing global momentum around transparency, accountability and civic participation in governance. The result was the creation of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a new multi-stakeholder coalition of governments, civil society and private sector actors working to advance open government around the world — with the goals of increasing public sector responsiveness to citizens, countering corruption, promoting economic efficiencies, harnessing innovation, and improving the delivery of services.

In September 2011, these founding OGP governments will gather in New York on the margins of the UN General Assembly to embrace a set of high-level open government principles, announce country-specific commitments for putting these principles into practice and invite civil society to assess their performance going forward. Also in September, a diverse coalition of governments will stand up and announce their intention to join a six-month process culminating in the announcement of their own OGP commitments and signing of the declaration of principles in January 2012.

'Opening Government' report

To help inform governments, civil society and the private sector in developing their OGP commitments, the Transparency and Accountability Initiative (T/A Initiative) reached out to leading experts across a wide range of open government fields to gather their input on current best practice and the practical steps that OGP participants and other governments can take to achieve it.

The result is the first document of its kind to compile the state of the art in transparency, accountability and citizen participation across 15 areas of governance, ranging from broad categories such as access to information, service delivery and budgeting to more specific sectors such as forestry, procurement and climate finance.

Each expert’s contribution is organized according to three tiers of potential commitments around open government for any given sector — minimal steps for countries starting from a relatively low baseline, more substantial steps for countries that have already made moderate progress, and most ambitious steps for countries that are advanced performers on open government.

Chapters and Contributing Authors

Aid – Publish What You Fund
Asset disclosure - Global Integrity
Budgets – The International Budget Project
Campaign finance – Transparency International - USA
Climate finance – World Resources Institute
Fisheries – TransparentSea
Financial sector reform Global Financial Integrity
Forestry – Global Witness
Electricity – Electricity Governance Initiative
Environment – The Access Initiative
Extractive industries – The Revenue Watch Institute
Open government data – The Centre for Internet and Society - India
Procurement – Transparency International-USA
Right to information – Access Info and the Center for Law and Democracy
Service delivery – Twaweza

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/opening-government-best-practice-guide

Open Standards Workshop at IGF '09

pranesh — 2011-08-23T02:54:03Z

The Centre for Internet and Society co-organized a workshop on 'Open Standards: A Rights-Based Framework' at the fourth Internet Governance Forum, at Sharm el-Sheikh. The panel was chaired by Aslam Raffee of Sun Microsystems and the panellists were Sir Tim Berners-Lee of W3C, Renu Budhiraja of India's DIT, Sunil Abraham of CIS, Steve Mutkoski of Microsoft, and Rishab Ghosh of UNU-MERIT.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee started the session with an address on various rights. Rights, he noted can range from being things like the rights to air and water to the right not to have the data carrier you use determine which movie you watch. Then, there are tensions between rights: the right to anonymity can clash with the right to know who posted information on making a bomb. Berners-Lee stated that for 2009, he has chosen to pursue one particular right: the right to government-held data. This data can include everything from where schools are to emergency services such as locations of hospitals. Today, we are talking about standards.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a fifteen-year old body in which all kinds of people come together for purposes of setting standards around the World Wide Web. Thus, everything from HTML, which is used to write Web pages to WCAG, which are guidelines to enable people with disabilities access websites through assistive technologies. W3C conducts its discussions openly: anybody who has a good idea has a right to participate in its discussions -- it does not matter who one works for, who one represents -- what does matter are the ideas one brings to the table. The kinds of standards that W3C deals with are of interest to an immensely wide-ranging group of people. Even ten-year olds have actually expressed their opinions about standards like HTML. All this openness of participation must be guaranteed while ensuring that the processes move forward.

Next spoke Renu Budhiraja of the Department of Information and Technology, which is a part of the Indian government. She started off by hoping that this workshop would be not only a platform to share knowledge, but also to reach consensus on a few matters. Next, she laid out why open standards are extremely important for the Indian government. What citizens want in their interactions with the government are ease of interaction and efficiency. For them it is immaterial whether a certain service is provided by Department A or Department B. Thus we need to move towards a single-window government service for citizens, enabling them to interact easily with the government's various departments. While such an initiative must be centralized for it to be effective, it is crucial that its implementation be decentralized and suited to each district or localities' needs.

There is, understandably, a huge institutional mechanism behind ensuring that these systems are based on open standards. We have expert committees, consisting of academics and knowledgeable bureaucrats, and working groups, which include industry groups. Through these, we have evolved a National Policy on Open Standards, which is currently in a draft stage, but shall be notified soon. This policy outlines the principles based on which particular standards required for governmental functioning are to be chosen or evolved. This document will ensure long-term accessibility to public documents and information, and seamless interoperability of various governmental services and departments. It will also reduce the risk of vendor lock-in and reduce costs, and thus ensure long-term, sustainable, scalable and cost-effective solutions.

Ms. Budhiraja noted that there are a few aspects of the policy that bear discussion in a forum such as the IGF. First is the issue of whether royalty-free is the only choice for innovation. All other things equal, between royalty-free and reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) standards, of course royalty-free is to be preferred. But what if a superior technology (JPEG200 vs. JPEG) is RAND? What should the government's position be in such a case? Further, what should the government's position be when in a particular domain a RAND standard is the only option?

Next is the issue of single vs. multiple open standards. When interoperability is what we are aiming at, can multiple standards be recommended as some in the industry are asking us to do? And then is the issue of market maturity. The government sometimes finds itself in a situation where a standard is available, but well-developed products around that standard aren't and there aren't sufficient vendors using that standard. All these issues are of great practical importance when a government works on a policy document on standards.

