Centre for Internet and Society

The Last Cultural Mile

praskrishna — 2011-09-28T05:40:51Z

Ashish’s research inquiry is informed by the ‘last mile’ which has emerged as a central area of discussion in the domains of technology and governance from the 1940s in India. Starting from mapping technology onto developmentalist–democratic priorities which propelled communication technologies beginning with the invention of radio in India, the monograph conceives of the ‘last mile’ as a mode of techno-democracy, where connectivity has been directly translated into democratic citizenship.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/last-cultural-mile.pdf

The largest Wikipedia gathering in South Asia kicks off

subha — 2016-08-06T17:11:39Z

Wikimedia Conference 2016Wiki Conference India 2016 (WCI), the largest gathering of contributors to Wikipedia and its sister projects in South Asia, will be held during August 5-7 this year in Chandigarh, India.

This was published Opensource.com on August 5, 2016

The first iteration of this event was five years ago in 2011. The event is focused around South Asian language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects. Hundreds of participants, including over 100 scholarship holders from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, will participate in this three-day event. A team of volunteers representing several Wikimedia communities across the country and three Wikimedia affiliates—Wikimedia India, Punjabi Wikimedians and Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge program—are working together to make this event a success.

Several Wikimedia project and program-related talks, meetups and thematic workshops, focused on technology, program design, volunteer leadership building and engagement, gender gap in Wikipedia, global reach, and education, will keep the participants occupied. There will be separate technical tracks, which were chosen from the results of a pre-event needs assessment survey to ensure that community needs are met. Prior to the conference, a month-long edit-a-thon has been running in twelve South Asian language Wikipedias, and one European language Wikipedia (Ukrainian Wikipedia). The focus of this sprint was to expand the content reach of Wikipedia on Punjab, Punjabi people, and their language and culture as the event is happening in Punjab. So far, more than 1900 articles have been created by about 150 Wikipedians, and the edit-a-thon will be also running during the conference to keep the option of creating more articles open to the participants. Some of the guests includes Wikimedia Foundation's board member Nataliia Tymkiv, the organization's newly promoted executive director Catherine Maher, Punjabi-language poet Surjit Patar and Internet freedom advocate and Centre for Internet and Society's Executive Director Sunil Abraham.

As compared to the last WikiConference India, this conference has more thematic focus, especially on challenges like the gender bias on Wikipedia, and emerging projects like the Wikipedia Education Program. There are as many as six presentations related to gender gap, and six more related to education program.

There has been constant engagement on both on Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag #WCI2016. Some of the most-used basic phrases in the Punjabi language have been recorded and shared to the participants from outside the region to communicate with the locals.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/opensource.com-subhashish-panigrahi-august-5-2016-largest-wikipedia-gathering-in-south-asia-kicks-off

The Knowledge Base is Liberated

Subodh Kulkarni and Madhav Gadgil — 2019-08-05T23:04:33Z

The article published in Sunday supplement of Loksatta newspaper of Express group, written jointly by Madhav Gadgil & Subodh Kulkarni summarises - the status of searchable open knowledge available on web, eagerness of youth generation across the social strata to access knowledge on new gadgets and the approaches to build resources in Marathi on web harnessing potential of Wikimedia projects. It also elaborates major three breakthroughs – Free & open source software movement, Unicode revolution and development of collaborative knowledge building and sharing free platforms like Wikimedia projects easily accessible to people in their own languages.

The article by Subodh Kulkarni and Madhav Gadgil titled ज्ञानभांडार मुक्त झाले.. in Marathi was published by Loksatta on August 3, 2019.

In 2020, Maharashtra state is celebrating its 60th anniversary, it is also 100th death anniversary of Lokmanya Tilak while the state has recently celebrated 100th birth anniversaries of Lokkavi Annabhau Sathe and Lokshahir Amar Shekh. These three social reformers and prolific writers had shaped the socio-political history of Maharashtra. On this occasion, appeal is made to the Marathi community for bringing the complete works of these three reformers in Wikimedia projects in searchable & freely accessible form. It is also mentioned that these efforts are being facilitated by Centre for Internet & Society and other like-minded organisations. The aim is to complete this project before Marathi language day in February 2020.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/loksatta-august-3-2019-subodh-kulkarni-and-madhav-gadgil-the-knowledge-base-is-liberated

The joys of being a Wikipedian

praskrishna — 2014-07-30T05:19:16Z

Radha Krishna, an engineer, had always wanted to share information online so that people who wanted to learn more could just log in and benefit by reading his articles. Eight years ago he started his own website for this very purpose. But he found it hard to maintain the site. He then chanced upon Wikipedia, the largest open-source encyclopedia, which was then just becoming popular in the country.

The article by Svetlana Lasrado was published in the New Indian Express on July 29, 2014. T. Vishnu Vardhan gave his inputs.

He registered an account on the website and started contributing to it by editing articles and adding references. Krishna, who has contributed over 4000 articles so far, prides himself on being one of the first few Wiki editors from Bangalore.

Komal Khatokar, on the other hand, has not spent as much time on the site as Krishna.

This 19-year-old B Com student of Christ University had to contribute one article to the Indian language Wikipedia last year as part of her assignment in a language of her choice, Sanskrit. She says, “I wrote an article on G V Iyer, who was the first person to direct a movie in Sanskrit.”

But it did not stop there. Last May, she took up an internship project with The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS), which acts as a catalyst for the Wikipedia movement in India. She wanted to explore the world of Wiki writing.

“I took part in a project to add articles from the Kannada encyclopedia online. We uploaded over 1200 articles, which will go live on the main website in October.” Komal now edits copies on the site and despite her hectic college schedule, wants to continue contributing to Wikipedia in any way that she can.

Anybody with an Internet access can edit an article on Wikipedia. Globally, the English Wikipedia has over 4 million articles and there are over a million registered users.

And in Bangalore, from just 10 members five years ago, there are now over 100 registered volunteers who contribute to the website on a daily basis, says Vishnu Vardhan, from CIS and adds, “Now, the maximum number of Wikipedians from India are from Bangalore and majority of the founding members of the Wikimedia India Chapter are also from here.”

Apart from English content, world over Wikipedia has many regional chapters covering over 200 languages to increase representation of region-specific content. In India, the Access to Knowledge programme developed by CIS works towards the growth of Indian language Wikipedias. In this regard, Vishnu states that Bangalore has a majority of active Kannada Wikipedia volunteers and is the single largest location for active Malayalam Wikipedians. Bangalore is also the second largest location for Telugu Wikipedia community after Hyderabad, he observes. The strong volunteer community is involved in the Wiki movement in ways more than one.

Different ways to contribute

Jeph Paul is not a Wikipedian in the traditional sense of the word. Why? Because he doesn't contribute or edit articles on the website. What he does is very technical. He develops tools and gadgets for Wikipedia in India to enhance user experience. Jeph got involved when Wikipedia started providing grants of up to $30000 to people who wanted to improve the usability and functionality of the website. Jeph applied and received $500 for his project. His project was simple -- he created a visual representation of how an article evolved. He explains, “There are over 100 editors who pore over just one article and modify it — the edits can be a sentence that is rewritten, a reference link added or citations made. But the changes are a lot and minute. I created a tool where people could see what changes are made and how the article evolves over a period of time.”

Besides developing tools and software, Jeph points out that users can generate visual content. For instance, there are some topics such as historical monuments which require visual documentation. Users can submit their visual repository to Wikipedia to enhance text content.

Wikipedia Caveats

Wikipedia, globally ranked sixth among all the websites based on web traffic, has laid down a list of rules and guidelines which users are required to follow. For instance, when one edits articles, one should avoid personal opinions. Komal cites a recent furore when there were slanderous remarks made against actor Ambarish.

“Such personal opinions should be reserved for blogs. Wikipedia is a public domain website. Hence, when you become a contributor, you have a certain responsibility. You should refrain from portraying biased sentiments through your articles,” she observes. Contemplating on this, Komal adds that Wikipedians should not fabricate content. "They should only include what’s already published and authenticate it using a credible source," she adds.

Another rule that is of utmost importance is compliance with copyright. Radha Krishna explains, “If you want to include information from a website or article, you can't copy the text verbatim. You have to analyse the content and paraphrase it based on your own understanding, citing legitimate references.”

When in doubt, the Wikipedians assert, it is always best to take help from other editors and collaborators through the ‘Talk’ option on the website or through monthly meetings.

It's easy to be a Wikipedia contributor:

Register: Although a visitor can edit articles, it is good to register to keep a record of your edits. You will also get an access to Wikipedia’s enhanced editing features.

Start with editing: Click the ‘Edit’ tab on the article’s page to modify the copy -- check typos, grammar, sentence structure and add an explanation. For example, if it is a spelling correction, add 'Typo'.

Preview: After editing, see a preview of the modifications by clicking ‘Show Preview’.

Save: Then save the changes by clicking the ‘Save Page’ tab.

Format: Wiki uses a markup language called wikitext to format text. Acquaint yourself with this language by reading the online tutorial. For instance, you can change a text to bold or italics by surrounding a word or phrase with multiple apostrophes.

Link: You can add inline citations by linking a word to another Wikipedia page. To do so, put the word in double square brackets. You can also change the display text.

Categorise: Add categories near the bottom of the article by typing the topic using Category:

Add footnotes: You can add reference tags around your source using <ref>Your Source</ref>.

Add external links: To add a link to an external credible website, type the URL inside a single set of brackets, followed by a space and the text to be displayed.

