Centre for Internet and Society

Unlicensed Spectrum Policy for Government of India

praskrishna — 2012-07-26T08:29:16Z

This file is authored by Satya N Gupta, Sunil Abraham and Yelena Gyulkhandanyan.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/unlicensed-spectrum-brief.pdf

Publication

praskrishna — 2012-12-14T10:01:05Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publication

Publication

praskrishna — 2016-11-05T12:30:14Z

Our major research outputs on Accessibility, Access to Knowledge, Openness, Internet Governance, Telecom and Digital Natives can be downloaded by clicking on the links below.

Accessibility

Web Accessibility Policy Making: An International Perspective

Published by G3ict and CIS in cooperation with the Hans Foundation
Foreword by Axel Leblois, Founder and Executive Director of G3ict
Download Web Accessibility Policy Making [PDF, 335 Kb]
Download the Daisy File

Universal Service for Persons with Disabilities: A Global Survey of Policy Interventions and Good Practices

Published by G3ict and CIS in cooperation with the Hans Foundation
Foreword by Axel Leblois, Founder and Executive Director of G3ict
Download Universal Service for Persons with Disabilities
Download Universal Service for Persons with Disabilities [Daisy Format]

e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities

Published in collaboration with G3ict and ITU and sponsored by the Hans Foundation

Foreword by Axel Leblois, Founder and Executive Director of G3ict

Download e-Accessibility Policy Handbook [PDF, 953 Kb]. Also available in Daisy Format and Braille
Download e-Accessibility Policy Handbook (Russian)

Access to Knowledge

Consumers International IP Watchlist 2011 — India Report

IP Watchlist was published by Consumers International in response to the US Special 301 Report. India Report was prepared by Pranesh Prakash
Originally published on the A2K Network website
Download the India Report [PDF, 150 Kb]

Consumers International IP Watchlist 2009 — India Report

Openness

	Free Access to Law Is it Here to Stay? Good Practices Handbook Published by LexUM (University of Montréal), SAFLII (The South African Legal Information Institute) and the Centre for Internet and Society with funding from IDRC as part of the “Free Access to Law – Is it Here to Stay?” research project launched in 2009. Download the Good Practices Handbook [PDF, 425 Kb]
	Free Access to Law Is it Here to Stay? Environmental Scan Report Published by LexUM (University of Montréal), SAFLII (The South African Legal Information Institute) and the Centre for Internet and Society with funding from IDRC as part of the “Free Access to Law – Is it Here to Stay?” research project launched in 2009. Download the Environmental Scan Report [PDF, 860 Kb]
	Free Access to Law Is it Here to Stay? Local Researcher's Methodology Guide Published by LexUM (University of Montréal), SAFLII (The South African Legal Information Institute) and the Centre for Internet and Society with funding from IDRC as part of the “Free Access to Law – Is it Here to Stay?” research project launched in 2009. Download the Local Researcher's Methodology Guide [PDF, 1.19 Mb]
	Open Government Data Study Published by CIS and the Transparency and Accountability Initiative Authored by Glover Wright, Pranesh Prakash, Sunil Abraham and Nishant Shah Download Open Government Data Study [PDF, 1.03 Mb]
	The Online Video Environment in India - A Survey Report Published by CIS, iCommons and the Open Video Alliance Authored by Siddharth Chadha, Benjamin Moskowitz and Pranesh Prakash Download Online Video Environment in India [PDF, 1.22 Mb]
	Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader Published by CIS and the Institute of Network Cultures Edited by Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz Download Critical Point of View [PDF,

Internet Governance

Intermediary Liability in India: Chilling Effects on Free Expression on the Internet

Researched by Rishabh Dara
Published by CIS and Google India as part of the Google Policy Fellowship 2011 (Conducted for the first time in India and Asia Pacific).
Download Intermediary Liability in India [PDF, 406 Kb]

Telecom

	Unlicensed Spectrum Policy brief for Government of India Published by CIS and the Ford Foundation Authored by Satya N Gupta, Sunil Abraham and Yelena Gyulkhandanyan Download the Unlicensed Spectrum Policy brief for Government of India [PDF, 519 Kb]
	Open Spectrum for Development India Case Study Authored by Shyam Ponappa as part of the APC’s project work on Spectrum for development Download the Open Spectrum for Development India Case Study [PDF, 280 Kb]

Digital Natives

Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

A four-book collective (To Be, To Think, To Act, To Connect), published by Hivos and CIS
Edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen
Download the Four-volume Collective [PDF Files]

Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon: Position Papers

Published by Hivos and CIS
Edited by Nishant Shah, Josine Stremmelaar and Fieke Jansen
Download the Position Papers [PDF, 1173 Kb]

Digital Natives with a Cause? A Report

Published by Hivos and CIS
Authored by Nishant Shah and Sunil Abraham
Download the Digital Natives with a Cause? Report [PDF, 647 Kb]

Researchers at Work

	Re:Wiring Bodies Monograph authored by Asha Achuthan Series Edited by Nishant Shah Section I (Attitudes to Technology) & Section II (Mapping Transitions) Download the Monograph [PDF, 2.58 Mb]
	Archive and Access Monograph authored by Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto Series Edited by Nishant Shah Chapter I (Introduction), Chapter II (Land and the Unstable Document), Chapter III (History and the Region) and Chapter IV (In the Capital) Download the Monograph [PDF, 3.11 Mb]
	Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities Monograph authored by Pratyush Shankar Series Edited by Nishant Shah Chapter I (City, Technology & Cyber Space), Chapter II (The Idea of Space), Chapter III (The Imagination) and Chapter IV (The Transformation) Download the Monograph [PDF, 9.80 Mb]
	The Last Cultural Mile Monograph authored by Ashish Rajadhyaksha Series Edited by Nishant Shah Chapter I (Naming the Problem), Chapter II (Will-M-Miracle), Chapter III (The Television Revolution and the Bullet Theory), Chapter IV (The Education Miracle and the Device), Chapter V (The Unique Identity Number for Every Resident in India Project) Download the Monograph [PDF, 4.8 MB]
	Porn, Law and Video Technology Monograph authored by Namita A Malhotra Introduction by Maya Ganesh Series Edited by Nishant Shah Chapter I (For They Know Not What They Do), Chapter II (Pornography: The Trials and Tribulations of the Indian Courts), Chapter III (Family Jewels and Public Secrets), Chapter IV (Film, Video and Body), Chapter V (Amateur Video Pornography), Chapter VI (Downloading the State), Chapter VII (Technology Beast) and Chapter VIII (Vignettes for the 'Next') Download the Monograph [PDF, 6.62 Mb]

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publication/publication

IP Watchlist 2009

praskrishna — 2012-06-21T08:57:23Z

India report prepared by Pranesh Prakash in 2009.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/ip-watchlist-2009.pdf

Annual Report (2008-09)

praskrishna — 2012-06-20T12:23:29Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/annual-report-2008.pdf

Annual Report (2009-10)

praskrishna — 2012-06-20T11:54:08Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/annual-report-2009.pdf

Google Hangout with Ashoka Fellow Sunil Abraham

praskrishna — 2012-06-20T09:16:33Z

Sunil Abraham, an Ashoka Fellow from India, visited the DC Office and shared his work on public accountability, access, and learning at the intersection of internet and society.

Watch the video below

Click to see the original from YouTube.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/google-hangout-with-sunil

Global Networks, Individual Freedoms: A Peer Forum on Internet Freedom and Human Rights

praskrishna — 2012-06-28T09:12:28Z

In Connection with the 2012 Internet Freedom Fellows Program, the United States Mission to the United Nations in Geneva is pleased to invite Pranesh Prakash to a peer forum at the United States Mission to the United Nations on Thursday, June 21, 2012, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Join the Internet Freedom Fellows, diplomats, UN representatives, civil society, technologists and social media experts, Geneva media and other professionals engaged in the intersection of human rights, internet freedom and technology.

This peer forum is part of the Internet Freedom Fellows program, which brings human rights activists from across the globe to Geneva, Washington, and Silicon Valley to meet with fellow activists, U.S. and international government leaders, and members of civil society and the private sector engaged in technology and human rights.

This year’s Internet Freedom Fellows, all human rights activists and active practitioners of digital media, are from Syria, India, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Venezuela and Azerbaijan.

For additional information on the program, please visit Internet Freedom Fellows.