Next up was Sunil Abraham, Executive Director of the Centre for Internet and Society. His presentation was on open standards as citizens' and consumers' rights. He started off by citing the example of the Smart Card Operating System for Transport Application (SCOSTA) standard, and the implications that the SCOSTA story has on large-scale projects such as the National Unique ID project currently under way in India. SCOSTA, an open standard, was being written off as unimplementable by all the MNC smart card vendors who wished to push RAND standards. IIT Kanpur helped the government develop a working implementation. Within twenty days, the card manufacturers submitted modified cards for compliance testing by NIC. Because of SCOSTA being an open standard, local companies also joined the tender. The cost went down from Rs. 600 per card to Rs. 30 per card. This shows the benefits of open standards as a means of curbing oligopolistic pricing, and working for the benefit of consumers.

From a rights-based perspective, access to the state machinery is a primary right. Citizens should not be required to pirate or purchase software to interact with the state. If e-governance solutions are based on proprietary standards, not all citizens would be equal. The South African example or requiring a particular browser to access the election commission's website shows that in a rather drastic fashion. When intellectual property interferes with governmental needs, governments have not been shy of issuing compulsory licences. This was seen when during the Great War the United States government pooled various flight-related patents and compulsorily licensed them, as well as what we are currently seeing with many Aids-related drugs being compulsorily licensed in developing countries. Thus, there are precedents for such licensing, and governments should explore them in the realm of e-governance. Many countries now have statutes that guarantee the right to government-held information. Government Interoperability Frameworks should take these into account, and mandate all government-to-citizen (G2C) information be transacted via open standards. This must be backed up by a strong accessibility policy to ensure that the governments don't discriminate between their citizens.

Proprietary standards act like pseudo-intellectual property rights, just as DRMs do. They add a layer on top of rights such as copyright, and can prevent the exercise of fair use and fair dealing rights because of an inability to legally negotiate the standards in which the content is encoded in a cost-free manner. In guaranteeing this balance between copyrights and fair dealing rights, free software and alternative IP models play a crucial role. Because of software patents being recognized in a few countries, development of free software which allows citizens to exercise their fair use rights is harmed in all countries.

Steve Mutkoski of Microsoft spoke next and placed the standards debate in a large context. He noted that standards are a technicality that are only a small part of the large issue which is interoperability in e-governance and delivery to citizens. The real challenges are organizational and semantic interoperability. Frequently interoperability is not harmed by technical issues, but by legal and organizational issues. Governments used to work on paper; during the shift to electronic data, they didn't engage in any organizational changes. Thus they continue to function with electronic data the same way that they did with paper-based data. Governments often lack strong privacy policies regarding the data that each of their departments holds. This harms governmental functioning. Additionally, legacy hardware and software have to be catered to by the standards we are talking about: sometimes an open standard just will not work.

Standards don't guarantee interoperability, and there is significant work done on this by noted academics ("Why Standards Are Not Enough To Guarantee End-to-End Interoperability" Lewis et al.; "Difficulties Implementing Standards" Egyedi & Dahanayake; "Standards Compliant, But Incompatible?" Egyedi et al.). Mandated standards lists will not help address interoperability issues between different implementations of the same standard. What would help? Transparency of implementations; collaboration with community; active participation in maintenance of standards, etc., would help. There is a need for continued public sector reform, with a focus on citizen-centric e-governance, and a need to engage with the question of whether government-mandated standards lists lead the market or follow the market.

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, a senior researcher at UN University, Maastricht, spoke next. He started by noting that technical standards are left to technical experts. That needs to change, which is why discussing open standards at the IGF is important. He next set off a hypothetical: imagine you go to the city council office in Sharm el Sheik, and at the parking lot there it says that your car has to be a Ford if you are to park there; or if the Dutch government insists that you have a Philips TV if you are to receive the national broadcaster's signal. While these might seem absurd, situations like this arise all the time when it comes to the realm of software. Thus, the social effects of open standards are of utmost importance, and not just their technical qualities. Analysing the social effects of open standards takes us back to the economics of technology and technological standards. Technological standards exhibit network externalities: their inherent value is less than the value of others using them. Being the only person in the world with a telephone won't be very useful. Technological standards also exhibit path dependence: once you go with one technological format, it is difficult to change over to another even if that other format is superior to the first. Thus, clearly, standards benefit when there is a 'natural monopoly'. The challenge really arises when faced with the question of how to ensure a monopoly in a technology without the supplier of that technology exhibiting monopolistic tendencies. This can only be done when the technology is open and developed openly, of which the web standards and the W3C are excellent examples. If the technology or the process are semi-open, then because of the few intellectual property rights attached to the technology, some would be better off than others. Just as governments cannot insist on driving a particular make of cars as a prerequisite for access to them, they cannot insist on using a particular proprietary standard as a means of accessing them.

Many interesting questions arose when the floor was thrown open to the audience. "Should governments only mandate a particular standard when it is certain that market maturity exists?" Not really, since governmental decisions also give signals to the market and help direct attention to those standards. It would be best if roadmaps were provided, with particular under-mature standards being designated as "preferred standards", thus helping push industry in a particular direction. Examples where this strategy has borne fruit abound. This is also the strategy found in the Australian GIF. On the issue of multiplicity of standards, Sir Tim was very clear that they have to be avoided at all costs. He gave the example of XSLT and CSS, which are both stylesheet formats. He noted that their domain of operation was very different (with one being for servers and the other for clients), so having two standards with similar functions but different domains of operation does not make them multiple standards. Multiple standards defeat the purpose of the standardization process.

It was noted that governmental choices are of practical importance to citizens. During the Hurricane Katrina emergency, the federal emergency website only worked properly if Internet Explorer was used. How do we move forward? We must move forward by having policies that strike a balance between allowing for the natural evolution of standards and stability. The Government Interoperability Frameworks must be dynamic documents, allowing for categorization between standards and having clear roadmaps to enable industry to provide solutions to the government in a timely fashion. Governments must be strong in order to push industry towards openness, for the sake of its citizens, and not let industry dictate proprietary standards as the solution. Some opined that since there are dozens of domains that governments function in, maintaining lists of standards is a time-consuming process that is not justified, but others rebutted that by noting that for enterprise architectures to work, governments have to maintain such lists internally. Opening up that list to citizens and service providers would not entail greater overheads.

