Centre for Internet and Society

World Library and Information Congress 2018

Admin — 2018-08-31T02:23:29Z

Swaraj Paul Barooah was a speaker at two panels during the World Library and Information Congress 2018 (WLIC2018), organised by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) in Kuala Lumpur on August 26 and 27, 2018.

Swaraj's first panel, titled "Intellectual Freedom in a Polarised World" was selected as one of 9 sessions to be live-streamed and recorded, out of 249 sessions in total. The recording can be accessed on YouTube.

Session 123 Intellectual Freedom in a Polarised World - Freedom of Access to Information and Freedom of Expression (FAIFE) Advisory Committee (SI)

Chair: Martyn Wade, United Kingdom

In many national contexts, citizens are seen to be either “with the government or against it,” leaving little opportunity to freely and safely express more nuanced views of current social, political or economic issues. While notable authoritarian regimes quite transparently monitor and limit societal discussion, others, ostensibly democratic, may work in practice to blunt potentially unfavourable social commentary on the pretence of defending political stability or public morality. IFLA’s Freedom of Access to Information and Freedom of Expression (FAIFE) Advisory Committee explores this phenomenon--and the potential role of civil society and information professionals in advancing freedom of expression--through the experience and insights of an NGO leader, an academic public intellectual, and an officer of UNESCO.

Presentations

Internet and the freedom of expression in Indonesia: opportunity and challenges - Indriaswati Dyah Saptaningrum, University of New South Wales; former Executive Director of the ELSAM human rights organization (Indonesia), Australia
Freedom of Expression in Malaysia - Azmi Bin Sharom, Faculty of Law, University of Malaysia, Malaysia
What's up with WhatsApp - polarisation and lynchings in India - Swaraj Paul Barooah, The Centre for Internet and Society, India
How to align national laws with international standards on freedom of expression? - Ming-Kuok Lim, Programme Specialist for Communication and Information, UNESCO, Indonesia

Session 140 To Have and not to Hold: The End of Ownership - CLM and FAIFE

The shift from buying physical library media to licensing digital content has profound impacts on the way libraries acquire and give access to content. From e-books that can disappear at the whim (or the mistake) of the owners of a server far away, to the limits on sharing and archiving imposed by some contracts. From the potential monitoring of reader behaviour, to the criminalisation of those who simply want to improve user experience. The dominance of digital media in information provision has both broadened the field of information to which we have access, but potentially made it shallower in terms of the use that libraries, and their users, can make of it. The joint CLM-FAIFE session will look at the question of the end of ownership from a legal and an ethical point of view, drawing on the experience and knowledge of the two communities.

Tomas A. Lipinski, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA – The Limits of Licensing.
Ann Okerson, Centre for Research Libraries, Chicago, USA – The Possibilities of Licensing.
Swaraj Paul Barooah, Centre for Internet and Society – The Balance among Licenses and Exceptions and Limitations to Copyright.
Brent Roe - Laurentian University, Sudbury, Canada – Privacy Concerns and Other Side Effects of Licensing.
Jonathan Hernandez-Perez, Researcher, Instituto de Investigaciones Bibilotecologicas, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico (Invited) – Special Issues in the Developing World; Open Access as a Recapturing of Ownership.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/world-library-and-information-congress-2018

Workshop on Media Law & Policy Curriculum Development

praskrishna — 2014-02-17T10:25:54Z

Centre for Communication Governance, National Law University, Delhi and University of Oxford in support with the International Higher Education-Knowledge Economy Partnerships Programme of the British Council is organizing this workshop on February 16 at National Law University in Delhi.

Chinmayi Arun is a speaker and Bhairav Acharya will be speaking at this event.