Program

9:00 a.m.	Welcome and introduction David Kennedy / John Horniblow
9:15 - 10:15	Freedom to Connect and Freedom from Fear: The problem of surveillance in a networked world. Rebecca MacKinnon – Co Founder Global Voices Online, Author “Consent of the Networked”, Boards of Directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Global Network Initiative
10:15 - 10:45	Developing Networked Voices and Promoting the protection of Human Rights Andreas Harsono, blogger and human rights activist (Indonesia), and Rosebell Kagumire, multimedia journalist working on peace and conflict issues in the Eastern Africa region (Uganda) 2011 Internet Freedom Fellows and journalists (via Skype)
10:45 - 11:00	Coffee break
11:00 - 12:00	Moderated Panel Discussion – How Do we Protect Human Rights in a world of global networks? How do the needs of the grassroots, civil society and business inform the process of upholding the UDHR and IHL in networks and technologies? Dr. Robert Whelan (ICRC), Pranesh Prakash, Salil Trepathi (IHRB), Nicolas Seidler (ISOC), Emin Milli Moderated Panel Discussion followed by Q &A
12:00 - 13:00	Buffet Luncheon
13:00 - 13:30	The Open Internet - Empowering Digital Humanitarianism Paul Conneally - Head of Communications for ITU and a former Red Cross delegate (in various positions, locations and with IFRC plus ICRC and the Irish Red Cross).
13:40 - 14:10	Global Network Initiative and the multistakeholder approach ensuring an Open Internet David Sullivan -Policy and Communications Director Global Network Initiative
14.15 - 14.40	The Silicon Valley Standard and implications for technology companies in the protection of Human Rights and other freedoms Brett Solomon -Exec Director Access Now (via Skype)
15:00	Twiplomacy Matthias Luefkins Managing Director, Digital, EMEA– Burson Marstellar

Participation is limited. Please RSVP by noon on Friday, June 15 to iff@usmission.ch. When responding, please indicate whether you will also join us for the luncheon buffet.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/peer-forum-on-internet-freedom-and-human-rights

Cos spying on competitors, staff: Study

praskrishna — 2012-06-20T08:46:38Z

Most companies are spying on their competitors and their own employees, according to a recent survey conducted by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham).

The Statesman published this article on June 19, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted in it.

The survey's results raise questions about whether employees have enough privacy in the workplace. Rubbishing the survey's findings, head of the Indian Council of Corporate Investigators, Mr Kunwar Vikram Singh, said businesses are not spying but verifying facts.

The Assocham survey said almost 1,200 of 1,500 executives surveyed admitted to hiring people to spy on their employees and monitor their lifestyles. They said they watch former employees, too, especially those who had been laid off or kicked out for fraud.

In the survey, which was done between January and May this year in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, the Delhi-National Capital Region and Mumbai, about 900 top industry officials said they carry out corporate espionage, bug the offices of their rivals and plant moles in other companies. About a quarter of respondents said they have hired computer experts to hack networks and track e-mails of their rivals.

Many more respondents — 1,110 of those questioned — said they use social media sites to track their rival companies and employees. “Most of the companies have mentioned their sensitive details including their data, plans, clients’ details, products and other confidential and trade-related secrets on their page and unknowingly share the same in the social media circuit,” said Mr DS Rawat, national secretary-general of Assocham, “which is why it is the most favoured spying activity being carried out by the companies.”

The practice of companies pilfering trade secrets and ideas may be bad for the country's business environment, said Mr Rawat. It “might dampen the spirit of innovation in the long-run,” he said.

The Indian Council of Corporate Investigators’ Mr Singh, however, disputed Assocham's picture of rampant corporate espionage. “I totally deny that corporates are spying on their employees,” he said. “It is not spying. It is verification of facts.”

Mr Singh said that when companies look into their employees or other companies, for example, before they enter into joint ventures, they are just carrying out “due diligence”. He said they legally gather information needed for companies to survive. He also denied there were any privacy issues.

Mr Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, though, said there are growing concerns about privacy in the workplace, including about intense video surveillance. “Managers started to object to this,” he said. “What they started saying was it really undermines the morale of these locations ... friends and relatives would ask, 'In spite of you being so educated, it's funny your companies don't trust you at all.'”

Companies need to develop more nuanced ways to deal with these problems — perhaps something more similar to the military's multiple levels of clearance — and different ways for people to acquire and lose trust, Mr Abraham said.

Whether or not surveillance is legal, depends on the type, Mr Abraham said. There is some private information a person will expect to remain private, and some information that is expected to be public — like Twitter feeds.

There is no law against monitoring this second type, known as “clear view surveillance”, he said, and blanket legislation could clash with freedom of expression. He said an ideal law for this should include a “proportional relation to power” clause, which would limit the legal ability of the powerful to monitor, but allow individual citizens more leeway.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/co-spying-on-competitors-staff

Internet At Liberty 2012

praskrishna — 2012-07-05T05:24:33Z

Activists and experts from all over the world came together for this event organised by Google on May 23 and 24, 2012 to explore free expression in the digital age.