Sunil Abraham talking Open Standards at IGF09

(Video added on December 30, 2009)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/dcos-workshop-09

Open Standards

pranesh — 2010-01-11T10:52:23Z

The Centre for Internet and Society promotes Open Standards, i.e., standards that are technically and legally free to study, free to use, developed and managed in an open manner, with a complete implementation available to all. Open standards help all -- government and citizens, industry and consumers -- by allowing greater interoperability and choice (since they are necessary for free and open source software), greater competition, reduction in costs, and greater long-term reliability. As part of our work on Open Standards, we have been providing the comments to the Indian government's Draft National Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance, and have been working as a member of the Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards at the UN-sponsored Internet Governance Forum.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/standards/standards

Open Government Data Study: India

pranesh — 2011-08-23T02:43:49Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/open_data_india_final.pdf

Open Government Data Study

pranesh — 2015-09-03T08:08:22Z

CIS produced a report on the state of open government data in India, looking at policy, infrastructure, and particular case studies, as well as emerging concerns, future strategies and recommendations. The report is authored by Glover Wright, Pranesh Prakash, Sunil Abraham, and Nishant Shah. We are grateful to the Transparency and Accountability Initiative for providing generous funding for this report.

Cross-posted from the Transparency and Accountability Initiative website.

Open Government Data Study: India

India provides one of the most fascinating examples of the use of open government data in a developing country context. It has one of the best right to information laws in the world and the government’s approach to open data builds on this legacy of making open data relevant to Indian citizens. An estimated 456 million Indians live on less than $1.25 a day and a key issue for India, and other developing countries, is how open data can be accessible to them.

This paper reviews the progress being made towards open government data in India. Using case studies, it examines some of the pressing challenges facing the adoption of OGD in India. These include infrastructural problems, privacy concerns and the power imbalances that improved transparency can unwittingly create. It also examines government attitudes towards open data and related policies and reviews the relationships between open government data, the media and civil society.

The authors argue that the Indian Government’s responsibility should not stop short at just providing information, but also extend to making it available and accessible in a way that facilitates analysis and enhances offline usability – and ultimately makes it accessible to the poorest.

The paper concludes by suggesting technical and policy strategies to develop, promote, implement and maintain a robust open government data policy in India.

Download the report [PDF, 1.03 MB]

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-government-data-study

Open Government Data in India (v2)

pranesh — 2012-12-14T10:25:25Z

The first draft of the second version of the Open Government Data Report is now online. Nisha Thompson worked on updating the first version of the report. This updated version of the report on open government data in India includes additional case studies as well as a potential policy (National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy) that would create a central government data portal. The report was distributed for peer review and public feedback.

There are additional government case studies regarding e-governance and how they are changing the way data is collected and distributed. The report also looks at the issues around open data at the city and panchayat level and profiles new projects that are working to fill that void. It also includes a deeper account account of the global perspective on open government data and how India's experience with open data will be different from what the west is doing. Please do let us know what you think are deficiencies in the report, corrections that should be made, or even just general comments. Drop in a word even if you just find it useful. Please do write in to pranesh[at]cis-india.org by Friday, September 2, 2011. Download the [draft report].

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/ogd-draft-v2-call-for-comments

Open Government Data

pranesh — 2012-07-16T12:42:33Z

The Transparency & Accountability Initiative published a book titled “Opening Government: A Guide to Best Practice in Transparency, Accountability and Civic Engagement across the Public Sector”. The Centre for Internet & Society contributed a chapter on Open Government Data.

Openness in relation to information on governmental functioning is a crucial component of democratic governance. There are few things more abhorrent to democracies than a lack of transparency in their functioning, and secrecy in public affairs is generally a sign of autocratic rule. Such transparency is the foundation for the seeking of accountability from those who exercise power over public policy issues and governmental functioning, including not only governments but also large corporations, trade unions, civil society organisations (CSOs), funding agencies and special interest groups. This information would also include all information on private bodies that can be accessed by public authorities.

Transparency helps citizens to independently evaluate governmental functioning and thus hold accountable any instances of corruption or mismanagement, whether at the level of policy formulation or at the level of implementation. Thus, the freedom of speech and expression and the right to receive information, which are seen as two sides of the same right under most international covenants, are both vitally important in ensuring transparent and accountable governance.

Making public information that is produced by the government is slightly different from merely making public information on governmental functioning. While many instances of the former are subsumed within the latter (e.g. information collected by the government), there are also areas where the two categories do not overlap. Openness with respect to government-produced information is part of the right of the public to access any output of taxpayer funding. Thus the category of ‘governmental information’ or ‘governmental data’ can be taken to include information about the government and governmental functioning, as well as information collected and produced by the government.

In addition, there can be two related but independent grounds on which the right of the public to governmental information is often founded. The ‘open government data’ movement – it is now a demand cutting across multiple nations and deserves to be so called – is predicated upon there being a certain degree of transparency in public functioning, notably through the existence of ‘right to information’ or ‘freedom of information’ statutes. Specifically, the open data movement generally understands the public’s right to information to include (1) the proactive disclosure of information; (2) the internet being the primary medium for such disclosure; (3) information being made available for access and for re-use free of charge and; (4) information being made available in a machine-readable format to enable computer-based re-use.

As it would be meaningless to demand the additional components that go to make ‘open government data’ in an environment where the basic right to information does not exist, all recommendations here (including initial steps) presume that such a right exists.

Initial steps

Goal
A commitment by the government to provide proactive disclosure of existing digital data on the web.