Talk to other editors: Use talk pages to discuss articles or any issues with other Wikipedians.

For a detailed tutorial on how to edit an article, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial

Wiki meets and awareness programmes: Since 2010, the Bangalore Wikipedia community has conducted over 40 meet-ups, according to Vishnu. “This helps increase participation among all volunteers, improves engagement and understanding of the work that is being done on an ongoing basis,” he opines.

Apart from this, their main focus is to get more people to join the fray through ‘Wiki Academy’ which travels to different organisations in the country to get people acquainted to the website and give them hands-on training on editing articles. Radha Krishna explains, “We recently conducted a workshop at C-DOT and Don Bosco Engineering College.” He adds, “Wikipedia has a lot of sister projects too like Wikiversity, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wiktionary, which people are not aware of. We want people to make use of these tools too.”

Rules every Wikipedian should follow:

Don't share unpublished results

Don't expound your personal theories or start debates

Respect other editors

If you spot an error, correct it

Write without using jargons

Do not violate copyright and attribute statements

Do not promote yourself

Do not be biased in your tone of writing. Always cover significant point of views

Don't be afraid to ask for help

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/new-indian-express-july-29-2014-svetlana-lasrado

The Internet Has a New Standard for Censorship

jyoti — 2016-01-30T09:17:54Z

The introduction of the new 451 HTTP Error Status Code for blocked websites is a big step forward in cataloguing online censorship, especially in a country like India where access to information is routinely restricted.

The article was published in the Wire on January 29, 2016. The original can be read here.

Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 opens with the declaration, “It was a pleasure to burn.” The six unassuming words offer a glimpse into the mindset of the novel’s protagonist, ‘the fireman’ Guy Montag, who burns books. Montag occupies a world of totalitarian state control over the media where learning is suppressed and censorship prevails. The title alludes to the ‘temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns,’ an apt reference to the act of violence committed against citizens through the systematic destruction of literature. It is tempting to think about the novel solely as a story of censorship. It certainly is. But it is also a story about the value of intellectual freedom and the importance of information.

Published in 1953, Bradbury’s story predates home computers, the Internet, Twitter and Facebook, and yet it anticipates the evolution of these technologies as tools for censorship. When the state seeks to censor speech, they use the most effective and easiest mechanisms available. In Bradbury’s dystopian world, burning books did the trick; in today’s world, governments achieve this by blocking access to information online. The majority of the world’s Internet users encounter censorship even if the contours of control vary depending on the country’s policies and infrastructure.

Online censorship in India

In India, information access blockades have become commonplace and are increasingly enforced across the country for maintaining political stability, for economic reasons, in defence of national security or preserving social values. Last week, the Maharashtra Anti-terror Squad blocked 94 websites that were allegedly radicalising the youth to join the militant group ISIS. Memorably, in 2015 the NDA government’s ham-fisted attempts at enforcing a ban on online pornography resulted in widespread public outrage. Instead of revoking the ban, the government issued yet another vaguely worded and in many senses astonishing order. As reported by Medianama, the revised order delegates the responsibility of determining whether banned websites should remain unavailable to private intermediaries.

The state’s shifting reasons for blocking access to information is reflective of its tendentious attitude towards speech and expression. Free speech in India is messily contested and normally, the role of the judiciary acts as a check on the executive’s proclivity for banning. For instance, in 2010 the Supreme Court upheld the Maharashtra High Court’s decision to revoke the ban on the book on Shivaji by American author James Laine, which, according to the state government, contained material promoting social enmity. However, in the context of communications technology the traditional role of courts is increasingly being passed on to private intermediaries.

The delegation of authority is evident in the government notifying intermediaries to proactively filter content for ‘child pornography’ in the revised order issued to deal with websites blocked as result of its crackdown on pornography. Such screening and filtering requires intermediaries to make a determination on the legality of content in order to avoid direct liability. As international best practices such as the Manila Principles on Intermediary Liability point out, such screening is a slow process and costly and intermediaries are incentivised to simply limit access to information.

Blocking procedures and secrecy

The constitutional validity of Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2008 which grants power to the executive to block access to information unchecked, and in secrecy was challenged in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India. Curiously, the Supreme Court upheld S69A reasoning that the provisions were narrowly-drawn with adequate safeguards and noted that any procedural inconsistencies may be challenged through writ petitions under Article 226 of the Constitution. Unfortunately as past instances of blocking under S69A reveal the provisions are littered with procedural deficiencies, amplified manifold by the authorities responsible for interpreting and implementing the orders.

Problematically, an opaque confidentiality criteria built into the blocking rules mandates secrecy in requests and recommendations for blocking and places written orders outside the purview of public scrutiny. As there are no comprehensive list of blocked websites or of the legal orders, the public has to rely on ISPs leaking orders, or media reports to understand the censorship regime in India. RTI applications requesting further information on the implementation of these safeguards have at best provided incomplete information.

Historically, the courts in India have held that Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India is as much about the right to receive information as it is to disseminate, and when there is a chilling effect on speech, it also violates the right to receive information. Therefore, if a website is blocked citizens have a constitutional right to know the legal grounds on which access is being restricted. Just like the government announces and clarifies the grounds when banning a book, users have a right to know the grounds for restrictions on their speech online.

Unfortunately, under the present blocking regime in India there is no easy way for a service provider to comply with a blocking order while also notifying users that censorship has taken place. The ‘Blocking Rules’ require notice “person or intermediary” thus implying that notice may be sent to either the originator or the intermediary. Further, the confidentiality clause raises the presumption that nobody beyond the intermediaries ought to know about a block.

Naturally, intermediaries interested in self-preservation and avoiding conflict with the government become complicit in maintaining secrecy in blocking orders. As a result, it is often difficult to determine why content is inaccessible and users often mistake censorship for technical problem in accessing content. Consequently, pursuing legal recourse or trying to hold the government accountable for their censorious activity becomes a challenge. In failing to consider the constitutional merits of the confidentiality clause, the Supreme Court has shied away from addressing the over-broad reach of the executive.

Secrecy in removing or blocking access is a global problem that places limits on the transparency expected from ISPs. Across many jurisdictions intermediaries are legally prohibited from publicising filtering orders as well as information relating to content or service restrictions. For example in United Kingdom, ISPs are prohibited from revealing blocking orders related to terrorism and surveillance. In South Korea, the Korean Communications Standards Commission holds public meetings that are open to the public. However, the sheer volume of censorship (i.e. close to 10,000 URLs a month) makes it unwieldy for public oversight.

As the Manila Principles note, providing users with an explanation and reasons for placing restrictions on their speech and expression increases civic engagement. Transparency standards will empower citizens to demand that companies and governments they interact with are more accountable when it comes to content regulation. It is worth noting, for conduits as opposed to content hosts, it may not always be technically feasible for to provide a notice when content is unavailable due to filtering. A new standard helps improve transparency standards for network level intermediaries and for websites bound by confidentiality requirements. The recently introduced HTTP code for errors is a critical step forward in cataloguing censorship on the Internet.

A standardised code for censorship

On December 21, 2015, the Internet Engineering Standards Group (IESG) which is the organisation responsible for reviewing and updating the internet’s operating standards approved the publication of 451-’An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles’. The code provides intermediaries a standardised way to notify users know when a website is unavailable following a legal order. Publishing the code allows intermediaries to be transparent about their compliance with court and executive orders across jurisdictions and is a huge step forward for capturing online censorship. HTTP code 451 was introduced by software engineer Tim Bray and the code’s name is an homage to Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451.

Bray began developing the code after being inspired by a blog post by Terence Eden calling for a censorship error code. The code’s official status comes after two years of discussions within the technical community and is a result of campaigning from transparency and civil society advocates who have been pushing for clearer labelling of internet censorship. Initially, the code received pushback from within the technical community for reasons enumerated by Mark Nottingham, Chair of the IETF HTTP Working Group in his blog. However, soon sites began using the code on an experimental and unsanctioned basis and faced with increasing demand for and feedback, the code was accepted.

The HTTP code 451 works as a machine-readable flag and has immense potential as a tool for organisations and users who want to quantify and understand censorship on the internet. Cataloguing online censorship is a challenging, time-consuming and expensive task. The HTTP code 451 circumvents confidentiality obligations built into blocking or licensing regimes and reduces the cost of accessing blocking orders.

The code creates a distinction between websites blocked following a court or an executive order, and when information is inaccessible due to technical errors. If implemented widely, Bray’s new code will help prevent confusion around blocked sites. The code addresses the issue of the ISP’s misleading and inaccurate usage of Error 403 ‘Forbidden’ (to indicate that the server can be reached and understood the request, but refuses to take any further action) or 404 ‘Not Found’ (to indicate that the requested resource could not be found but may be available again in the future).

Adoption of the new standard is optional, though at present there are no laws in India that prevent intermediaries doing so. Implementing a standardised machine-readable flag for censorship will go a long way in bolstering the accountability of ISPs that have in the past targeted an entire domain instead of the specified URL. Adoption of the standard by ISPs will also improve the understanding of the burden imposed on intermediaries for censoring and filtering content as presently, there is no clarity on what constitutes compliance. Of course, censorious governments may prohibit the use of the code, for example by issuing an order that specifies not only that a page be blocked, but also precisely which HTTP return code should be used. Though such sanctions should be viewed as evidence of systematic rights violation and totalitarian regimes.