Sunil Abraham was a speaker in Plenary IV Debate 3: In a world where nearly nine out of ten Internet users are not American, what is the responsibility of United States institutions in promoting internet freedom? Cynthia Wong, Mohamed El Dahshan, Dunja Mijatović and Judy Woodruff were the other speakers in this panel. See the video below:

Video

Internet at Liberty 2012: Plenary IV - Sunil Abraham, Cynthia Wong, Mohamed El Dahshan and Dunja Mijatović

View the video on YouTube

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/internet-liberty-2012

HasGeek presents The Fifth Elephant

praskrishna — 2012-06-19T06:38:13Z

HasGeek and the Centre for Internet & Society invite you the Fifth Elephant at the NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bangalore on July 27 and 28, 2012.

Why The Fifth Elephant?

Modern technology with ubiquitous connectivity and cloud-hosted computing power is increasingly becoming important for making sense of data. The infrastructure, tools, processes and algorithms for storage, analytics and visualization shape the meanings and value that can be derived from the data. At the same time, these technologies are strongly intertwined i.e., the database infrastructure shapes how data is accessed for processing, as well as the tools you can (or cannot) use to represent the data in certain ways on the frontend. Similarly, the paradigms used for simplifying and storing data — MapReduce, NoSQL, RDBMS — variously enable the morphing of complex data into meaningful formats. Working with each one of them involves limitations and possibilities.

The Fifth Elephant is the first of its kind of events where you will meet different people working with different kinds of data. It is an opportunity for learning about new tools, technologies, platforms, processes and best practices, and engaging with business leaders, IT decision-makers, journalists, analysts and developers. It is also an opportunity to showcase data products, APIs, services and platforms.

A Conference? An Event?

The Fifth Elephant is not simply a series of lectures. It is a space for interactions with a diverse audience to serendipitously explore insights and solutions for your data problems, to understand how hidden meanings in data can be made manifest, and to learn how others are working with data. The event is open to data analysts and scientists, statisticians, geeks, enthusiasts, data-driven product managers and designers, enterprise architects, journalists, researchers, developers and database professionals.

The Agenda

The Fifth Elephant will be held on July 27 and 28, 2012 at the NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bangalore. Day 1 covers the technology track — big data infrastructure, analytics and visualization. Day 2 invites talks from business and industry — finance, retail, health, media, telecom — to showcase the nature of data in each of these sectors and how they are working (and not working) with the data.

Apart from demos, lectures and tutorials, there will be opportunities for open house discussions and presentations on Hadoop, NoSQL versus RDBMS paradigms, and legal and licensing frameworks for data sharing, among others. Hacker corners, a dedicated participant lounge and interactive sponsor booths will further the learning, showcasing and engagement at the event.

For submitting talks and speaking proposals, visit funnel.hasgeek.com/5el.
Corporate tickets available for company delegates and employees. For more information write to info@hasgeek.com
For sponsorship queries, write to zainab@hasgeek.com

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/has-geek-presents-the-fifth-elephant

Recruitment Tracker: 21 students placed out of the 49 who sat for recruitment in Christ University’s School of Law, Class of 2012

praskrishna — 2012-06-18T08:45:53Z

The Class of 2012 at the School of Law, Christ University saw 21 students placed out of the 49 who sat for recruitment. The graduating class has a batch strength of 77 students. The batch saw 8 pre-placement offers, 4 students being accepted for LLM’s abroad and 3 students opting for litigation while 1 student opted to appear for the civil services examination.

Published by the Bar & Bench News Network on June 11, 2012

Pangea 3 was the biggest recruiter, bagging four students while Nishith Desai Associates, Murli & Co., Clutch Group and Prudent Insurance Brokers Private Limited hiring two students each. J. Sagar Associates, Linklegal, PXV Law Partners, BMR Advisors and Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Corporation picked up one student each.

The Centre for Internet and Society, human-rights organisation Justice and Care, Teach for India and the Freeland Wildlife Trust hired one student each. Out of the four students who have opted for a Masters programme, two will be going to the National University of Singapore and one each to Cornell University and George Washington University.

At the time of publication, the recruitment process for one student was currently under progress at J. Sagar Associates.