Justification
Most governments already rely on computers at least for information storage at most levels even if they often perform information processing and sharing (i.e. conduct governmental transactions whether government-government, government business, or government-civil society) offline. This information that already exists in a digital form – quite often in the form of text documents and spread sheets – can and should be made public, based on a narrow negative blacklist. This blacklist should have a list of categories of information that should not be made available because of a narrow set of concerns such as privacy and properly classified state secrets. While this will undoubtedly result in the haphazard release of files that may be difficult to comprehend or use effectively, this is not a reason for keeping data offline and out of public reach. Once a process has been initiated of continually putting data up online, the data and the process can themselves be bettered through more elaborate technological and process-related improvements. Proactive disclosure steps can and should be taken even without the implementation of a robust procedural back-end
for information gathering, processing and sharing along with the technology that enables it. While such robust information architecture and back-end infrastructure is certainly desirable, it is not necessary for the immediate online release of files that are already in digital format.

Recommendations

The government should create a minimal front-facing infrastructure, in terms of both technology (namely, a website) and human resources (people who are tasked with the responsibility of uploading governmental records, documents, reports and other information).
A negative list of information that may not be shared should be drawn up by each public authority so that all other material can be made publicly available immediately, keeping in mind the more general guidelines that exist in national and sub-national policies and laws on the right to information.
A timeline should be put in place to ensure that proactive disclosure of existing government information continues to happen on a regular basis, until more rigorous steps are taken towards open government data.

More substantial steps

Goal
All government data is made available, in a form that ensures ease of use and reuse.

Justification
Making government data available online is just the first basic step. All information released requires a proper underpinning in informational policy and technological support to realise full transparency, citizen participation and full social and economic value. Governments should use smarter technologies to ensure that the policy commitment to open government data can be realised in practice. In particular, searchability in the system greatly helps to ensure accessibility for persons with disabilities. Such searchability is often easy when it comes to text, but ends up being more complicated in other areas. For this reason, some of the suggestions on this have been kept for the next section (on proposals for most ambitious steps).

Recommendations

Policy and process

An information policy should be formulated that deals comprehensively with best practices with regard to information collection, storage, retrieval and management at the national level, and that allows for the adoption of that policy either with modification or directly by sub-national governments.
- Part of this policy must ensure that most new information is either created in a digital form, or is digitised from paper as soon as is practicable, and that later transactions of this information happen, as far as possible, over electronic modes of communication.
- This policy must also ensure that as much as electronic receipt of governmental information is seen as a right of citizens, so is non-electronic receipt.
A technological policy should be formulated that mandates the use of open standards in all e-governance to promote interoperability and prevent vendor lock-in, with only temporary and limited exceptions.
- This must be accompanied by a document on technological architecture (whether called an e-governance interoperability framework (e-GIF) policy, or a national enterprise architecture (NEA)) that lays down the broad parameters of the technology framework to enable the information architecture policy, including the metadata standards.
The ability to reuse the published data must be guaranteed as part of a public sector information/open government data policy. This is crucial to enable journalists, CSOs and others.
All information must be provided free of cost at least in cases where:
- The government is not monetising the data, nor has plans to do so; or
- The data is for use by individuals and small and medium enterprises; or
- The data is available without any special fees under right to information/freedom of information statutes.

Technology

All public authorities must be made to ensure that they use open standards, such as Unicode, prescribed in the e-GIF/ NEA. In addition, their data processing and publishing processes must comply with those laid out in these architectural documents.
Sector-specific and use-specific metadata must be included in all files and objects made available to the public, so that when they use the services to retrieve objects they can make sense of the objects and manipulate them appropriately.
This metadata must be standardised, as this is a crucial requirement to enable easy categorisation and searching of information. An important part of searching through the data is also searching through the full contents of the datasets.

Most ambitious steps

Goal
To translate the publishing of open governmental data into better data via input from the public.

Justification
Public outreach and citizen-oriented tools are crucial to ensuring a vibrant online and offline public sphere where government data are used and discussed and a feedback loop is created, rather than this being a mere data dump. Using service-oriented architecture will help in ensuring platform independence, better scalability, greater code reuse, higher availability of services, parallel development of different components and many other benefits in terms of provision of data for governments. A robust service-oriented architecture will enable citizens to be treated as yet another client asking for information, and will enable useful application programming interfaces (APIs) to be built that will allow for easy access for power users to the data.

Integration with social media is a must, because it allows governments to reach vast networks of people at once and defray costs. Such integration will allow governments to go where many citizens are, rather than trying to get the citizens to come to them. However, care must be taken to ensure that such integration is done with adequate safeguards for privacy, long-term archival capability and data portability.

Recommendations

Policy and process

The pro-elite bias that is often inherent in online technologies must be actively neutralised through policy. Such a policy must be designed to ensure that there is no elitist capture of the benefits of open government data, and that there is active promotion of ‘offline translation’ of data, especially in technologically divided countries where the gap between those who have access to technology and those who do not is wide.
Governments must allow for correction of data by the public.
Offline translation of data must be facilitated, especially in technologically poorer countries.

Technology

Documents should be structured with semantic mark-up, which allows for intelligent querying of the content of the document itself. Before settling upon a domestic usagespecific semantic mark-up schema, well-established XML schemas should be examined for their suitability and should be used wherever appropriate.
Multiple forms of access must be provided to the data, and it must be made available interactively through the web for non-technical users. For more advanced users, the data must be available for bulk downloads, and it should also be accessible through well-documented open APIs.
There should be a single-point portal (similar to the UK’s Data.gov.uk) to provide access to different public authorities’ data.
All data should be Cloud-based to the extent that it ensures lower overheads for the government.

Download the full report (PDF, 440 Kb)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/open-government-data-commitments-best-practices

Open Debate

pranesh — 2011-04-02T14:34:00Z

Deepa Kurup's article in Frontline on the battle over open standards in e-governance.

Original report in Frontline.

Open Debate

With substantial public funding committed to e-governance projects, the issue of technological standards generates much heat.

by Deepa Kurup
(from Volume 26, Issue 23, dated November 07-20, 2009)

THE information technology (IT) industry in India is bitterly divided over the issue of technological standards to be adopted in e-governance processes. This problem stems from the fact that large, state-funded e-governance projects in the pipeline present the recession-hit IT sector with substantial business opportunities.