Timing	Programme
10.00 10.10	Welcome Address Prof. (Dr.) Srikrishna Deva Rao, Registrar & Professor of Law, National Law University, Delhi
10.10 10.15	Introduction to the Project Chinmayi Arun, Research Director, Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University, Delhi
10.15 10.45	Session 1: Introductory Material The Media Landscape, Media & Democracy Lead discussants: Aloke Thakore, Kanamma Raman, Sukumar Muralidharan and Vibodh Parthasarathi Freedom of Expression & Freedom of Press Lead discussants: Arudra Burra, Bhairav Acharya, Manav Kapur and Sukumar Muralidharan
10.45 11.30	Session 2: Media Law The State and the Media (Sedition, Contempt of Court, Parliamentary Privilege and Reporting Court Proceedings) Geeta Seshu, Jawahar Raja, Manav Kapur, Praveen and Sukumar Muralidharan Citizen, Society and the Media (Defamation, Obscenity, Public Order & Communal Harmony and Privacy) Arudra Burra, Bhairav Acharya, Jawahar Raja, Praveen and Saurav Datta
11.30 11.45	Tea
11.45 12.15	Session 3: Media Content & Regulatory Mechanism and Public Service Broadcasting Media Carriage, Pluralism, Ownership & Cross Ownership Lead discussants: Aloke Thakore, Geeta Seshu, Saurav Datta and Vibodh Parthasarathi
12.15 12.45	Session 4: Converged Media, Globalised Media and the Internet Lead discussants: Aloke Thakore, Abhinav Srivastava, Geeta Seshu Kanamma Raman and Sukumar Muralidharan
12.45 13.30	General Feedback about accessibility, structure and other miscellaneous factors

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/workshop-media-law-and-policy-curriculum-development

Women Arrested in Mumbai for Complaining on Facebook

praskrishna — 2012-11-21T11:32:04Z

For over 30 hours following the death of the Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray on Saturday, stores throughout Mumbai closed their shutters and taxis and autorickshaws stayed off the streets.

This article by Neha Thirani and Hari Kumar was published in New York Times on November 19, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

While analysts throughout Mumbai debated whether the citywide shutdown following the death of Mr. Thackeray was inspired by fear or respect, one 21-year-old woman and her friend were arrested for raising a similar question.

On Sunday, the police in Palghar, in Thane district, on the outskirts of Mumbai, arrested Shaheen Dhadha after she posted a status update on Facebook that questioned the shutdown, also known as a bandh. A local daily, the Mumbai Mirror, reported that Ms. Dhadha, 21, had written, "People like Thackeray are born and die daily and one should not observe a bandh for that." The police also arrested her friend who "liked" the post, whom NDTV identified by her first name, Renu.

The women were arrested under Section 505 of the Indian Penal Code for “statements creating or promoting enmity, hatred or ill will between classes.” Srikant Pingle, station house in charge of the Palghar police, told India Ink that the local Shiv Sena chief, whom he identified as “Mr. Bhushan,” filed the complaint against Ms. Dhadha because her comment on Facebook hurt Shiv Sena’s sentiments. Mr. Pingle declined to comment further on the details of the arrests.

Sudhir Gupta, the defense counsel for the two women, told NDTV, “Their posts don’t incite violence. It can’t be said they have made any derogatory remarks. They don’t belong to any political ideology.”

In a phone conversation with India Ink, a police officer of the Palghar station, who identified himself only as Gavali, said that the arrest took place on Sunday night and that the pair had been taken to court on Monday.

The two women, who were sentenced to 14 days in jail by the court, received bail after a bond of 15,000 rupees ($270) was paid, reported NDTV.

The Times of India reported that a mob of 2,000 Shiv Sena workers vandalized her uncle’s orthopedic clinic in Palghar. Repeated calls made to the Dhada orthopedic hospital in Thane went unanswered, while Harshal Pradhan, a Shiv Sena spokesman, said that he was unaware of the incident.

A police officer at the Palghar Police Station, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that no one has been arrested in the attack on the clinic.

Pranesh Prakash, program manager with the Center for Internet and Society, said the arrests of the two women were a violation of free speech and the misapplication of the law. “There were thousands of people on Facebook, Twitter and in person who were saying the exact same kinds of things that this girl is alleged to have said,” said Mr. Prakash. “And the fact that only she and one other person who liked that comment have been arrested shows a clear arbitrariness in the application of the law.”

In an open letter addressed to the chief minister of Maharashtra, the former Supreme Court Judge Markandey Katju defended the two women, saying, “To my mind it is absurd to say that protesting against a bandh hurts religious sentiments.” He further said that the arrest appears to be a criminal act as it is a crime to wrongfully arrest or wrongfully confine someone who has committed no crime.

On social networking sites, people came out in support of Ms. Dhadha and her friend. The Facebook group “Ban Shiv Sena” had about 36,400 "likes" as of Monday afternoon, while the party’s official Facebook page had just under 2,700. On Twitter, several commenters expressed solidarity with the two women, including Milind Deora, the government minister of state, communications and information technology, who said, "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize ~ Voltaire."