Name of the Company / Firm	Number of Students Recruited
Pangea3	4
Nishith Desai & Associates	2
Murli & Co.	2
Prudent Insurance Brokers	2
Clutch Group	2
BMR Advisors	1
J Sagar Associates	1
Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Corporation	1
PXV Law Partners	1
Link Legal	1
Freeland Wildlife Trust	1
Centre for Internet & Society	1
Justice and Care	1
Teach for India	1
TOTAL	21

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/recruitment-tracker-21-students-placed

PPOs save placement-record as Christ Law’s 2nd graduating batch hosts fewer law firms

praskrishna — 2012-06-18T08:33:02Z

The number of recruiting law firms visiting Christ College of Law Bangalore slumped to two this year, but the second batch graduating from the college made it up in terms of pre placement offers (PPOs) to secure 21 total jobs, one short of the college’s debut recruitment record.

This blog post by Prachi Shrivastava was published in Legally India on June 10, 2012

Out of the 14 organisations hiring from a pool of 49 students registered with the recruitment coordination committee of 2012, J Sagar Associates (JSA) and Nishith Desai Associates (NDA) were the only law firms interviewing on campus. JSA hired one and NDA hired two students.

[Correction: The information supplied by the RCC previously, was partially incorrect. It has now clarified that JSA and NDA did not visit campus, but conducted off-campus interviews]

PXV Law Partners, BMR Advisors and Link Legal Advocates, each extending one PPO, and Murli Associates with two PPOs, were the only other law firms figuring in the RCC’s recruitment table this year.

Legal process outsourcing unit (LPO) Pangea3 was the biggest recruiter at the law school, hiring three students through campus and one through PPO. Clutch Group was the other LPO that visited campus and engaged two students.

Insurance companies also paid a visit: Prudent Insurance Brokers hired two students while Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Corporation made one hire.

Three non government organisations (NGOs) and a think tank each recruited the remaining four students. International human rights NGO Justice and Care, and domestic free school-teaching movement Teach for India picked one student each on campus, and wildlife-law enforcement NGO Freeland Wildlife Trust hired one student through PPO.

Bangalore-based think tank Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) engaged a student.

Four more RCC participants in the batch of 77, will pursue an LLM. The University of Singapore accepted two students, while Cornell University and George Washington University accepted one each.

Three students are known to have opted for court practice while one gears up to take the civil services examination.

Previously, at Christ

The first ever class graduating from the Bangalore law school last year, smaller in size by two students, saw 22 jobs for a pool of 52 students registered with the inaugural recruitment coordination committee.

Trilegal and Lakshmikumaran & Sridharan (LKS) were the biggest of the five law firms visiting campus last year, while GMR, Infosys and Roamware were the three local companies interviewing students on campus.

An LPO was the keenest recruiter at Christ last time as well, though CPA Global took the place of Pangea 3 which did not figure in last year’s recruitment table.

HNLU Raipur was the other law school where LPO Pangea3 was the heaviest recruiter this year, being the only one to visit the Abhanpur campus. The LPO hired three student’s from HNLU’s class of 2012.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/ppos-save-placement-record-as-christ-laws-2nd-graduating-batch-hosts-fewer-law-firms

India: The New Front Line in the Global Struggle for Internet Freedom

praskrishna — 2012-06-18T07:10:21Z

The government tussles with Internet freedom activists in the world's largest democracy.

This article was published in the Atlantic on June 7, 2012

This Saturday, Indian Internet freedom advocates are planning to stage a nation-wide protest against what they see as their government's increasingly restrictive regulation of the Internet. An amorphous alliance of concerned citizens and activist hackers intend to use the streets and the Internet itself to make their opposition felt.

Over the last year, as Americans were focused on the domestic debates surrounding the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), or on the more brazen displays of online censorship by mainstays of Internet restriction like China, Iran and Pakistan, India was rapidly emerging as a key battleground in the worldwide struggle for Internet freedom.

The confrontation escalated in April 2011, when the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology introduced sweeping new rules regulating the nature of material that Internet companies could host online. In response, civil liberties groups, Internet freedom supporters, and a growing assembly of online activist hackers have been fighting back, initiating street protests, organizing online petitions, and launching -- under the banner of the "Anonymous" hacker group -- a torrent of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against Indian government and industry web sites.

The April 2011 rules, an update to India's Information Technology Act (IT Act) of 2000 (amended in 2008), popularly known as the "intermediary guidelines," instruct online "intermediaries" -- companies that provide Internet access, host online content, websites, or search services -- to remove, within 36 hours, any material deemed to be "grossly harmful, harassing, blasphemous," "ethnically objectionable," or "disparaging" by any Internet user who submits a formal objection letter to that intermediary. Under the guidelines, any resident of India can compel Google, at the risk of criminal and/or civil liability, to remove content from its site that the resident finds politically, religiously, or otherwise "objectionable."

Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal -- the intermediary guidelines' most important government evangelist, and the head of the agency responsible for administering the guidelines -- even instructed Internet companies to go one step further and start pre-screening content for removal before it was flagged by concerned users. This requires companies like Facebook, in effect, to determine what material might offend its users and thus violate Indian law, and then remove it from the website. With over 100 million Internet users in India, no company could possibly monitor all its content through human intervention alone; web companies would have to set up filters and other mechanisms to take down potentially objectionable content more or less automatically.

India's constitution, in large part crafted in response to the modern country's harrowing history of religious and communal violence, allows for "reasonable restrictions" on free speech. Indian officials have at times banned certain books, movies, or other materials touching on such sensitive subjects as religion and caste.

Left with little choice but to comply or risk legal action, Google, Yahoo!, and other Internet companies acquiesced and began pulling down webpages after receiving requests to do so. Yet many companies refused to remove all the content requested, prompting Mufti Aijaz Arshad Qasm, an Islamic scholar, and journalist Vinay Rai, respectively, to file civil and criminal suits against 22 of the largest Internet companies operating in India. The targets, including Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and Microsoft, were accused of failing to remove material deemed to be offensive to the Prophet Mohammed, Jesus, several Hindu gods and goddesses, and various political leaders.

The companies have had some success in the litigation: Google India, Yahoo!, and Microsoft have all been dropped from the civil case after the court heard preliminary arguments; the Delhi High Court recently dismissed Microsoft from the criminal case. Otherwise, both cases are still ongoing.

India has taken its Internet regulation internationally, asking the United States government to ensure that India-specific objectionable content is removed from sites such as Facebook, Google, and YouTube, and suggesting that these companies should be asked to relocate their servers to India in to order better to regulate the content locally.

The Indian government's state-centric view of Internet regulation and governance is also clear in their approach to international governance. Citing the need for more governmental input in the Internet's development and what happens online, India formally proposed the creation of the Committee for Internet Related Policies (CIRP) at the 2011 United Nations General Assembly. The CIRP would be an entirely new multilateral UN body responsible for coordinating virtually all Internet governance functions, including multilateral treaties.

To be fair, some Indians see these as efforts not to impose censorship but to allow a greater degree of Indian and international control over a system considered by many in India and elsewhere to be under the thumb of the U.S. government.

Yet some Internet experts in both India and the West are criticizing the CIRP proposal as part of "thinly masked efforts to control or shape the Internet," as one Indian official put it. They warn that a state-centric system of Internet governance could lead to serious restrictions on the type of information available online, and damage the Internet's potential for innovation.

India's Internet freedom advocates are straining to keep up with the rapid pace of the last year. But, now, they're gathering some steam. Online petitions against the intermediary guidelines, the IT Act, and censorship in India in general have appeared on Change.org and Facebook; protest videos are popping up on Youtube. The Centre for Internet and Society, a web-focused think tank, released an extensive report highlighting the intermediary guidelines' effects on freedom online. The Internet Democracy Project organized a day-long training program on freedom of expression and censorship for bloggers entitled "Make Blog not War." FreeSoftware Movement Karnataka organized a protest of hundreds of students in Bangalore, India's IT hub. And Save Your Voice activists held a sit in outside Delhi's Jantar Mantar monument to pressure lawmakers.

Yet, not all the opposition has been so civil. Hackers, operating under the umbrella of the techno-libertarian hacker community, "Anonymous," are waging their own, less lawful fight against the government as well as the Internet companies that have, in their view, too readily complied with the government's censorship demands.

On May 17, Anonymous hackers attacked a number of Indian government websites, including the Indian Supreme Court, the Reserve Bank of India, the ruling Congress Party and its coalition partners, as well as the opposition Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), making them all inaccessible for several hours.

Moreover, just this past week, Anonymous broke into the websites and servers of a number of Internet Service Providers, including Reliance Communications, seemingly to punish them for complying with government orders to block file-sharing hosts such as Pirate Bay and Vimeo. Once in the ISPs' servers, the hackers accessed their lists of blocked sites -- which they then distributed to media outlets. They also redirected people who tried to reach Reliance's site to an Anonymous protest page.

Building on the momentum of these attacks, and on the anti-censorship outrage growing across India, Anonymous has called for a national day of protest in 11 Indian cities this Saturday, and an additional series online attacks against government and industry websites. The occupy-style protests -- which Anonymous insists will be non-violent -- are to include awareness campaigns on Facebook and other social networking sites. Protesters are being asked to don the Guy Fawkes mask, a symbol now associated with Anonymous, among other protest movements, both in the streets and on their Facebook profiles.