With the guidelines for setting these standards being finalised by the Department of Information Technology (DIT) under the National Policy on Open Standards for E-Governance, the debate on the nature of the standards – critical to the effective delivery of public e-services – is hotting up. Intense lobbying is on by those in favour of proprietary standards and by the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement, which is against it.

When the draft policy was tabled at the meeting of the apex committee of standards for e-governance in June, the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) and the Manufacturers’ Association for Information Technology (MAIT) pushed for two modifications to it: the replacement of open and free standards with royalty-based ones, and allowing multiple standards in the same technological domain.

The FOSS community and open source technology firms have opposed these demands strongly. Fosscomm, a FOSS community network, wrote to the DIT seeking the withdrawal of both clauses. Leading open source technology firms such as Sun Microsystems, IBM and Red Hat have pointed out that the NASSCOM-MAIT position is at divergence with theirs and, therefore, does not reflect a unified “industry” perspective.

The DIT, which made public the first draft of the policy in June 2008, has not placed subsequent drafts for public review. Fosscomm has protested against the “unparticipatory nature” of this policymaking process, which has considerable public-interest implications, not to mention an outlay of over Rs.5,000 crore for 27 national e-governance projects.

The FOSS community believes that for a standard to be truly open, its specifications must be unconditionally accessible and royalty-free in perpetuity. This includes associated patents and extensions. NASSCOM, on the other hand, has sought standards that are open but tied to royalties, on what in policy parlance is called RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) licensing terms.

However, RAND standards are inextricably linked to intellectual property right (IPR) regimes. The government may have to pay royalties to patent holders throughout the lifetime of the standards. Further, the FOSS community argues that “reasonable/non-discriminatory” is a loose term that can be interpreted to the advantage of the patent holder. And with licence confidentiality being what it is, violations will be hard to monitor, it feels.

Prabir Purkayastha of the Delhi Science Forum believes that the policy, if implemented in its current form, will create an “anomalous position” for the government. “That would imply that India still does not legally recognise software patents, yet is willing to accept patent protection in its standards.”

Standards diluted

The first draft of the policy unambiguously states that the open standard chosen must be royalty-free for its lifetime, but subsequent drafts allowed for RAND terms to be invoked in the absence of an existing open standard. This loophole, FOSS supporters fear, may allow powerful lobbies to hijack these standards in a non-transparent environment inside committee rooms.

If, as the proprietary camp wishes, open standards are redefined as RAND exclusively, a substantial portion of the taxpayers’ money will go towards royalties and software monopolies will be entrenched into this growing segment.

Leading Indian IT companies have supported proprietary software; this was evident from the debate on India’s vote at the International Standards Organisation (ISO) on the Open Document Format versus Microsoft’s OOXML controversy.

Open standards

“If we do not pay for using weights and measures in the physical world, why should we in the digital world?” asks Venkatesh Hariharan, corporate affairs director, Red Hat. “It’s a trap. Proprietary formats are controlled by monopolistic outfits that drive adoption of a technology, file a thicket of patents, and litigate if royalties aren’t paid.”

The Internet, built on several open standards, is the best example of how open standards form the basis of major technological innovations. It allows for a level playing field, particularly in developing economies. By framing a purely open standards policy, India can show the way for the developing world.

Developed countries (such as those of the European Union) are moving towards mandating open standards in government departments, processes and interactions. However, it is developing countries that stand to gain most from open standards. “Proprietary standards place a larger burden on developing economies than developed as they have a greater need to participate in the global network by using standards, but do have lesser capabilities than developed economies in terms of paying for royalties,” writes Pranesh Prakash, Centre for Internet and Society, in his letter to the DIT. The “industry view” is not in the interests of small- and medium-size enterprises.

An Indian case study of how open standards can cut costs, foster monopoly-free competition and provide interoperability is the Smart Card Operating System for Transport Applications (SCOSTA). A standard for smart card-based driving licences and vehicle registration projects handled by different State governments, SCOSTA was developed by the National Informatics Centre with help from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

The number of vendors providing cards and card readers increased after an open standard was adopted and specifications were made freely available on a website.

While four foreign companies were marketing smart cards earlier, over a dozen Indian companies are doing the same now, according to a United Nations Development Programme report on e-government interoperability. More significantly, IPR rents dropped and the market price of a card came down from Rs.300 to Rs.30.

On the second issue – that of allowing multiple standards in a single technological domain – the policy allows adopting additional standards “in national interest”.

Multiple standards

Public data, like land records, lie at the core of every e-governance process; multiple standards create interoperability issues and increase the cost of conversion from one format to another. In fact, if a standard is truly open, and hence developed in a participative manner, it will automatically grow to incorporate any reasonable requirement of the community.

Although this tussle appears to be restricted to the e-governance space, much more is really at stake. In a developing economy such as India, open and royalty-free technological standards are critical because they enable domestic industries to grow and compete in a fair and monopoly-free market. And, by enabling access to technology, they foster an innovation-friendly environment.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/open-debate

Online Pre-Censorship is Harmful and Impractical

pranesh — 2011-12-12T17:00:50Z

The Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Mr. Kapil Sibal wants Internet intermediaries to pre-censor content uploaded by their users. Pranesh Prakash takes issue with this and explains why this is a problem, even if the government's heart is in the right place. Further, he points out that now is the time to take action on the draconian IT Rules which are before the Parliament.

Mr. Sibal is a knowledgeable lawyer, and according to a senior lawyer friend of his with whom I spoke yesterday, greatly committed to ideals of freedom of speech. He would not lightly propose regulations that contravene Article 19(1)(a) [freedom of speech and expression] of our Constitution. Yet his recent proposals regarding controlling online speech seem unreasonable. My conclusion is that the minister has not properly grasped the way the Web works, is frustrated because of the arrogance of companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. And while he has his heart in the right place, his lack of knowledge of the Internet is leading him astray. The more important concern is the IT Rules that have been in force since April 2011.