In India where access to software code repositories such as Github and Sourceforge are routinely restricted, the need for such code is obvious. The use of the code will improve confidence in blocking practices, allowing users to understand the grounds on which their right to information is being restricted. Improving transparency around censorship is the only way to build trust between the government and its citizens about the laws and policies applicable to internet content.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-wire-jyoti-panday-january-29-2016-internet-has-a-new-standard-for-censorship

The International Copyright System and Access to Education: Challenges, New Access Models and Prospects for New Principles

praskrishna — 2012-06-01T04:29:36Z

This event organised by Max Planck Institute was held in Munich, Germany on May 14 and 15, 2012. Pranesh Prakash participated in this event.

List of Participants

Name	Affiliation
Mr. Olatunji Babatunde Adetula	Director, Nigerian Copyright Commission
Prof. Olufunmilayo Arewa	African University for Science and Technology & University of California School of Law, Irvine
Prof. Michael W. Carroll	Professor of Law, Director, Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, American University, Washington College of Law
Mr. Alberto Cerda Silva	S.J.D. Candidate Georgetown University Law Center, Research Associate,Knowledge Ecology International
Ms. Vera Franz	Senior Program Manager Open Society Information Program Open Society Foundations
Prof. Christophe Geiger	Associate Professor Director General Director of the Research Department CEIPI, Université de Strasbourg
Prof. Daniel Gervais	FedEx Research Professor of Law Co-Director, Vanderbilt Intellectual Property Program Vanderbilt University Law School
Ms. Cristiana Gonzalez	Senior Researcher Universidade de São Paulo
Ms. Teresa Hackett	Programme Manager EIFL
Prof. Dr. Reto M. Hilty	Managing Director Full Professor ad personam at the University of Zurich Honorary Professor at the University of Munich Max Planck Institute
Dr. Zorina Khan	Professor Department of Economics Bowdoin College
Dr. Kaya Köklü	Senior Research Fellow Intellectual Property and Competition Law Max Planck Institute
Ms. Eniko Kovacs	Program Manager Academic Fellowship Program, HESP Open Society Foundations
Mr. Ahmed Abdel Latif	Intellectual Property and Technology Senior Programme Manager International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development
Ms. Mayara Nascimento Santos Leal	Division of Intellectual Property Economic Department Ministry of External Relations, Brazil
Prof. Lydia Loren	Professor of Law Kay Kitagawa & Andy Johnson-Laird IP Faculty Scholar Lewis & Clark Law School
Ms. Viviana Munoz Tellez	Programme Officer, IAKP The South Centre
Prof. Ruth Okediji	William L. Prosser Professor of Law University of Minnesota Law School
Mr. Pranesh Prakash	Programme Manager The Center for Internet and Society
Mr. G.R. Raghavender	Registrar of Copyrights & Director (BP & CR) Copyright Office Government of India, Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resources Development
Prof. Jerome H. Reichman	Bunyan S. Womble Professor of Law Duke University Law School
Dr. Manon Ress	Director of Information Society Projects Knowledge Ecology International
Ms. Carolina Rossini	Senior Fellow at GPOPAI, University of Sao Paulo
Dr. Susan Strba	Expert and Author, Copyright L&Es for Education in Africa
Mr. Luis Villaroel Villalon	Director de Investigación Corporación Innovarte
Dr. Moktar Warida	First Secretary, Permanent Mission of the Arab Republic of Egypt to the United Nations
Ms. Raquel Xalabarder Plantada	Director, Learning Resources Vice President’s Office, Faculty and Academic Organization Open University of Catalonia

Workshop Associates

Name	Affiliation
Lindsey Niznik	Senior, University of Minnesota
Peju Solarin	Doctoral Candidate International Max Planck Research School on Retaliation, Mediation, and Punishment, Max Planck Institute

See the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/workshop-on-education-and-copyright

The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T05:07:06Z

An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the fourth among seven sections.

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

In an article in the Digital Humanities Quarterly describing the emergence of the term cyberinfrastructure, Patrik Svensson speaks of an ‘infrastructure turn’ in the humanities, pointing towards a seemingly new found interest and investment in resources and tools for humanities research, pedagogy and publication in many universities and other knowledge institutions (Svensson 2011). Though the term has not been significantly used otherwise, it is interesting to note the implications of such a statement in the context of other such important ‘turns’ in the history of ideas, such as the linguistic or cultural turn. Particularly in the predominant debates around digital humanities, which are largely Anglo-American, infrastructure is an important and inherent component of any thinking around this area, as it derives many of its theoretical and practical concerns from a history of humanities computing. A lot of early work in DH was done in in the area of digital archives and knowledge repositories, such as The Walt Whitman Archive, Rossetti and Blake archives (Gold and Groom 2011, Drucker 2011), where digitization and algorithmic querying were important developments in terms of imagining and opening up the archive. From there to seemingly complex projects on data mapping, visualization, distant reading and cultural analytics, which require parsing through a huge corpora of humanities data, the growth of infrastructure has been a key aspect of these developments, although this many not be emphasized in the early literature about the field. The use of computational methods and the move towards the use of big data in the humanities has been an important change in terms of objects of the enquiry and methodology, and infrastructure is an essential condition of both these changes.

Like with other disciplines the nature of infrastructure and resources available to the humanities – in the form of galleries, archives, libraries, museums and now online repositories, language laboratories, and bibliographic, writing and editing tools and software – have also in some manner influenced the nature or scope of questions that could be asked of an object or text. It is therefore useful to explore the influence of infrastructure at a very conceptual level, in terms of what new ways of enquiry have been made possible with digital technologies and the internet. Now with new tools that can parse many pages of text at a go, or an algorithm that can derive patterns from a data set of images, video or other cultural artifacts, the scope of the enquiry seems to have increased exponentially, as much literature around DH suggests (Berry 2011). Indeed this point is also a bone of contention for many traditional humanities scholars, as it not only seems to be a technologically deterministic notion, but also one that takes away from more conventional methods of humanities research, which are based on close reading and interpretation of texts. In the Indian context however, these possibilities still seem distant owing to several gaps in terms of requirements of infrastructure, resources and material. In many institutions, the lack of basic infrastructure and resources in the form of libraries, classroom teaching-learning resources and access to the internet and other digital tools for the humanities continues to remain a problem. Existing institutional infrastructure is lesser that what is required, and mostly outdated.

This conflict over whether new tools and resources for the humanities is taking away or adding to humanities research is better understood in the light of how the concept of infrastructure has been understood, and specifically in the context of communication and research. Brian Larkin (2008) describes infrastructures as “institutionalized networks that facilitate the flow of goods in a wider cultural as well as physical sense”. He talks about both technical (such as transport, telecommunications, urban planning, energy and water) and ‘soft’ infrastructure such as the knowledge of a language, or cultural style and religious learnings. He therefore defines infrastructure as “this totality of both technical and cultural systems that create institutionalized structures whereby goods of all sorts circulate, connecting and binding people into collectivities.” This definition opens out the understanding of the term a little more, for it brings within the ambit different kinds of goods – such as knowledge, and proposes that infrastructure has the power to bind people within collectivities, thus emphasizing both its limitations as well as potentialities.

The notion of infrastructure as not being neutral to culture is further emphasized when Larkin talks about its mediating capacities, brought about by a layering of new technologies over old ones. "Infrastructures…mediate and shape the nature of economic and cultural flows and the fabric of urban life. One powerful articulation of this mediation is the monumental presence of infrastructures themselves" (Ibid.: 6). Thus the understanding of infrastructures as merely a means of the execution of ideas is one of the obstacles in terms of imagining them as more central to the work of the humanities. Often, the notion of infrastructure has been understood in terms of the institutional infrastructure in place, and not in terms of the smaller networks, tools or resources that build it, which are often located at the level of individuals. Ownership is a key aspect of the problem here, because the ownership of such infrastructure is largely with the state or large corporate entities, and not something within the ambit of small and private institutions or even individuals, and this often mandates the manner of their use. Indeed in the case of DH, there are certain kinds of technologies and resources that cannot be replicated easily at all, as such it is something that needs investment from the state and large knowledge institutions such as the university. Another problem, as rightly identified by Svensson is that the imagination of research infrastructures has been primarily in terms of the needs of the natural sciences, as a result of which resources, tools and materials for the humanities often end up being inadequate, in terms of financial and intellectual investment. Thus not only is there a challenge in terms of the availability of infrastructure, but also with respect to the optimum utilization of what is available.

Some of the practitioners and scholars interviewed as part of this mapping have also repeatedly brought up a number of concerns about (or the lack of) infrastructure they have had to use, modify and develop as part of their projects and research. Dr. Indira Chowdhury, historian and Founder-Director of the Centre for Public History (CPH) at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore finds it rather ironic that a city like Bangalore, with so much infrastructure at its disposal has such little thinking in the humanities. There are of course several reasons for this, she says, and in many places infrastructure development is restricted for certain reasons, like for example in Kashmir, where the use of internet and mobile phones is regulated strictly due to security concerns. The key question of course is to have more of a dialogue between places to ensure that they are not functioning in isolation. She also emphasizes that the problems are also at a more basic level, like with transcription for example [1]. The advent of the digital has brought with it several new possibilities, but she also talks about the many misconceptions that seem to be prevalent with regard to the digital, particularly in terms of preservation and storage capacity. The question of format is of great importance and a determining factor in much of research that mobilizes digital technologies. As part of her work on archiving oral histories, she has often had to emphasize that there are specific formats for a digital oral archive. As she says:

You should not switch to say MP3 just because it’s cheaper, more convenient and a lighter file. I often have people arguing that I just bought a recorder, it gives me a clear recording [in the MP3 format] etc. If you were to archive that file you would find that within a few years you begin to lose data on that file. The digital archive has also made people think a lot more about what they are preserving, in what format. These are things you then teach yourself, you do not archive in certain formats, or rely on an archive of MP3 files, because every time you copy them onto something it would have lost a little bit of its description. So these are things that make the historian more oriented, you think a lot more about what you are doing.