In Maharashtra, Shiv Sena has a history of banning books, movies and other popular culture that are critical of the political party. In 2010, Rohinton Mistry’s book, "Such a Long Journey," was withdrawn from the syllabus of Mumbai University after Shiv Sena officials complained that the book insulted Bal Thackeray. Ironically, in a January 2007 interview with Shekhar Gupta, the editor in chief of The Indian Express, Mr. Thackeray said that what differentiated him from the mafia is that journalists and others were free to disagree with him and criticize him.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/india-blogs-nytimes-nov-19-2012-neha-thirani-hari-kumar-women-arrested-in-mumbai-for-complaining-on-facebook

Women arrested for Facebook post: Did cops act under Sena pressure?

praskrishna — 2012-11-21T11:17:37Z

After Bal Thackeray's death, during the Mumbai Bandh, a 21-year-old criticised the shutdown on her Facebook page — her friend approved of it — next thing they know, they are facing a case, and this morning they were arrested.

YP Singh, Alyque Padamsee, Rohan Joshi, Karuna Nundy and Pranesh Prakash took part in a discussion about the arrest of two girls over a Facebook comment. The discussion was aired in NDTV on November 19, 2012.

The anchor asked Pranesh Prakash:

Who are these people scrolling through people's Facebook posts and Twitter accounts, finding these comments and taking action?

Pranesh Prakash said that it could be anyone. The reality is doesn't really matter because the laws are written in such a way that if it is public and stuff that is on Facebook for different purposes can either be public or private, if it is public these laws can very often apply and that is a problem. We haven't quite figured out to what extent these laws apply. The IT Act section 66A for instance, is unconstitutional, section 295 A which has been applied, and section 505 which also seems to have been applied in this case make it a clear case of misappropriation of those provisions. These kind of arrests will happen. It doesn't quite matter if we have right laws at one level and it clearly doesn't help if we have bad laws. What we need to do at least in part to remedy the situation is to amend the IT Act to make it consonant and consistent with civil and political rights and to do so in multi-stakeholder fashion involving civil society, industry and government. Right now it doesn't protect privacy and freedom of speech as much as it should.

Watch the full video aired on NDTV

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/ndtv-video-ndtv-special-ndtv-24x7

Will India win net neutrality battle?

praskrishna — 2016-01-11T02:28:44Z

There is more than what meets the eye in Facebook’s ‘noble mission’ of providing internet for all.

The article by Pratap Vikram Singh and Taru Bhatia was published by Governance Now on January 5, 2016. Sunil Abraham gave inputs.

India is gearing up for an era of startups and entrepreneurship and the man pushing it as one of his biggest development and self reliance agenda is none other than prime minister Narendra Modi, who launched the ‘Startup India, Standup India’ campaign this year. Few technology giants, led by the likes of Facebook and some telecom service providers, however, have thrown a technology spanner. It is important to note that a significant number of the startups in India are internet-based – next only to the US and China in having maximum number of tech startups, according to industry body NASSCOM.

For these to flourish and for India to have next Facebook or Google it is important to have an open and neutral internet, believe digital rights experts. A network which doesn’t discriminate between the data packets (smallest unit of information sent in binary format over a network) and provides level playing field for all. “It is critical for the Startup India campaign. If we let the principles of net neutrality be compromised, then it makes it very difficult for entrepreneurs and startups to compete against established players, who can close off the market for upstarts by schemes like differentiated pricing and zero rating (toll free access to websites or apps),” said Vishal Misra, associate professor, department of computer science, Columbia University.

A prerequisite for startups

A few months from now, country’s telecom regulator, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), is going to decide whether internet would remain neutral and whether it will continue to foster innovation. A major threat to net neutrality, according to civil society and digital rights experts, comes from zero rating – toll free access to a few selected websites or apps, a strategy adopted by internet service providers or internet platforms to hook users to those select few sites. For telecom and internet service providers zero rating is a new stream of revenue, a way to secure optimal return on investment from their existing subscriber base – without requiring additional investment. The ISPs are arguing that they should be given more flexibility in managing their network – in a way they should be allowed to assume the role of gatekeeper of the internet.

For ISPs, net neutrality is an obsolete and utopian idea. Facebook, which has grown into a mammoth internet platform since its inception in 2004, has recently joined this bandwagon. Under its Free Basics initiative (erstwhile internet.org), the internet giant provides toll free access to a set of websites (including Facebook obviously!) handpicked by itself to the users. In India so far it has partnered with Reliance Communications.