Background

The New York Times scooped a story on Monday revealing that Mr. Sibal and the MCIT had been in touch with Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, asking them to set up a system whereby they would manually filter user-generated content before it is published, to ensure that objectionable speech does not get published. Specifically, he mentioned content that hurt people's religious sentiments and content that Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor described as 'vile' and capable of inciting riots as being problems. Lastly, Mr. Sibal defended this as not being "censorship" by the government, but "supervision" of user-generated content by the companies themselves.

Concerns

One need not give lectures on the benefits of free speech, and Mr. Sibal is clear that he does not wish to impinge upon it. So one need not point out that freedom of speech means nothing if not the freedom to offend (as long as no harm is caused). There can, of course, be reasonable limitations on freedom of speech as provided in Article 19 of the ICCPR and in Article 19(2) of our Constitution. My problem lies elsewhere.

Secrecy

It is unfortunate that the New York Times has to be given credit for Mr. Sibal addressing a press conference on this issue (and he admitted as much). What he is proposing is not enforcement of existing rules and regulations, but of a new restriction on online speech. This should have, in a democracy, been put out for wide-ranging public consultations first.

Making intermediaries responsible

The more fundamental disagreement is that over how the question of what should not be published should be decided, and how that decision should be and how that should be carried out, and who can be held liable for unlawful speech. I believe that "to make the intermediary liable for the user violating that code would, I think, not serve the larger interests of the market." Mr. Sibal said that in May this year in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. The intermediaries (that is, all persons and companies who transmit or host content on behalf of a third party), are but messengers just like a post office and do not exercise editorial control, unlike a newspaper. (By all means prosecute Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft whenever they have created unlawful content, have exercised editorial control over unlawful content, have incited and encouraged unlawful activities, or know after a court order or the like that they are hosting illegal content and still do not remove it.) Newspapers have editors who can take responsibility for content published in the newspaper. They can afford to, because the number of articles in a newspaper is limited. YouTube, which has 48 hours of videos uploaded every minutes, cannot. One wag suggested that Mr. Sibal was not suggesting a means of censorship, but of employment generation and social welfare for censors and editors. To try and extend editorial duties to these 'intermediaries' by executive order or through 'forceful suggestions' to these companies cannot happen without amending s.79 of the Information Technology Act which ensures they are not to be held liable for their user's content: the users are. Internet speech has, to my knowledge, and to date, has never caused a riot in India. It is when it is translated into inflammatory speeches on the ground with megaphones that offensive speech, whether in books or on the Internet, actually become harmful, and those should be targeted instead. And the same laws that apply to offline speech already apply online. If such speech is inciting violence then the police can be contacted and a magistrate can take action. Indeed, Internet companies like Facebook, Google, etc., exercise self-regulation already (excessively and wrongly, I feel sometimes). Any person can flag any content on YouTube or Facebook as violating the site's terms of use. Indeed, even images of breast-feeding mothers have been removed from Facebook on the basis of such complaints. So it is mistaken to think that there is no self-regulation. In two recent cases, the High Courts of Bombay (Janhit Manch v. Union of India) and Madras (R. Karthikeyan v. Union of India) refused to direct the government and intermediaries to police online content, saying that places an excessive burden on freedom of speech.

IT Rules, 2011

In this regard, the IT Rules published in April 2011 are great offenders. While speech that is 'disparaging' (while not being defamatory) is not prohibited by any statute, yet intermediaries are required not to carry 'disparaging' speech, or speech to which the user has no right (how is this to be judged? do you have rights to the last joke that you forwarded?), or speech that promotes gambling (as the government of Sikkim does through the PlayWin lottery), and a myriad other kinds of speech that are not prohibited in print or on TV. Who is to judge whether something is 'disparaging'? The intermediary itself, on pain of being liable for prosecution if it is found have made the wrong decision. And any person may send a notice to an intermediary to 'disable' content, which has to be done within 36 hours if the intermediary doesn't want to be held liable. Worst of all, there is no requirement to inform the user whose content it is, nor to inform the public that the content is being removed. It just disappears, into a memory hole. It does not require a paranoid conspiracy theorist to see this as a grave threat to freedom of speech. Many human rights activists and lawyers have made a very strong case that the IT Rules on Intermediary Due Diligence are unconstitutional. Parliament still has an opportunity to reject these rules until the end of the 2012 budget session. Parliamentarians must act now to uphold their oaths to the Constitution.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/online-pre-censorship-harmful-impractical

On the Internet, how much is too much?

pranesh — 2011-04-02T15:19:33Z

The Hindu carried a piece on 05/08/2009, discussing the Avinash Kashyap / defamation of the President case.

On the Internet, how much is too much?

Deepa Kurup

BANGALORE (05/08/2009): As many as 9,740 website links are thrown up when running a search with a phrase ridiculing the Indian President on the popular search engine Google. Of these, at least a few hundred websites host content that criticise the first citizen, often in harsh terms; one even hosts a game on flash player where you can fling virtual tomatoes on the President’s portrait. The Internet is inundated with such attacks, arguably offensive and hurtful, on several public personalities.

Last week a Bangalore-based engineering student Avinash Kashyap was arrested for allegedly posting “obscene content” about the President on the Internet under Section 469 of the Indian Penal Code (forgery for purpose of harming reputation). Later, he was released on bail. Police sources said the message was objectionable and not “obscene or pornographic”, as reported in some sections of the media. Two unsubstantiated versions did the rounds: the student had hacked into an official government website, and posted on her behalf: “I am a rubber stamp”. The second story is that Avinash created an online profile under her name and posted the same.

SC refusal

Using the web to rant, make unwarrantable allegations or defame an individual is offensive, to say the least. However, those who campaign for a non-invasive Internet argue that laws are often misused to target individuals and stifle dissenting voices. Recently, the Supreme Court refused to quash criminal proceedings against a student, Ajith D. He had been prosecuted for creating an anti-Shiv Sena community on Orkut. Ajith had argued that he merely started the community, and also pleaded that his life would be under threat if he had to appear in a Maharashtra court. “Anything that is posted on the Internet goes to the public... you are a computer student and you know how many people access Internet portals,” the court said, adding that he will have to explain his conduct in a court of law.