She therefore warns against these presumptions that a digital archive will resolve completely problems of space and preservation, as a change in format can easily render your data inaccessible and essentially useless. The idea of ‘loss of data’ and lack of space is something easily missed, as there a notion of the digital being an endless space, but that too comes at a cost. As Jonathan Sterne (2013) explains in his work on the MP3 as a cultural artifactiv, it is a format that works through compression and elimination of excess sound, which eventually greatly affects the quality of the sound object itself. The notion of the digital rendering a certain quality of sound, and by implication generating a ‘better’ digital artifact itself, is therefore highly debatable.

There are other considerations to bear in mind as well. As Padmini Ray Murray, another faculty member at the CPH points out, the context of such work in the global south is very different, and lack of good infrastructure is definitely one of the major problems. There are issues of bandwidth, problems such as surveillance, and issues with regulation of internet access, now the issue of network neutrality and so on, all of which have implications for possible digital humanities work and specifically work on digital archives. A significant challenge she sees is that we don't have mechanisms to translate between/ from Indian languages. She says that:

It would be amazing to have an archive metadata tool that can work with different Indian languages which at the moment is an impossibility. This is where a place like Bangalore comes into the picture... We need to pull on resources that are being pioneered in places like the IITs, or institutions here working with natural language processing...technologies that we cannot in a humanities context create, but pull those in to use them for humanities research. But the questions that we are asking are necessarily quite different, from what we have in the West.

The problem with Indian languages brings out the problems that are specific to the global south and therefore the infrastructure needs of humanities research work. Padmini Murray mentions Bichitra, the online variorum of the works of Rabindranath Tagore developed by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University as an effective illustration of the challenges faced by researchers working in languages other than English. She explains “The very level of creating the code for Bichitra was different, because it had to be done from scratch. Finding a set of reliable Bangla characters is difficult because the ligatures get mixed up, so they created a character set from scratch to create Bichitra, and for Prabhed [the collation software] which works within it.” The problem of a lack of standardization for Indic language inputs is therefore an immediate practical concern for archival work in different languages in India [2].

Indiancine.ma [3], an online archive of Indian film, has similarly been experimenting with different ways of reading and annotating film text, with a focus right now on films that are out of copyright. It uses an open-source platform named Pandor/a [4] for media archives, which helps to organise and manage large, decentralized collections of video, to collaboratively create metadata and time-based annotations, and to archive as a desktop-class web application. The editing tool enables a user to pause, cut and annotate a particular scene or sequence in the film according to a time code, thus creating enormous new possibilities in terms of how we engage with the film text at several levels. The different ways of organising content through different filters also helps map content in unique ways and read them. According to Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lutgert, who are part of the team that developed the archive and its predecessor Pad.ma [5], Indiancine.ma is a work in progress, and it will always be, so as to allow new opportunities to present themselves with every change in the software and tools being used. They are particular about the archive being open to a variety of users and uses – that is, it is not only a tool or space of publication for humanities researchers, but is also a software project, a resource for a film fan club, and many other things as it is open to interpretation. It is meant for people to build together and have conversations across domains and disciplines. In their work with people from both the humanities and sciences, they do see a void or gap between domains, and reiterate that it is very difficult for people to have a conversation across their disciplinary moorings. Infrastructure development has also become divided across these lines, and suffers from a kind of tunnel vision which often prevents it from being developed in response to the needs of the communities it is meant to address. As Sebastian recollects the experience of creating Pad.ma, a similar online video archive using the same platform, Pandor/a, he speaks of collaborating with people from a non-technology background, at the artists collective CAMP in Mumbai [6], and how the lack of a hierarchy between technologists and non-technologists only contributed to making these projects better. A lot of the early software projects in India suffered due to this distance between people from technology and non-technology backgrounds, and the lack of a common language for them to communicate. Both Sebastian and Jan themselves come with training and experience in diverse areas, ranging from philosophy and visual arts to software development, and believe that their contribution to this archive is more conceptual than technological. They also see the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) culture, then a rather incipient movement in India when they had just begun work on these projects, as one that can foster more conversations and collaborative work in technology and research in India. When they had started out of course, it was very difficult to convince people to use free and open source software, or even get filmmakers to release their footage for an open access platform like Pad.ma. CAMP was one of the few spaces then that had this open source culture, and it encouraged people to collaborate extensively, across areas of expertise. As Sebastian says “You deal with a relatively complex informatics system, but you are fully aware that you can modify and change things, and deal with them in a transparent way, which is great.” Both claim that nobody owns Pad.ma or Indiancine.ma, but everybody looks after it in a way, because they all use it differently depending on their interests, and this nurtures and builds the platform in different ways. The availability of this somewhat outside/alternate space for collaboration, and working within the open source context has been instrumental in the growth of these two online open access archives.

The computational aspects of Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, and even Bichitra to some extent is may be something to look forward to for researchers interested in exploring the possibilities of such research with these platforms. Given that both are essentially large corpora of material, introducing new algorithmic tools to work with them is not a distant possibility, something that has also been the core of a lot of DH work in the Anglo-American context. Jan and Sebastian have tried this already with one of their earlier projects, 0xdb [7], which is another online archive of cinema, by running a color recognition algorithm on it. There is an instance of face detection and speech recognition software that could be run on this platform, with interesting results. The existing filters on Indiacine.ma also make it possible to search for images or sequences based on colour and object recognition. For instance, an interesting experiment is to search for ‘telephone’ in the archive, which pulls up images containing telephones from across the entire corpus, outlining an interesting trajectory of the use of the instrument. While helpful in terms of querying and searching over a large corpus, they also emphasize the need to be able to make sense of it in a meaningful way. As Jan says “Most of this software is developed really as a means of control, in the area of surveillance etc., and not for exploring; it is more of a content identifying tool rather than to discover things. Clustering or referencing credits are other possibilities, but its more statistical analysis of the footage; are they really adding anything qualitative to cinema studies is still an open question”. Given this disjuncture in what these tools are developed for and how they are finally used, a point of concern is whether the research questions are also driven by the possibilities and limitations of the software itself. While that remains a broader question, Sebastian feels that more than a software, this is a new digital eco-system itself, and using these platforms in different ways, in fact even beyond what they were imagined for, will drive the technology in new directions. The limitation of computational tools as he sees now is really the speed, and given the expenses involved, they may not be feasible to implement and expect results anytime soon.

Both the above platforms demonstrate a certain ability to read texts both closely, as well as from a distance through the use of algorithmic tools, thus demonstrating the possibilities of analysis afforded by the infrastructure it has been built with. More importantly, they also highlight the limits of such tools and resources due to several challenges posed by the material itself. In the case of Bichitra, the problems of developing a code for Bengali characters has put forth a number of technological challenges; a pointer towards one among many problems for archiving materials in Indian languages. Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma are more symptomatic of the context in which new technologies can develop today given the support and space for collaboration and conversations across domains of expertise. The problems of format and technological obsolescence brought up by scholars at CPH is an important one; while colluding with proprietary software is inevitable in some cases, as suggested by the practitioners and researchers behind these platforms, keeping back-ups of material and being able to migrate out of a digital platform at any given point is also extremely essential. Such flexibility of material, and immense interoperability – across domains, formats and social-cultural contexts including language is something that researchers in DH, or for that matter in any field that actively engages with the internet and digital technologies would look for in the infrastructure that they build for research, scholarship and pedagogy. Infrastructure continues to remain a critical aspect knowledge production and dissemination, and it is imperative now more than ever, that it is addressed at the conceptual level of any research intervention involving digital technologies and knowledge production.

Notes

[1] See section on Archives for a more detailed discussion on this issue: http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment.

[2] See the section on Reading from a Distance – Data as Text for more on this: http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text.

[3] See: http://indiancine.ma/

[4] See: https://pan.do/ra

[5] See: http://pad.ma/

[6] See: http://studio.camp/

[7] See: https://0xdb.org/

References

Berry, D.M. "The Computational Turn", Culture Machine. Vol 12, 2011. http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/440.

Drucker, Johanna, "Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship" In Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/34.

Gold, Matthew K. and Jim Groom. "Looking for Whitman: A Grand, Aggregated Experiment". In Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/5.

Larkin, Brian. "Introduction". In Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria. London: Duke University Press, 2008

Sterne, Jonathan, 'The MP3 as Cultural Artifact,' New Media and Society. Vol. 18(5):825–842, 2006

Svensson, Partrik, "From Optical Fibre to Conceptual Cyberinfrastructure" In' Digital Humanities Quarterly, Vol.5, No.1, 2011. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000090/000090.html.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research Adopts an Open Access Policy

nehaa — 2013-09-30T15:03:04Z

In this blogpost, Nehaa Chaudhari discusses the newly adopted Open Access Policy of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research.