Facebook by far is the most audacious and aggressive proponent of ‘zero rating’ scheme. From lobbying the prime minister to giving back-to-back ads in television channels and two-page ads in national dailies to circulating a vaguely written letter in support of Free Basics on its social media site, Facebook is pitching for ‘digital equality’ by giving access to 'basic internet’ or say a slice of the internet.

Cautioning against zero rating, Prabir Purkayastha, chairperson, Society for Knowledge Commons, said the way zero-rating is being discussed, it seems Indians are only the consumers of internet, which is not true. “Indians are also the innovators on internet,” said Purkayastha. “Internet has given the innovators the right to connect to the users without having a huge amount of money. This is the character that will be destroyed if zero-rating will be implemented,” he says.

That’s true. Be it US-based Facebook or Google or Indian Flipkart or PayTm or SnapDeal, had it not been for open and neutral internet they wouldn’t have become what are today.

Raman Jit Singh Chima, global public policy director, Access Now, a New York-based firm working for digital rights, said the idea is to prevent a telco or an internet platform from assuming a role of a gatekeeper and control access. Misra, too, has written extensively on the counter-productiveness of zero rating: stifling of innovation and service providers loosing incentive to improve service and keep prices low. Both Misra and Chima testified their views on net neutrality to the standing committee on IT in August after the department of telecommunications submitted an expert committee report on the neutrality issue.

Whither public consultation

To formulate a regulation on how internet will shape up, the TRAI has come out with two consultation papers concerning net neutrality in the last nine months. The first consultation paper on ‘regulatory framework for over the top players (OTTs)’, which came in March, was written in favour of telecom and internet service providers. “It was embarrassing,” said Purkayastha. Over 1.2 million people wrote to the regulator. This was result of the savetheinternet.in campaign ran by free internet activists and lawyers, who were later joined by All India Bakchod (AIB) whose video on net neutrality went viral on YouTube (the video has received three million views in last eight months). This was unprecedented in the history of TRAI consultations. However, the fate of those responses is still unclear.

In December the regulator brought another paper. This time it was titled ‘regulation on differential pricing’. Contrary to the initial paper, this paper is far more objective and reasonable, said Nikhil Pahwa, founder, MediaNama portal and a key volunteer behind savetheinternet.in campaign. The regulator has sought comments on its second paper by December 30 and counter-comments by January 7. Till the time a final call is taken, the telecom regulator has instructed Reliance Communications, Facebook’s India telecom partner, to put Free Basics on hold.

The savetheinternet.in campaign has formulated the responses to the new consultation paper and has made it available for everyone favouring net neutrality to send it to the TRAI. The AIB team has released another video titled ‘Save the Internet - 2 – Judgement Day’, which has been viewed close to one million times in just four months.

The neutrality debate started in India in December 2014 when Airtel, country’s largest telco, announced – although it later backtracked – that the company would charge consumers more for using VOIP services, on top of the data charges. Later, it went on to launch Airtel Zero, wherein it struck deal with online services providers for user access at zero rate. Facebook had already introduced internet.org by then. While it was initially led by civil society, the debate was later joined by politicians – Naveen Patnaik, M Chandrashekhar, Jay Panda, Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal – who strongly came out in support of net neutrality.

Facebook has termed its zero rating platform as a philanthropic activity intended to connect billions of unconnected population so that they can access education, health and employment related information. It has urged users to sign a petition, cautioning them against "a small, vocal group of critics" lobbying to prevent 1 billion people from accessing 'affordable internet'. Under Free Basics, Facebook claims, it doesn't charge app developers and includes them if they comply to its 'objective tech specs'.

Free Basics: A camouflage?

Critics, however, call it a walled garden. In providing free access to close to a hundred websites it continues to play the role of a gatekeeper. It is not the poor who decide what to access but Facebook! While it says that it is not making money out of Free Basics as it doesn't display ads in the Free Basics version of Facebook, it keeps the option of monetisation open in the future.

“It [Free Basics] has been camouflaged as charity," said a senior TRAI official, in an off the record conversation. While speaking to the Guardian on Facebook’s zero rating in December, Tim Berners Lee, founder of world wide web (www), said, “In the particular case of somebody who's offering... something which is branded internet, it's not internet, then you just say no. No it isn't free, no it isn't in the public domain, there are other ways of reducing the price of internet connectivity and giving something... [only] giving people data connectivity to part of the network deliberately, I think is a step backwards.”