It's unclear how much support the June 9 protest will receive, or how serious the planned Anonymous attacks with be, but given the attention that the announcement has attracted in the Indian media, it seems likely that people will at least be paying attention. And even if this weekend the protest fails to attract the type of large and vocal response protest organizers are hoping it will, that it's come so far is an indication that neither side looks ready to back down.

Still, the government has given some small signs recently that it is reconsidering its position on the "intermediary guidelines," if not on Internet regulation more generally. Information Technology Minister Sibal, under pressure from the political opposition and after Parliament Member P. Rajeeve tabled a motion to seek rescission of the new rules, indicated that he would reconsider his previous positions, and the government has agreed to reexamine the rules.

This is an encouraging sign, although it's unlikely that any government action will come in time to forestall this weekend's protests. But even if the intermediary guidelines are ultimately rescinded, India will likely continue its soul-searching on how it deals with the Internet.

As the world's largest democracy and a model for much of the developing world, and with an Internet population anticipated to surpass that of the United States in the next few years, India is an important, maybe the most important, test case for the future of Internet freedom globally. Should India continue down a course of restriction, other nations eager to restrict online speech could see precedent to impose their own technical and political barriers to free expression online. It would be a tragic irony if India, as one of the developing world's greatest beneficiaries of the information revolution, ended up curbing those same free flows of information and ideas.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/india-the-new-front-line-in-the-global-struggle-for-internet-freedom

India's struggle for online freedom

praskrishna — 2012-06-18T06:39:32Z

"65 years since your independence," a new battle for freedom is under way in India — according to a YouTube video uploaded by an Indian member of Anonymous, the global "hacktivist" movement.

Rebecca MacKinnon's article was published in the Sydney Morning Herald on June 9, 2012

With popular websites like Vimeo.com blocked across India by court order, the video calls for action: "Fight for your rights. Fight for India." Over the past several weeks, the group has launched distributed denial-of-service attacks against websites belonging to internet service providers, government departments, India's Supreme Court, and two political parties.

Street protests are being planned for today in as many as 18 cities to protest laws and other government actions that a growing number of Indian internet users believe have violated their right to free expression and privacy online.

A lively national internet freedom movement has grown rapidly across India since the beginning of this year.

The most colourful highlight so far was a seven-day Gandhian hunger strike, otherwise known as a "freedom fast," held in early May on a New Delhi pavement by political cartoonist Aseem Trivedi and activist-journalist Alok Dixit. Trivedi's website was shut down this year in response to a police complaint by a Mumbai-based advocate who alleged that some of Trivedi's works "ridicule the Indian Parliament, the national emblem, and the national flag."

Escalating political and legal battles over internet regulation in India are the latest front in a global struggle for online freedom — not only in countries like China and Iran where the internet is heavily censored and monitored by autocratic regimes, but also in democracies where the political motivations for control are much more complicated.

Democratically elected governments all over the world are failing to find the right balance between demands from constituents to fight crime, control hate speech, keep children safe, and protect intellectual property, and their duty to ensure and respect all citizens' rights to free expression and privacy. Popular online movements — many of them globally interconnected — are arising in response to these failures.

Only about 10 per cent of India's population uses the web, making it unlikely that internet freedom will be a decisive ballot-box issue anytime soon. Yet activists are determined to punish New Delhi's "humourless babus," as one columnist recently called India's censorious politicians and bureaucrats, in the country's media. Grassroots organisers are bringing a new generation of white-collar protesters to the streets to defend the right to use a technology that remains alien to the majority of India's people.

The trouble started with the 2008 passage of the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, whose Section 69 empowers the government to direct any internet service to block, intercept, monitor, or decrypt any information through any computer resource.

Company officials who fail to comply with government requests can face fines and up to seven years in jail. Then, in April 2011, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology issued new rules under which internet companies are expected to remove within 36 hours any content that regulators designate as "grossly harmful," "harassing," or "ethnically objectionable" — designations that are open to a wide variety of interpretations and that free speech advocates argue have opened the door to abuse.

It is thanks to these rules that the website of the hunger-striking cartoonist, Trivedi, was taken offline. Also thanks to the 2011 rules, Facebook and Google are facing trial for having failed to remove objectionable content. If found guilty, the companies could face fines, and executives could be sentenced to jail time.