Earlier this month, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) adopted an Open Access Policy. Inter alia, this policy requires each ICAR institute to set up an Open Access Institutional Repository (OAIR), with the ICAR to set up a central harvester to harvest the meta data and full text of all the records from the Open Access (OA) repositories so set up. What is interesting from the IPR perspective is that the meta-data and other information of these repositories is copyrighted with the ICAR and has been licensed for research and academic purposes, for using, re-using and sharing. Commercial and other reuse would require the written permission of the ICAR. In a nod to the increasing importance of social media, ICAR’s Open Access Policy encourages its institutes to share their works on public repositories and social networking sites, besides adopting the mandate to have all publications, including its journals placed under Open Access. What might be harder to realize, however, is the publication of their research by scientists and other researchers across ICAR institutes or elsewhere, with publishers that allow self archiving Open Access Institutional Repositories. The ICAR Open Access Policy is available here.

In May, earlier this year, the ICAR had released a draft version of this policy, inviting comments. CIS’ comments had lauded the Policy as being comprehensive, detailed, and as being a positive step in the right direction, and had suggested some possible changes to the same.

It is observed that the adopted Open Access Policy (OAP) differs from the Draft Policy (DP) in certain respects, some of which are a cause for concern, whereas a few others expand the scope of the OAP. First, while the OAP requires that Institutional Repositories be established; the requirement contained in the DP to use Free and Open Source Software which was OAI-MHP compliant has been removed. Given that this is an endeavour to foster openness, requiring the use of Open Source Software was definitely a welcome step sought to be adopted by the ICAR, and its elimination renders the OAP lacking in the spirit of openness to its greatest realizable extent. Further, compliance with OAI-MHP would have ensured interoperability, as noted by us in our comments to the DP, and a failure to utilize this would reduce the accessibility and impact of archived materials. Second, the OAP requires that authors of scholarly articles deposit both, preprints and post-prints of their papers accepted for publication in the OAIR. This is a departure from the position in the DP, which required only preprints be deposited. Given that there is likely to be a difference in content and form of the article between the preprints and post-prints (which are after peer review), the inclusion of both preprints and post-prints in the OAIR is seen to be a beneficial move. Third, the period of embargo while signing copyright agreements with publishers had been envisaged to be six months in the DP, whereas the OAP extends the same to twelve months. It is felt that scientific writing is likely to be time sensitive, and twelve months might be an inordinate delay for its availability in the public domain, possibly reducing its applicability and relevance. Therefore, it is suggested that the earlier embargo period of six months might be the better alternative between the two. Fourth, the OAP incorporates an End Note, that was absent in the DP, which stipulates the time period of three years for compliance with the Open Access initiative, and recognizes the OAP as the first stage of a larger process. Both, the time period for compliance, and the recognition that the adoption of the OAP is but the first stage, are appreciated.

In sum, the OAP of the ICAR, while addressing some of the issues associated openness does leave room for desirability. Besides the suggestions that we had made earlier, other concerns include those reflected in this blog post, particularly regarding the departure from the DP in certain specific instances. Nonetheless, the adoption of the OAP by the ICAR is a welcome move- one that would hopefully be followed by other Government agencies such as the Department of Atomic Energy, the University Grants Commission, the Department of Biotechnology, etc.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/icar-adopts-open-access-policy

The India Chronicles

praskrishna — 2011-10-14T09:13:15Z

Tory Read, a professional researcher, writer and journalist was commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation to create a vivid description of its work in India. This was done in the interest of transparency and to ensure that it captured lessons from this new approach. Tory travelled for a couple of weeks across Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and some towns in Kerala — attending community meet-ups speaking with a host of individual community members in these cities. Tory has given a journalistic account and analysis, based on document review, interviews and observations conducted between November 2010 and June 2011, including 16 days in India in June 2011.The views expressed herein are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Wikimedia Foundation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/india-chronicles.pdf

The Impact of Regulation: FOSS and Enterprise

praskrishna — 2011-09-22T10:53:49Z

The workshop seeks to elaborate the impact of regulation, between Free and Open Source Software and Enterprise. It will look at the following key areas:

Education,
Software development,
Digital Content,
Empowering persons with disability,
FOSS for disaster preparedness etc.

If time allows, we will explore, if cloud computing is an open Source adjacent?

This lively discussion, is meant to bring into perspective the real picture in the market and broaden the minds of participants to realize the options available and come up with recommendations on what needs to be considered to have a fair playing ground, more especially for the developing countries.

Which of the five broad IGF Themes or the Cross-Cutting Priorities does your workshop fall under?

Access and Diversity

Have you organized an IGF workshop before? Yes

If so, please provide the link to the report:

http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/chronocontact/?%20chronoformname=Workshopsreports2009View&curr=1&wr=43

Provide the names and affiliations of the panellists you are planning to invite:

Mr.Samer Azmy- ICT Manager / Solution Integration Consultant, Huawei(Moderator)
Mr. Satish Babu -ICFOSS,India
Mr. Yves Miezan Ezo- Smile Training, Manager, (France)
Mr. Sunil Abraham,Executive Director, Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India
Mr. Evans Ikua- FOSS Certification Manager in the ict@innovation program
Dorothy Gordon- Director General, AITI-KACE
Ms. Judy Okite (Remote Moderator)

Provide the name of the organizer(s) of the workshop and their affiliation to various stakeholder groups:

Mr. Samer Azmy- FOSSFA(Pan-African)
Mr. Satish Babu -ICFOSS,(India)
Mr. Yves Miezan Ezo - Smile Training Centre(France)

Organization: FOSSFA, ICFOSS

Contact Person: Mr. Samer Azmy, Mr. Satish Babu

Workshop Number: 211

See the event details on the IGF website

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/foss-instrument-for-accessible-development

The High Level Privacy Conclave

Natasha Vaz — 2012-03-01T06:09:21Z

India in dire need of privacy law; experts say government is ironically creating huge national security risks in attempts to prevent crime and terrorism.

Privacy India, the Centre for Internet and Society and the Society in Action Group, with support from Privacy International, have spent 18 months studying the state of privacy across India, conducting consultations in Kolkata, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Guwahati, Chennai and Mumbai. Today, the results of their research were discussed by representatives from government, industry, media and civil society at a high-level conclave in Delhi. In attendance were Manish Tewari MP, Microsoft Director of Corporate Affairs Deepak Maheshwari and P.K.H. Tharakan former Chief of the Research and Analysis Wing. A privacy symposium open to the general public will be held tomorrow afternoon at the Indian International Centre.

The 130-page long Country report details how government bodies like the National Technical Research Organization (NTRO) engage in pervasive and frequently unauthorized wiretapping, listening in on the private conversations of politicians and ordinary citizens alike. The Cabinet Secretary himself, in a report last year, noted that a body like the Central Board of Direct Taxes should never have been authorized to conduct telephone tapping, as the Supreme Court had long ago made clear. Privacy problems are arising from UID, NPR, and other e-governance projects that involve the creation of databases and the collection of personal information. Indian citizens are losing the ability to control who has access to their information, what that information says about them and how that information is used.

Overall, the study paints a picture of a dysfunctional system, with multiple pieces of legislation dealing with sectoral privacy-related issues like health, banking, phone tapping etc and no overarching legal guarantee of privacy. As Manish Tewari observed today, there is a nationwide lack of understanding about new technologies and judges are very rarely technologically literate. This has created a situation in which the government's efforts to fight crime and terrorism by intercepting communications has horribly backfired. By building backdoors into communications systems to allow lawful access, and by restricting cryptography to a 40-bit limit, the authorities have created serious vulnerabilities in India's communications system that can be easily exploited by any malicious third party or foreign government.

Gus Hosein, Executive Director of Privacy International: "In their efforts to preserve and defend democratic society, India has undermined the very thing it wanted to protect. Both citizens and state are now at serious risk of being spied upon by anyone with a small amount of technological know-how and a computer."

Usha Ramanathan, social and political activist, said: "In the name of state transparency, government projects are in fact rendering citizens transparent to the State, rather than the other way round. A comprehensive privacy law for India cannot come soon enough."

Privacy India

Privacy India was established in 2010 with the objective of raising awareness, sparking civil action and promoting democratic dialogue around privacy challenges and violations in India. One of our goals is to build consensus towards the promulgation of comprehensive privacy legislation in India through consultations with the public, policymakers, legislators and the legal and academic community.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/the-high-level-privacy-conclave

The Hazards of a Non-neutral Internet

geetha — 2015-05-27T16:07:36Z

Spurred by recent events, India’s policy circles are dancing to the complex tunes of net neutrality. Airtel came under fire for pricing calls made over the Internet differentially; it has since withdrawn this plan. Airtel and Reliance Communications are caught in the storm as Airtel Zero and Internet.org, the Facebook-spearheaded product for low-cost Internet access, face stiff criticism for violating net neutrality. Companies like Flipkart, which earlier supported these products, have stepped back and are throwing their weight behind net neutrality. The Department of Telecommunications has set up a six-member panel to consult on net neutrality.

A modified version of the blog entry was published as an article titled "A must for free speech" in the Week on April 18, 2015

Responding to concerns, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) released a consultation paper on OTT services on March 27, 2015. TRAI has called for public comments to be sent by April 24, 2015, and counter-comments to be sent by May 8, 2015. The TRAI consultation paper raises several crucial issues, including net neutrality. Given the heightened interest in the issue, let us two steps back and revisit the basics about net neutrality.

What is net neutrality?

In the simplest terms, net neutrality is the principle by which the carrier (telco/ISP like Reliance, Airtel) is prohibited from discriminating between any two ‘packets’ of data carried over its network. That is, ISPs ought not treat data packets differently, no matter what the content, source or price.