Speaking in favour of zero rating, Payal Malik, associate professor, economics, Delhi University, said that it is wrong to assume that all consumers will get hooked to zero rated sites. “In a way you are saying that all humans have same preferences and likes and dislikes, which is very unlikely,” said Malik.

Experts representing telecom industry argue that the net neutrality regulation should be geography specific and the telecom players should be given more flexibility in dealing with the network. Mahesh Uppal, a senior telecom consultant and director, ComFirst India, while speaking at a round table discussion in Delhi, said that a majority of population in the West including countries opting for strict net neutrality – including Netherlands, Slovenia and the US – are already connected. "The data connectivity is primarily through fixed lines - copper, co-ax cable or optical fibre wired — wherein it is easier to add capacity to meet traffic growth. However this is difficult to do so for wireless networks," said Uppal. In developing countries, including India, mobile telephony and internet majorly runs on wireless. Hence, he argued, telecom and internet service providers should be given flexibility to zero rate. For Uppal, if zero rating or sponsored content is implemented properly “it can be one of the ways to scale up internet access” to the unconnected regions.

Neutrality proponents, however, differ. “It is basic economic theory, and zero rated sites get a price advantage. There are studies that show customers stay within the world of zero rated sites and never venture outside or are aware of the full internet,” professor Misra said.

Zero or equal rating?

So is there a middle ground? Are there ways to increase access without tampering with open and neutral character of the internet? Experts believe there are. Some of the solutions are not completely black and white, but in between. While there is a fierce opposition to zero rating, it might work, according to Sunil Abraham, executive director, centre for internet and society (CIS), if provided with an amount of equal rating (giving free data pack to users so that they can access any site or app they want).

Mozilla Foundation advocates equal rating. The foundation has sought to create such an alternative in Bangladesh and countries in Africa within the Firefox OS ecosystem. The foundation has tied up with telecom operator Grameenphone in Bangladesh to provide 20 Mb data per day for free to users, in exchange for viewing an advertisement. The model could be easily replicated in India, said Pahwa of MediaNama.

For African countries, the foundation has partnered with Orange. Both allow Africans to purchase $40 Firefox OS smartphones that come packaged with free three to six months of voice calling, text, and up to 500 Mb of monthly data. Purkayastha of Knowledge Commons said that zero-rating plan by telecom operators only makes sense when government services are provided for free through it. “That is the form of zero-rating I would support.”

There are a few platforms which are reimbursing data in megabytes to users accessing partnering apps. The user can then use the free data pack to access any other site or app. Some of them include: mCent, Gigato and DataMi. mCent, owned by Boston-based firm Jana, is a pioneer in this area. It is being used by 30 million users cross 98 countries. In India, according to Jana, one out of every 10 internet users has subscribed to mCent.

Yes, it does violate neutrality as it puts those app providers not having enough money at a disadvantageous position vis-à-vis to those having deep pocket to reimburse data to users. “I think it’s a grey area,” said professor Misra. On the surface it seems to be just like Free Basics, however, Gigato (or mCent) is making no pretense that what they are doing is philanthropy of increasing access, said professor Misra, adding that it is still acceptable as user will have the data to venture out of the walled garden. The senior TRAI official too finds it acceptable. “In my opinion, Facebook should become like Gigato,” he said.

If the regulator is going to protect consumers’ right and also not stifle startups and entrepreneurism, it will have to ensure some broad, core principles of the internet. It will have to prevent both the ISPs and the internet platforms from becoming gatekeepers. It must not allow any throttling, blocking, fast and slow lanes, discrimination based on price or quality of service and distortion of level playing field. How and whether TRAI is going to do these would be clear in a few months.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/governance-now-pratap-vikram-singh-and-taru-bhatia-january-6-2015-will-india-win-net-neutrality-battle

Why was the Gwalior court in such a hurry to block IIPM URLs?

praskrishna — 2013-02-19T11:51:43Z

Is it really that easy to get courts to block online content as it appears from the latest case of the blocking of 73 URLs related to IIPM? Legally speaking, yes.

The article by Danish Raza was published in FirstPost on February 19, 2013. Snehashish Ghosh's analysis on blocked sites is quoted.