Debate

This observation has triggered a debate among net users and academics who differ on the private — and public — nature of web space. Those who advocate boundless Internet freedom point to incidents in 2007 and 2008 where a political party consistently clamped down on individuals that criticised it, often resorting to violence and vandalism. But were these isolated cases? Or can the Rama Sene — seen beating up women in a pub in Mangalore — use defamation laws against the retaliatory and witty Pink Chaddi campaign that spread though a social-networking site?

The Internet, unlike traditional media, is complicated for various reasons, one of them being that it is difficult to accurately trace the author of a particular posting. Gurumurthy of the IT for Change, a non-profit organisation, feels that Internet norms have to be evolved. “The Internet is global, and the laws also must be. The real solution can be a global public policy process, which is being considered at the Internet Governance Forum (a UN body),” he says.

The Indian IT Act, as it stands today, is being criticised as restrictive. Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society says the law is “unclear and over-expansive”. “If you are an individual blogger, a law like this could have a chilling effect on creativity and free speech. You could call this a scare tactic: by making examples of a few people and scaring people from doing what could be normal web activities like forwarding a joke,” Mr. Abraham explains.

The other argument is that technology and email gateways are seldom fool-proof. Lakshman Kailash, a software professional arrested in August 2007 for allegedly defaming Maratha king Shivaji by uploading an “offensive picture” on a social networking site, says “better clarity and awareness on laws is critical today”.

For no fault of his, he spent 50 days in jail because the Internet Service Provider made a mistake in tracking his IP (Internet Protocol) address. “I later decided to go public though this meant prolonging the agony for my family, because there is no awareness and accountability in the net space,” he says.

“I will never condone offending someone on the Internet — but if authorities want to keep the laws strict, then they must create awareness among users. Perhaps, websites can be asked to moderated content,” Mr. Kailash says.

Laws of the land

Google and such websites act in accordance with the laws of the land. Moreover, these IP addressed can be manipulated and a random cruise through websites or social networks reveal that the next offensive message is just a few clicks away.

As Mr. Kailash points out, thousands of bloggers continue to air their opinions, often extreme and offensive, oblivious to the repercussions. It is time they pause to think about the possible consequences, before going ahead with their blogging.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/on-the-internet-how-much-is-too-much

NTIA to give up control of the Internet's root

pranesh — 2014-03-18T18:21:40Z

On Friday evening the U.S. government's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced that it was setting into motion a transition to give up a few powers that it holds over some core Internet functions, and that this would happen by September 2015. Pranesh Prakash provides a brief response to that announcement.

As it noted in the NTIA's press release:

NTIA’s responsibility includes the procedural role of administering changes to the authoritative root zone file – the database containing the lists of names and addresses of all top-level domains – as well as serving as the historic steward of the [Domain Name System (DNS)]. NTIA currently contracts with [the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN] to carry out the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions and has a Cooperative Agreement with Verisign under which it performs related root zone management functions. Transitioning NTIA out of its role marks the final phase of the privatization of the DNS as outlined by the U.S. Government in 1997.

This move was welcomed by "Internet technical leaders".

While this announcement cannot be said to be unexpected, it is nonetheless an important one and is also a welcome one. The NTIA seems to have foreclosed any option of the US government's role being performed by any government-led organization by noting in their press release, "NTIA will not accept a proposal that replaces the NTIA role with a government-led or an inter-governmental organization solution," once again reaffirming their belief in American exceptionalism: the NTIA could fulfil its role despite being a government, but now even a body involving multiple stakeholders can't replace the NTIA's role if it is going to be government-led.

Unfortunately, this announcement to relax American "stewardship" or "oversight" over some aspects of the Internet's technical functioning cannot restore the trust that has been lost due to actions taken by the US government and US companies. This new announcement won't change the US government's ability to 'tap' the Internet, nor will it affect their ability to unilaterally seize .com/.net/.name/.org/.edu/.tv/.cc/.us and other US-based domain names. Nor will a shift away from NTIA oversight lead to any of the chilling visions that some believe might lie in our future: the fears of the Association of National Advertisers and of some politicians and members of the US Congress is based on ignorance of what NTIA's role is.

The European Commission in a communiqué last month noted: "recent revelations of large-scale surveillance have called into question the stewardship of the U.S. when it comes to Internet governance". Unfortunately, the U.S. giving up that stewardship role will not prevent the continuation of their large-scale surveillance, just as the lack of such a stewardship role has not prevented other governments — U.K., India, Canada, Sweden, France, etc. — from engaging in large-scale surveillance.

There are three main benefits from the U.S. giving up this role.

First, it will put an end to the political illegitimacy of the U.S. government having a core authority in a global system, somehow making it first among equals;
Second, will focus light on ICANN, which under US oversight performs the IANA functions, and might, one hopes, lead to needed reform in ICANN's other functions;
Third, it will allow us to collectively move on from this dreaded political issue at the heart of Internet governance, which nevertheless is of little practical consequence if ICANN's accountability mechanisms are strengthened. As difficult as it may be, ICANN has to be accountable not just to one government or another but to the world, and ensuring that accountability to all doesn't become accountability to none, as NetChoice's Steve DelBianco put it, is the formidable task ahead of us.

Yet, all the ICANN reform in the world will still not lead to a less spied-upon, more open, and more equitable Internet.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/ntia-to-give-up-control-of-internets-root

No Civil Society Members in the Cyber Regulations Advisory Committee

pranesh — 2013-01-09T17:56:57Z

The Government of India has taken our advice and reconstituted the Cyber Regulations Advisory Commitee. But there is no representation of Internet users, citizens, and consumers — only government and industry interests.