It follows, then, that when packets are given differential treatment, the principle of net neutrality is violated. As Centre for Internet and Society’s Sunil Abraham explains, differential treatment may occur in many ways: first, carriers may provide consumers with free access to certain websites or web content, while charging the sender or destination; second, ISPs may throttle traffic of one website/company to give it priority over other sites (the website will then load faster than others); third, ISPs may refuse access to some websites unless consumers or content-providers pay extra charges. Other violations abound too; this list is merely illustrative.

Diversity, Innovation & Competition: The Costs of Net Non-neutrality

Let us take zero-rating to explore the impacts of a net neutrality violation. In Internet.org and Airtel Zero, companies like Facebook and Flipkart (prior to the latter’s withdrawal) pay to provide users with free access to their cluster of websites; these are examples of “zero-rating”. Telcos and content-providers like Facebook argue that this is crucial to expand Internet access in price-sensitive markets like India. While this is an important consideration, zero-rating can have detrimental impacts on free speech and diversity, competition and innovation. It can result in “walled gardens” and a diversity-trap, where the only sites we can access are the walled gardens of curated information compiled by Facebook and the like.

Today, we can access an unprecedented variety of content across freely accessible platforms. We pay for our Internet connections and for data, but the content we access is neither set nor monitored by ISPs or content-providers, unless legally mandated to do so under Section 69 of Information Technology Act, 2000. Our freedom to access and receive diverse information is not curated by the companies themselves (as Facebook would in Internet.org) or their ability to pay ISPs to carry traffic. But with zero-rating, preferential access or traffic throttling, content diversity will suffer.

Of course, impact of receding diversity of content may not be felt in the short term, if access is made the priority. However, if net non-neutrality is allowed to continue in perpetuity, this may result in corporate curation and censorship of content. Moreover, since established players can better shell out the money needed for zero-rated or prioritised access, new companies and start-ups may find their entry blocked. Such a possibility is vexing for innovation, as greater costs will disincentivise smaller players from entering the market. There is also an impact on competition: entrenched players who can afford to pay carriers will dig their heels deeper, and become the sole curators of content. This is censorship by market design.

Access and Self-preservation, say the Telcos

Some telecom operators and ISPs argue that zero-rating is essential for universal access to data services, a dream of the Digital India mission. They also stress that OTTs like Whatsapp, Viber, Skype and others are free-riding on their networks and usurping their revenue, since it is the telcos and not OTTs who pay licence fees and spectrum charges. Finally, telcos and ISPs say that treating packets differently is a form of network and traffic management; such management is crucial to an efficient and open Internet, and is an age-old practice of operators.

Of course, traffic and network management practices do exist, and operators do block or manage speeds during congestion periods or when there are security threats. As users, we also experience different Internet speeds depending on the hardware and software employed by operators, the time of day, the type of content accessed (video/ audio/ text), etc. As Christopher Yoo says, operators should be free to experiment with network management practices (‘network diversity’) so long as consumers and competition suffer no detriment.

But as reports show, net non-neutrality practices have negative impacts on speech diversity, innovation and competition, among others. Any proposal to grant legal recognition to net non-neutrality practices like zero-rating, traffic-prioritization or others, which depend on the consumer or content-provider’s ability to pay and result in differential treatment of data packets, must answer these concerns and provide safeguards. In Shreya Singhal, the Supreme Court affirmed the value of freedom of speech and diversity; saying that “…a culture of open dialogue is important”, the Court declared that “…we need to tolerate unpopular views”. Internet companies and telcos provide the platforms to make such views available. Through traffic prioritization and zero-rating, and by chilling innovation and competition, net neutrality violations can stifle speech diversity. The Department of Telecom and TRAI must remember this when debating a net neutrality regulation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-week-april-18-2015-geetha-hariharan-hazards-of-non-neutral-internet

The Habit of Care: Technologies of Living and Laboring Cyborgs at World Social Science Forum 2013

praskrishna — 2013-08-28T09:19:43Z

The World Social Science Forum 2013 organized by International Social Science Council will take place in Palais des Congrès de Montréal, Canada from October 13 to 15, 2013. Dr. Nishant Shah is participating in the event as a panelist and will speak on "The Habit of Care: Technologies of Living and Laboring Cyborgs".

This was published on the World Science Forum website.

Within the larger discourse around digital cultures, much attention is given to care. Care infrastructure includes physical infrastructure of access to remote spaces, regulatory and policy environments to control the digital spaces, redesigned geographies to house the new populations created by the ICT industries, and is discussed in disciplines as varied as Artificial Intelligence and Climate Change. Care Technologies find obvious resonances with the Foucaultian idea of ‘Technologies of the Self’, reminding us of the normative nature of measurement, cognition, discipline and punishment that is an inherent part of care.

The responses to Care Technologies and the Labor of Caring are not uniform. Some clearly identify the emergence of Care Technologies as a new form of alienation of labour, leading to discrimination and inequity. Others celebrate the ways in which the penetrative nature of the digital – from deep space probes to the sub-molecular conception of the human – allow us to imagine social interactions and our relationships with our own bodies in new ways.

In all the discourse around Care, there is silence about its form, function and nature. While attention is given to infrastructure, labour, politics, production and the intelligibility of care practices, we haven’t yet tried to fathom the conditions and generation of care, relegating it to the realm of the private and the subjective. Combining practice and theory, in different parts of the Global South, and inspired by gender and sexuality studies, this panel looks at Care as a Habit. We focus on the ‘care of technologies’, showing how the forced separation of care and technology needs to be revisited to look at conditions of being human, being social and being political. Working through diverse geographical and political contexts, the panel illustrates the tensions in understanding and engaging with Care and why there is a need to find new vocabularies and relationships to deal with this area.

Coordinator:

Dr. Nishant Shah

Dr. Radhika Gajjala

Organization/Institution:

Centre for Internet and Society and Bowling Green State University

Schedule:

Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - 09:00 - 10:45

Room:

520AD

Nishant Shah

Dr. Nishant Shah is the co-founder and Research Director at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. He is an International Tandem Partner at the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University, Germany and a Knowledge Partner with the Hivos Knowledge Programme, The Netherlands. He is committed to producing infrastructure, frameworks and collaborations in the global south to understand and analyse the ways in which the emergence of digital technologies have shaped the contemporary social, political and cultural milieu. He edits a series of monographs on ‘Histories of Internet(s) in India’ that examine the complicated relationship that technologies have with questions of gender, sexuality, body, city, governance, archiving and gaming. He was the principle researcher for a research programme that produced the four-volume anthology ‘Digital AlterNatives With a Cause?’, examining the ways in which young people’s relationship with digital technologies produces changes in their immediate environments. Nishant is on the steering committee of the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Project (USA) as well as on the Media Art Histories collective (Latvia). He is involved with the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Consortium (Taiwan/S. Korea/Hong Kong) and the global Network of Centres for Internet and Society housed at the Berkman Centre for Internet & Society, USA. He is committed to encouraging multi-stakeholder dialogue and hence regularly does public consultations and trainings for civil society and NGOs, governments, academic partners and private corporate entities. He is a regular speaker at events like Re:publica and Video Vortex and a columnist with India’s leading English language newspaper The Indian Express. His academic and research publications reflect his political stance on open access and open knowledge infrastructure and are all available for free download and distribution under open license.

Schedule Overview

Saturday, October 12
15:00-18:00 Pre-Registration

Sunday, October 13 (Day 1)
09:00-19:30 Registration
11:00-12:45 Plenary I
11:30-17:00 Exhibition Opens
13:00-14:45 Panel Session 1
15:00-16:45 Panel Session 2
17:30 Opening Ceremony and Reception

Monday, October 14 (Day 2)
08:30-17:30 Registration
09:30-17:00 Exhibition Opens
09:00-10:45 Panel Session 3
11:00-12:45 Plenary II
13:00-14:45 Panel Session 4
15:00-16:45 Panel Session 5
17:00-18:45 Panel Session 6
20:00 Movie Night with the NFB

Tuesday, October 15 (Day 3)
08:30-17:30 Registration
09:30-17:00 Exhibition Opens
09:00-10:45 Panel Session 7
11:00-12:45 Panel Session 8
13:00-14:45 Awards Luncheon
15:00-16:45 Panel Session 9
17:00-18:45 Plenary III
18:45 Closing Ceremony and Reception

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/wssf2013-october-15-2013-panel-habit-care-technologies-living-and-laboring-cyborgs

The Government’s Increased Focus on Regulating Non-Personal Data: A Look at the Draft National Data Governance Framework Policy

Digvijay Chaudhary and Anamika Kundu — 2022-06-30T13:24:35Z

Digvijay Chaudhary and Anamika Kundu wrote an article on the National Data Governance Framework Policy. It was edited by Shweta Mohandas.

Introduction

Non Personal Data (‘NPD’) can be understood as any information not relating to an identified or identifiable natural person. The origin of such data can be both human and non-human. Human NPD would be such data which has been anonymised in such a way that the person to whom the data relates cannot be re-identified. Non-human NPD would mean any such data that did not relate to a human being in the first place, for example, weather data. There has been a gradual demonstrated interest in NPD by the government in recent times. This new focus on regulating non personal data can be owed to the economic incentive it provides. In its report, the Sri Krishna committee, released in 2018 agreed that NPD holds considerable strategic or economic interest for the nation, however, it left the questions surrounding NPD to a future committee.