In cases of defamation, violations of copyright and trademark law and threats to national security, courts can direct the government agency (CERT-in or Computer Emergency Response Team- India) to take down the offending content. And these can be ex-parte orders. Meaning the person or organisation posting the content online is not intimated every time the material is blocked.

Legality aside however, advocates of free speech say that such court orders should be exceptions and not the rule. There is a perception that the process in its current form – right from the filing of court case to the content being taken offline- is opaque.

Traditionally the Internet has been viewed as a more liberal, open and democratic platform as compared to traditional media. Through such orders, says Delhi based advocate and expert on cyber law Apar Gupta, courts seem to give out a warning that online content is not outside the purview of the law.

The problem in this case however, is not the ‘warning’ itself. It is the way that the warning is being given that is setting the wrong precedent.

The blocks on IIPM related URLs is based on an interim order passed by a Gwalior court. The head of the institute, Arindam Chaudhuri in an exclusive interview with Firstpost, said that the case was filed last year by one his ‘channel partners’. He added that the court had made him a party in the case only in January and he would soon respond to court orders.

Three of the affected parties (Careers 360, Caravan and Kafila), however, said that they were never informed about the blocks, reported Mint.

After the block orders, Shivam Vij, founder of the blog, Kafila, told Firstpost, “This is against the principle of natural justice. The court blocked the URL of my blog without giving me a chance to defend myself.

While there are occasions warranting the urgent removal of content, experts say similar exigency need not be shown in cases of defamatory content.

In his analysis of blocked URLs related to IIPM, Snehashish Ghosh from the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a Bangalore based organisation, notes that according to the Bonnard Rule, in a defamation case, interim injunction should not be awarded unless a defence of justification by the defendant was certain to fail at trial level. “Therefore, it appears that the (Gwalior) Court order has moved away from the settled principles of law while awarding an interim injunction for blocking of content related to IIPM”, says the report.

Commenting on court ordered blocks, Parminder Jeet Singh, executive director of IT for change, a Bangalore based organisation which works on internet governance issues, says, “When there is clear imminent danger or threat to the society, as in case of possible rioting, immediate removal of content without notifying and hearing the other party is understandable. But defamatory content does not fall in this category. Decisions on such largely civil matter should be taken with due deep consideration, after listening to all parties. And by far the considerations of free speech should have overwhelming weight in making decisions.”

Singh adds that “Even if it is considered necessary to remove any content, a fully transparent process has to be followed.”

The most common reason cited for not sending notices before removing the content is the tiresome process of zeroing in on the one person or authority responsible for posting the content, says Prabir Purkayastha of Knowledge Commons, an organisation which promotes open source information. “If you approach intermediaries such as Google or Yahoo, they will rightly say that they can provide details only if they are allowed to do as per international treaties,” says Purkayastha. But when there is clarity on who put the content online, like in the IIPM case, he says, “DoT cannot absolve itself from the responsibility of writing at least an email to these entities.”

In the case of Tata Sons Ltd. vs Green Peace International, cited by Ghosh of CIS, the Delhi High Court addressed the question whether posting or publishing of libelous material on the Internet calls for a different standard. Ghosh writes, “The court decided that there cannot be a separate standard for the Internet while awarding temporary injunction in defamation cases. The wider viewership or accessibility compared to other medium does not alter the fact that it is a medium.”

Purkayastha agrees. “Freedom of speech and expression and the restraints on it, as enshrined in the constitution, should not depend on the medium of expression. But due to the haste shown by courts in blocking online content, it appears that courts seem be applying two sets of standards with respect to Internet and traditional media,” he says.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/first-post-feb-19-2013-danish-raza-why-was-the-gwalior-court-in-such-a-hurry-to-block-iipm-urls

Why this blocking di?

praskrishna — 2012-05-28T05:47:20Z

In a bid to curb piracy, film producers are now approaching courts to block websites that host pirated content. But the court orders are so vaguely worded that users lose access to even legitimate content. R Krishna reports.

The article by R Krishna was published in Daily News & Analysis on May 27, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted in it.

The film 3 owes its popularity to thousands of netizens who watched the song ‘Why this kolaveri di’ on YouTube, and then recommended it to their friends on social networking sites. It is rather ironic that the same netizens were denied access to legitimate content — such as other independent films, free software, etc — on the internet, by the producers of the film.