In multiple op-eds (Indian Express and Mint), I have pointed out the need for the government to reconstitute the "Cyber Regulations Advisory Committee" (CRAC) under section 88 of the Information Technology Act. That it be reconstituted along the model of the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee was also part of the suggestions that CIS sent to the government after a meeting FICCI had convened along with the government on September 4, 2012.

Section 88 requires that people "representing the interests principally affected" by Internet policy or "having special knowledge of the subject matter" be present in this advisory body. The main function of the CRAC is to advise the the Central Government "either generally as regards any rules or for any other purpose connected with this Act".

Despite this important function, the CRAC had — till November 2012 — only ever met twice, both times in 2001. The response to an RTI informed us that the body had never provided any advice to the government.

Government Not Serious

The increasing pressure on the government for botching up Internet regulations has led it to reconstitute the CRAC. However, the list of members of the committee shows that the government is not serious about this committee representing "the interests primarily affected" by Internet policy.

Importantly, this goes against the express wish of the Shri Kapil Sibal, the Union Minister for Communications and IT, who has repeatedly stated that he believes that Internet-related policymaking should be an inclusive process. Most recently, at the 2012 Internet Governance Forum he stated that we need systems that are:

"collaborative, consultative, inclusive and consensual, for dealing with all public policies involving the Internet"

Interestingly, despite the Hon'ble Minster verbally inviting civil society organizations (on November 23, 2012) for a meeting of the CRAC that happened on November 25, 2012, the Department of Electronics and Information Technology refused to send us invitations for the meeting. This hints at a disconnect between the political and bureaucratic wings of the government, at least at some levels.

Interestingly, this isn't the first time this has been pointed out. Na. Vijayashankar was levelling similar criticisms against the CRAC way back in August 2000 when the original CRAC was constituted.

Breakdown by Stakeholder Groupings

While there is no one universal division of stakeholders in Internet governance, but four goups are widely recognized: governments (national and intergovernmental), industry, technical community, and civil society. Using that division, we get:

Government - 15 out of 22 members
Industry bodies - 6 out of 22 members
Technical community / Academia - 1 out of 22 members
Civil society - 0 out of 22 members.

List of Members of Cyber Regulatory Advisory Committee

The official notification (G.S.R. 827(E)) is available on the DEIT website and came into force on November 16, 2012.

(Note: Names with ~~strikethroughs~~ have been removed from the CRAC since 2000, and those with emphasis have been added.)

Minister, Ministry of Communication and Information Technology - Chairman
Minister of State, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology - Member
Secretary, Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, Department of Electronics and Information Technology - Member
Secretary, Department of Telecommunications - Member
~~Finance Secretary - Member~~
Secretary, Legislative Department - Member
Secretary, Department of Legal Affairs - Member
~~Shri T.K. Vishwanathan, Presently Member Secretary, Law Commission - Member~~
Secretary, Ministry of Commerce - Member
Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs - Member
Secretary, Ministry of Defence - Member
Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank of India - Member
Information Technology Secretary from the states by rotation - Member
Director, IIT by rotation from the IITs - Member
Director General of Police from the States by rotation - Member
President, NASSCOM - Member
President, Internet Service Provider Association - Member
Director, Central Bureau of Investigation - Member
Controller of Certifying Authority - Member
Representative of CII - Member
Representative of FICCI - Member
Representative of ASSOCHAM - Member
President, Computer Society of India - Member
Group Coordinator, Department of Electronic and Information Technology - Member Secretary

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cyber-regulations-advisory-committee-no-civil-society

New Release of IPR Chapter of India-EU Free Trade Agreement

pranesh — 2011-09-22T12:34:05Z

A draft of the IPR chapter of the EU-India FTA, made publicly available now for the first time, provides insight into India's response in July 2010 to several EU proposals on intellectual property protection and enforcement.

A draft of the IPR chapter of the EU-India FTA, made publicly available for the first time (PDF, 296Kb), provides insight into India's response in July 2010 to several EU proposals on intellectual property protection and enforcement. The consolidated draft which was prepared to serve as the basis of talks that took place from July 12-14, 2010, in New Delhi, reveals parties' negotiating stances in response to preliminary positions put forth earlier (see IPR Chapter May draft).

In particular, this draft reflects India's rejection of many EU proposals that would require India to:

exceed its obligations under the WTO's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), e.g by providing data exclusivity for pharmaceutical products;
impose radical enforcement provisions, such as liability of intermediary service providers, border measures for goods in transit, and raised norms for damages and injunctions; or
require legislative change, e.g., on data protection, and to accommodate the full EU demands on geographical indicators.

A chart compiled by CIS comparing proposed language by India and the EU in several provisions with TRIPS can be found here (PDF, 402 Kb).

Sources close to the negotiations have also confirmed that during the July talks India reiterated its refusal to go beyond TRIPS, and its refusal to discuss issues that require changes to Indian law. India appears to have also reiterated that it could not finalise FTA copyright provisions before passage of the Copyright Amendment Bill in the Indian Parliament.

It is hard to assess the current state of the negotiations on IP or to measure the outcomes of subsequently held talks without access to recent drafts, a public record of deliberations, or the schedule of full and intersessional rounds taking place. However, from press and other statements attributed to the European Commission and Indian officials after the December 2010 EU-India Summit in Brussels, it appears that:

both parties plan to conclude the FTA, the biggest ever for the EU, by Spring 2011;
the EU has not relaxed its pursuit of at least some "TRIPS plus" provisions such as data protection for pharmaceuticals
a mutually agreed solution to India's WTO case against the EU over the seizure of generic medicines may be round the corner. Its impact on the FTA is open to speculation.

Because the India-EU FTA is likely to set a new precedent for future trade agreements between developed and developing countries, and with enormous stakes for patients across the globe, India and the EU need to get it right and ensure no provision runs counter to the interests of millions of citizens.

For further information about the text, contact Malini Aisola <malini.aisola@gmail.com> or Pranesh Prakash <pranesh@cis-india.org>

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/july-2010-ipr-india-eu-fta