History of NPD Regulation

In 2020, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (‘MEITY’) constituted an expert committee (‘NPD Committee’) to study various issues relating to NPD and to make suggestions on the regulation of non-personal data. The NPD Committee differentiated NPD into human and non-human NPD, based on the data’s origin. Human NPD would include all information that has been stripped of any personally identifiable information and non-human NPD meant any information that did not contain any personally identifiable information in the first place (eg. weather data). The final report of the NPD Committee is awaited but the Committee came out with a revised draft of its recommendations in December 2020. In its December 2020 report, the NPD Committee proposed the creation of a National Data Protection Authority (‘NPDA’) as it felt this is a new and emerging area of regulation. Thereafter, the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 (‘JPC’) came out with its version of the Data Protection Bill where it amended the short title of the PDP Bill 2019 to Data Protection Bill, 2021 widening the ambit of the Bill to include all types of data. The JPC report focuses only on human NPD, noting that non-personal data is essentially derived from one of the three sets of data - personal data, sensitive personal data, critical personal data - which is either anonymized or is in some way converted into non-re-identifiable data.

On February 21, 2022, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (‘MEITY’) came out with the Draft India Data Accessibility and Use Policy, 2022 (‘Draft Policy’). The Draft Policy was strongly criticised mainly due to its aims to monetise data through its sale and licensing to body corporates. The Draft Policy had stated that anonymised and non-personal data collected by the State that has “undergone value addition” could be sold for an “appropriate price”. During the Draft Policy’s consultation process, it had been withdrawn several times and then finally removed from the website. The National Data Governance Framework Policy (‘NDGF Policy’) is a successor to this Draft Policy. There is a change in the language put forth in the NDGF Policy from the Draft Policy, where the latter mainly focused on monetary growth. The new NDGF Policy aims to regulate anonymised non-personal data (‘NPD’) kept with governmental authorities and make it accessible for research and improving governance. It wishes to create an ‘India Datasets programme’ which will consist of the aforementioned datasets. While MEITY has opened the draft for public comments, is a need to spell out the procedure in some ways for stakeholders to draft recommendations for the NDGF policies in an informed manner. Through this piece, we discuss the NDGF Policy in terms of issues related to the absence of a comprehensive Data Protection Framework in India and the jurisdictional overlap of authorities under the NDGF Policy and DPB.

What the National Data Governance Framework Policy Says

Presently in India, NPD is stored in a variety of governmental departments and bodies. It is difficult to access and use this stored data for governmental functions without modernising collection and management of governmental data. Through the NDGF Policy, the government aims to build an Indian data storehouse of anonymised non-personal datasets and make it accessible for both improving governance and encouraging research. It imagines the establishment of an Indian Data Office (‘IDO’) set up by MEITY , which shall be responsible for consolidating data access and sharing of non-personal data across the government. In addition, it also mandates a Data Management Unit for every Ministry/department that would work closely with the IDO. IDO will also be responsible for issuing protocols for sharing NPD. The policy further imagines an Indian Data Council (‘IDC’) whose function would be to define frameworks for important datasets, finalise data standards, and Metadata standards and also review the implementation of the policy. The NDGF Policy has provided a broad structure concerning the setting up of anonymisation standards, data retention policies, data quality, and data sharing toolkit. The NDGF Policy states that these standards shall be developed and notified by the IDO or MEITY or the Ministry in question and need to be adhered to by all entities.

The Data Protection Framework in India

The report adopted by the JPC, felt that it is simpler to enact a single law and a single regulator to oversee all the data that originates from any data principal and is in the custody of any data fiduciary. According to the JPC, the draft Bill deals with various kinds of data at various levels of security. The JPC also recommended that since the Data Protection Bill (‘DPB’) will handle both personal and non-personal data, any further policy / legal framework on non-personal data may be made a part of the same enactment instead of any separate legislation. The draft DPB states that what is to be done with the NDP shall be decided by the government from time to time according to its policy. As such, neither the DPB, 2021 nor the NDGF Policy go into details of regulating NPD but only provide a broad structure of facilitating free-flow of NPD, without taking into account the specific concerns that have been raised since the NPD committee came out with its draft report on regulating NPD dated December 2020.

Jurisdictional overlaps among authorities and other concerns

Under the NDGF policy, all guidelines and rules shall be published by a body known as the Indian Data Management Office (‘IDMO’). The IDMO is set to function under the MEITY and work with the Central government, state governments and other stakeholders to set standards. Currently, there is no sign of when the DPB will be passed as law. According to the JPC, the reason for including NPD within the DPB was because of the impossibility to differentiate between PD and NPD. There are also certain overlaps between the DPB and the NDGF which are not discussed by the NDGF. NDGF does not discuss the overlap between the IDMO and Data Protection Authority (‘DPA’) established under the DPB 2021.

Under the DPB, the DPA is tasked with specifying codes of practice under clause 49. On the other hand, the NDGF has imagined the setting up of IDO, IDMO, and the IDC, which shall be responsible for issuing codes of practice such as data retention, and data anonymisation, and data quality standards. As such, there appears to be some overlap in the functions of the to-be-constituted DPA and the NDGF Policy.

Furthermore, while the NDGF Policy aims to promote openness with respect to government data, there is a conflict with open government data (‘OGD’) principles when there is a price attached to such data. OGD is data which is collected and processed by the government for free use, reuse and distribution. Any database created by the government must be publicly accessible to ensure compliance with the OGD principles.

Conclusion

Streamlining datasets across different authorities is a huge challenge for the government and hence the NGDF policy in its current draft requires a lot of clarification. The government can take inspiration from the European Union which in 2018, came out with a principles-based approach coupled with self-regulation on the framework of the free flow of non-personal data. The guidance on the free-flow of non-personal data defines non-personal data based on the origin of data - data which originally did not relate to any personal data (non-human NPD) and data which originated from personal data but was subsequently anonymised (human NPD). The regulation further realises the reality of mixed data sets and regulates only the non-personal part of such datasets and where the datasets are inextricably linked, the GDPR would apply to such datasets. Moreover, any policy that seeks to govern the free flow of NPD ought to make it clear that in case of re-identification of anonymised data, such re-identified data would be considered personal data. The DPB, 2021 and the NGDF, both fail to take into account this difference.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/national-data-governance-framework-policy

The Geopolitics of Cyberspace: A Compendium of CIS Research

arindrajit — 2021-11-15T14:48:49Z

Cyberspace is undoubtedly shaping and disrupting commerce, defence and human relationships all over the world. Opportunities such as improved access to knowledge, connectivity, and innovative business models have been equally met with nefarious risks including cyber-attacks, disinformation campaigns, government driven digital repression, and rabid profit-making by ‘Big Tech.’ Governments have scrambled to create and update global rules that can regulate the fair and equitable uses of technology while preserving their own strategic interests.

With a rapidly digitizing economy and clear interests in shaping global rules that favour its strategic interests, India stands at a crucial juncture on various facets of this debate. How India governs and harnesses technology, coupled with how India translates these values and negotiates its interests globally, will surely have an impact on how similarly placed emerging economies devise their own strategies. The challenge here is to ensure that domestic technology governance as well as global engagements genuinely uphold and further India’s democratic fibre and constitutional vision.

Since 2018, researchers at the Centre for Internet and Society have produced a body of research including academic writing, at the intersection of geopolitics and technology covering global governance regimes on trade and cybersecurity, including their attendant international law concerns, the digital factor in bilateral relationships (with a focus on the Indo-US and Sino-Indian relationships). We have paid close focus to the role of emerging technologies in this debate, including AI and 5G as well as how private actors in the technology domain, operating across national jurisdictions, are challenging and upending traditionally accepted norms of international law, global governance, and geopolitics.

The global fissures in this space matter fundamentally for individuals who increasingly use digital spaces to carry out day to day activities: from being unwitting victims of state surveillance to harnessing social media for causes of empowerment to falling prey to state-sponsored cyber attacks, the rules of cyber governance, and its underlying politics. Yet, the rules are set by a limited set of public officials and technology lawyers within restricted corridors of power. Better global governance needs more to be participatory and accessible. CIS’s research and writing has been cognizant of this, and attempted to merge questions of global governance with constitutional and technical questions that put individuals and communities centre-stage.

Research and writing produced by CIS researchers and external collaborators from 2018 onward is detailed in the appended compendium.

Compendium

Global cybersecurity governance and cyber norms

Two decades since a treaty governing state behaviour in cyberspace was mooted by Russia, global governance processes have meandered along. The security debate has often been polarised along “Cold War” lines but the recent amplification of cyberspace governance as developmental, social and economic has seen several new vectors added to this debate. This past year two parallel processes at the United Nations General Assembly’s First Committee on Disarmament and International Security-United Nations Group of Governmental Experts (UN-GGE) and the United Nations Open Ended Working Group managed to produce consensus reports but several questions on international law, norms and geopolitical co-operation remain. India has been a participant at these crucial governance debates. Both the substance of the contribution, along with its implications remain a key focus area for our research.