Saturday's protesters are calling for annulment of the 2011 rules and the repeal of part of the 2008 act. They are also calling for internet service companies to reverse the wholesale blocking of hundreds of websites, including the file-sharing services isoHunt and The Pirate Bay, as well as the video-sharing site Vimeo and Pastebin, which is primarily used for the sharing of text and links.

Internet service providers were responding to a court order from the Madras High Court demanding the blockage, which is aimed at preventing the online distribution of pirated versions of one particular film. The internet companies, fearing that they would not be able to catch every individual instance on every possible site they host, instead chose to block entire services along with all of their content — which had nothing to do with the film in question.

Such "John Doe" orders, named because they are directed against unknown potential offenders in the present and future, are characterised "by their overly broad and sweeping nature," argue lawyer Lawrence Liang and researcher Achal Prabhala, which extends "to a range of non-infringing activities as well, thus catching a whole range of legal acts in their net."

More broadly, as Delhi-based journalist Shivam Vij wrote in a recent essay: "The current mechanisms of internet censorship in India — blocking, direct removal requests to websites, intermediary rules — are draconian and unconstitutional. They need to be replaced with a new set of rules that are fair, transparent and accessible for public scrutiny. They should not be amenable to misuse by the powers-that-be for their own private interests."

Not only are the rules abused, but researchers find that they are causing extralegal censorship by companies that overcompensate in order to err on the side of caution. Last year, the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society performed an experiment in which it sent "legally flawed" takedown demands to seven companies that provide a range of online services, including search, online shopping, and news with user-generated comments.

The legal flaws in the notices were such that the companies could have rejected them without being in breach of the law. Yet "of the 7 intermediaries to which takedown notices were sent, 6 intermediaries over-complied with the notices, despite the apparent flaws in them," reads the Centre for Internet and Society report.

Despite the growing public opposition, a motion to annul the 2011 rules was defeated by voice vote in the upper house of Parliament last month. Yet the criticism was sufficiently sharp that Communications Minister Kapil Sibal announced that he will hold consultations with all members of Parliament, representatives of industry, and other "stakeholders" to discuss the law's problems and how it might be revised.

Many of the law's critics, however, are skeptical that this will eliminate the law's deep flaws and loopholes for abuse, especially given the government's failure to listen so far. Comments on the 2011 rules submitted last year by the Centre for Internet and Society were not even acknowledged as having been received by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. "Sibal uses the excuse of national security and hate speech," says the center's director, Sunil Abraham, "but that is not what is happening."

Abraham worries that what is really happening is a government effort at Internet "behavior modification" through a process akin to an experiment involving caged monkeys, bananas, and ice water. Put four monkeys in a cage and hang a bunch of bananas on the ceiling. Every time one of them climbs up to reach the bananas, you drench all of them with ice water.

Soon enough, the monkeys will start policing themselves — attacking anybody who tries to reach the bananas, making it unnecessary for their masters to deploy the ice water. "This is why the government is being so aggressive so early on, with only 10 percent of India's population online," says Abraham. "If you start the drenching early on, by the time you get to 50 per cent [internet penetration], every one will be well-behaved monkeys."

Companies will act as private internet police for fear of legal punishment before the government is called upon to step in and enforce the law. If it works, Indian politicians could have fewer reasons to worry about online critiques or mockery, because companies fearing prosecution will proactively delete speech that could potentially be designated "harassing" or "grossly harmful."

India is not China or Iran, however. Its politicians may be corrupt, and most of its voters may not understand why Internet freedom matters because they've never used the Internet. But it still has an independent press and boisterous civil society that are not going to give up their critiques and protests anytime soon. India also has a strong, independent judiciary, with a record of ruling against censorship and surveillance measures when a strong case can be made that they conflict with constitutional protections of individual rights. "On free speech I have high faith in the Indian judiciary," says Abraham. "There is a good chance to launch a constitutional challenge."

If Google and Facebook lose at their impending trial — now scheduled for July — they will most certainly appeal, which activists hope could provide just such an opportunity to prevent the sort of "behaviour modification" process that Abraham warns against.

Now India's burgeoning internet freedom movement needs its own reverse "behaviour modification" strategy — imposing consistent and regular doses of political and legal ice water upon India's bureaucrats, politicians, and companies whenever they do things that threaten to corrode the rights of India's internet users. Saturday's protest is just the beginning.

Sunil Abraham is quoted in the article. The report on Intermediary Guidelines co-produced by CIS and Google is also mentioned.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/indias-struggle-for-online-freedom

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