Edited Volumes

Karthik Nachiappan and Arindrajit Basu India and Digital World-Making, Seminar 731, 1 July 2020 (featuring contributions from Manoj Kewalramani, Gunjan Chawla, Torsha Sarkar, Trisha Ray, Sameer Patil, Arun Vishwanathan, Vidushi Marda, Divij Joshi, Asoke Mukerji, Pallavi Raghavan, Karishma Mehrotra, Malavika Raghavan, Constantino Xavier, Rajen Harshe' and Suman Bery)

Long-Form Articles

Arindrajit Basu and Elonnai Hickok, Cyberspace and External Affairs: A Memorandum for India (Memorandum, Centre for Internet and Society, 30 Nov 2018)
The Potential for the Normative Regulation of Cyberspace (White Paper, Centre for Internet and Society, 30 July 2018)
Arindrajit Basu and Elonnai Hickok Conceptualizing an International Security Architecture for cyberspace (Briefings of the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace, Bratislava, Slovakia, May 2018)
Sunil Abraham, Mukta Batra, Geetha Hariharan, Swaraj Barooah, and Akriti Bopanna, India's contribution to internet governance debates (NLUD Student Law Journal, 2018)

Blog Posts and Op-eds

Arindrajit Basu, Irene Poetranto, and Justin Lau, The UN struggles to make progress in cyberspace, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 19th, 2021
Andre’ Barrinha and Arindrajit Basu, Could cyber diplomacy learn from outer space, EU Cyber Direct, 20th April 2021
Arindrajit Basu and Pranesh Prakash, Patching the gaps in India’s cybersecurity, The Hindu, 6th March 2021
Arindrajit Basu and Karthik Nachiappan, Will India negotiate in cyberspace?, Leiden Security and Global Affairs blog,December 16, 2020
Elizabeth Dominic, The debate over internet governance and cybercrimes: West vs the rest?, Centre for Internet and Society, June 08, 2020
Arindrajit Basu, India’s role in Global Cyber Policy Formulation, Lawfare, Nov 7, 2019
Pukhraj Singh, Before cyber norms,let's talk about disanalogy and disintermediation, Centre for Internet and Society, Nov 15th, 2019
Arindrajit Basu and Karan Saini, Setting International Norms of Cyber Conflict is Hard, But that Doesn’t Mean that We Should Stop Trying, Modern War Institute, 30th Sept, 2019
Arindrajit Basu, Politics by other means: Fostering positive contestation and charting red lines through global governance in cyberspace (Digital Debates, Volume 6, 2019)
Arindrajit Basu, Will the WTO Finally Tackle the ‘Trump’ Card of National Security? (The Wire, 8th May 2019)

Policy Submissions

Arindrajit Basu, CIS Submission to OEWG (Centre for Internet and Society, Policy Submission, 2020)
Aayush Rathi, Ambika Tandon, Elonnai Hickok, and Arindrajit Basu. “CIS Submission to UN High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation.” Policy submission. Centre for Internet and Society, January 2019.
Arindrajit Basu,Gurshabad Grover, and Elonnai Hickok. “Response to GCSC on Request for Consultation: Norm Package Singapore.” Centre for Internet and Society, January 17, 2019.
Arindrajit Basu and Elonnai Hickok. Submission of Comments to the GCSC Definition of ‘Stability of Cyberspace (Centre for Internet and Society, September 6, 2019)

Digital Trade and India's Political Economy

The modern trading regime and its institutions were born largely into a world bereft of the internet and its implications for cross-border flow and commerce. Therefore, regulatory ambitions at the WTO have played catch up with the technological innovation that has underpinned the modern global digital economy. Driven by tech giants, the “developed” world has sought to restrict the policy space available to the emerging world to impose mandates regarding data localisation, source code disclosure, and taxation - among other initiatives central to development. At the same time emerging economies have pushed back, making for a tussle that continues to this day. Our research has focussed both on issues of domestic political economy and data governance,and the implications these domestic issues have on how India and other emerging economies negotiate at the world stage.

Long-Form articles and essays

Arindrajit Basu, Elonnai Hickok and Aditya Chawla, T he Localisation Gambit: Unpacking policy moves for the sovereign control of data in India (Centre for Internet and Society, March 19, 2019)
Arindrajit Basu,Sovereignty in a datafied world: A framework for Indian diplomacy in Navdeep Suri and Malancha Chakrabarty (eds) A 2030 Vision for India’s Economic Diplomacy (Observer Research Foundation 2021)
Amber Sinha, Elonnai Hickok, Udbhav Tiwari and Arindrajit Basu, Cross Border Data-Sharing and India (Centre for Internet and Society, 2018)

Blog posts and op-eds

Arindrajit Basu, Can the WTO build consensus on digital trade, Hinrich Foundation,October 05,2021
Amber Sinha, The power politics behind Twitter versus Government of India, The Wire, June 03, 2021
Karthik Nachiappan and Arindrajit Basu, Shaping the Digital World, The Hindu, 30th July 2020
Arindrajit Basu and Karthik Nachiappan, India and the global battle for data governance, Seminar 731, 1st July 2020
Amber Sinha and Arindrajit Basu, Reliance Jio-Facebook deal highlights India’s need to revisit competition regulations, Scroll, 30th April 2020
Arindrajit Basu and Amber Sinha, The realpolitik of the Reliance-Jio Facebook deal, The Diplomat, 29th April 2020
Arindrajit Basu, The Retreat of the Data Localization Brigade: India, Indonesia, Vietnam, The Diplomat, Jan 10, 2020
Amber Sinha and Arindrajit Basu, The Politics of India’s Data Protection Ecosystem, EPW Engage, 27 Dec 2019
Arindrajit Basu and Justin Sherman, Key Global Takeaways from India’s Revised Personal Data Protection Bill, Lawfare, Jan 23, 2020
Nikhil Dave,“Geo-Economic Impacts of the Coronavirus: Global Supply Chains.” Centre for Internet and Society , June 16, 2020.

International Law and Human Rights

International law and human rights are ostensibly technology neutral, and should lay the edifice for digital governance and cybersecurity today. Our research on international human rights has focussed on global surveillance practices and other internet restrictions employed by a variety of nations, and the implications this has for citizens and communities in India and similarly placed emerging economies. CIS researchers have also contributed to, and commented on World Intellectual Property Organization negotiations at the intersection of international Intellectual Property (IP) rules and the human rights.

Long-form article

Arindrajit Basu, Extra Territorial Surveillance and the incapacitation of international human rights law, 12 NUJS LAW REVIEW 2 (2019)
Gurshabad Grover and Arindrajit Basu, ”Internet Blockage”(Scenario contribution to NATO CCDCOE Cyber Law Toolkit,2021)
Arindrajit Basu and Elonnai Hickok, Conceptualizing an international framework for active private cyber defence (Indian Journal of Law and Technology, 2020)
Arindrajit Basu,Challenging the dogmatic inevitability of extraterritorial state surveillance in Trisha Ray and Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan (eds) Digital Debates: CyFy Journal 2021 (New Delhi:ORF and Global Policy Journal,2021)

Blog Posts and op-eds

Arindrajit Basu, “Unpacking US Law And Practice On Extraterritorial Mass Surveillance In Light Of Schrems II”, Medianama, 24th August 2020
Anubha Sinha, “World Intellectual Property Organisation: Notes from the Standing Committee on Copyright Negotiations (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 and 4)”, July 2021
Raghav Ahooja and Torsha Sarkar,How (not) to regulate the internet:Lessons from the Indian Subcontinent,Lawfare,September 23,2021,

Bilateral Relationships

Technology has become a crucial factor in shaping bilateral and plurilateral co-operation and competition. Given the geopolitical fissures and opportunities since 2020, our research has focussed on how technology governance and cybersecurity could impact the larger ecosystem of Indo-China and India-US relations. Going forward, we hope to undertake more research on technology in plurilateral arrangements, including the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue.

Arindrajit Basu and Justin Sherman, The Huawei Factor in US-India Relations,The Diplomat, 22 March 2021
Aman Nair, “TIkTok: It’s Time for Biden to Make a Decision on His Digital Policy with China,” Centre for Internet and Society, January 22, 2021,
Arindrajit Basu and Gurshabad Grover, India Needs a Digital Lawfare Strategy to Counter China, The Diplomat, 8th October 2020
Anam Ajmal, The app ban will have an impact on the holding companies...global power projection begins at home, Times of India, July 7th, 2020 (Interview with Arindrajit Basu)
Justin Sherman and Arindrajit Basu, Trump and Modi embrace, but remain digitally divided, The Diplomat, March 05th, 2020

Emerging Technologies

Governance needs to keep pace with the technological challenges posed by emerging technologies, including 5G and AI. To do so an interdisciplinary approach that evaluates these scientific advances in line with the regimes that govern them is of utmost importance. While each country will need to regulate technology through the lens of their strategic interests and public policy priorities, it is clear that geopolitical tensions on standard-setting and governance models compels a more global outlook.

Long-Form reports

Anoushka Soni and Elizabeth Dominic, Legal and Policy implications of Autonomous weapons systems (Centre for Internet and Society, 2020)
Aayush Rathi, Gurshabad Grover, and Sunil Abraham, Regulating the internet: The Government of India & Standards Development at the IETF (Centre for Internet and Society, 2018)

Blog posts and op-eds

Aman Nair, Would banning Chinese telecom companies make India 5G secure in India? Centre for Internet and Society, 22nd December 2020
Arindrajit Basu and Justin Sherman, Two New Democratic Coalitions on 5G and AI Technologies, Lawfare, 6th August 2020
Nikhil Dave, The 5G Factor: A Primer, Centre for Internet and Society, July 20, 2020.
Gurshabad Grover, The Huawei bogey Indian Express, May 30th, 2019
Arindrajit Basu and Pranav MB, What is the problem with 'Ethical AI'?:An Indian perspective, Centre for Internet and Society, July 21, 2019

(This compendium was drafted by Arindrajit Basu with contributions from Anubha Sinha. Aman Nair, Gurshabad Grover, and Pranav MB reviewed the draft and provided vital insight towards its conceptualization and compilation. Dishani Mondal and Anand Badola provided important inputs at earlier stages of the process towards creating this compendium)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/arindrajit-basu-september-24-2021-the-geopolitics-of-cyberspace-compendium-of-cis-research