Last week, the producers, via Copyright Labs, obtained an order from the Madras High Court against 15 internet service providers (ISPs) and five ‘Ashok Kumars’, directing them to not infringe on the film’s copyright. The result: many popular torrent sites as well as video sharing websites like Vimeo and Dailymotion were blocked by some ISPs.

The ‘Ashok Kumar’ in the order refers to unknown people who may infringe on the film’s copyright. It is the desi version of what is known as a John Doe order, used by courts in the US, UK, Canada and Australia.

Acting against unknown offenders

According to Delhi-based advocate Apar Gupta, John Doe orders came into practice in India in the early 2000s to help producers counter cable operators airing pirated versions of recently released films on their local channels. Films normally release on Friday, and if someone had pirated the movie, producers would have to wait till Monday to file a plea in court against the offenders.

By the time the court issued the order, the pirated film would have done its damage. That’s why courts started granting producers temporary injunctions against unknown people — John Doe — who were likely to infringe on the film’s copyright. This way, producers could serve court notices without any delay.

“The internet is now being included within the scope of such orders,” says Gupta. As a result, a film producer armed with a John Doe order can ask ISPs to block access to any website that is likely to infringe upon his copyright.

“In the digital age, it takes seconds to spread pirated copies with good prints across the world. A John Doe order makes it convenient for us to serve a notice. Of course, we have to prove that (the website) has infringed copyright,” says Sanjay Tandon, vice president, music and anti-piracy, Reliance Entertainment, which started the trend by blocking torrent websites during the release of their film Singham.

Carpet blocking websites

But according to Pranesh Prakash, programme manager, Centre for Internet & Societies, “Unlike the Calcutta High Court order in March this year, which specified the 104 websites that should be blocked, a John Doe order doesn’t mention any specific website. In some cases, the websites are being blocked without any evidence (of copyright infringement). Courts need to be informed of what people with John Doe orders are doing. We need to be specific about what can be blocked and what can’t be.”

A case in point is Vimeo, a website similar to YouTube, which has been blocked by certain ISPs. There is no information about which particular video on Vimeo infringes upon copyright. And even if there is some such video, experts are perplexed why the entire website was blocked.

“The injunctions being granted in India are very generalised and broad. For instance, all it states is that the court is preventing defendants from transmitting copyrighted content. It doesn’t set any limitations, such as requiring the plaintiff to identify specific URLs to be blocked, instead of the whole website,” says Gupta.

However, Tandon points out, Reliance Entertainment has not been asking ISPs to block entire websites. “We are asking ISPs and websites to not allow our content to be streamed via their service. I don’t know why ISPs choose to block entire websites,” he says.

ISPs are not forthcoming in explaining why entire websites are being blocked. “Access to certain sites has been blocked by Airtel pursuant to and in compliance with court orders,” is all an Airtel spokesperson is willing to reveal.

According to Gupta, entire websites are being blocked either because copyright owners demand this, or because ISPs are trying to avoid potential liability. “The fault lies with the legislative procedure. If the ISP is afraid and blocks the entire website, it shows that our laws are not good enough to protect its interests,” says Gupta.

In either case, the present system of functioning is too ham-handed and is like using a butcher’s knife where a surgeon’s scalpel is needed. “Courts should be strict in monitoring how the plaintiff is using the John Doe order. But for things to change, we need one of those unnamed defendants to come before the court and express how the order was used against him,” adds Gupta. Will a John Doe please stand up?

What is happening internationally

John Doe orders are used by courts in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. However, there are few instances abroad where they have been used to block websites. According to Apar Gupta, advocate, there is only instance in the UK where a court ordered the blocking of Pirate Bay. “But even that order was specific to Pirate Bay. In the US, they have the Digital Millennium Copyright Act wherein the copyright holder can write to the website asking them to take down content. It clearly specifies that only specific torrent files can be taken down, not the entire website. Indian laws do not go into such detail,” says Gupta.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/why-this-blocking

Why the Internet is Making India Furious

praskrishna — 2016-02-28T03:01:59Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bangalore is a kind of hacker club for wonks and lawyers obsessed with issues of digital rights and global development. Not exactly the mainstream kids’ lunch table. But the Center was brought into sudden relief this week, thanks to … Mark Zuckerberg.

Read Sanjena Sathian's blog post published by Ozy on February 19, 2016

In a splashy bit of news, India’s telecom authority rejected a program called Free Basics, which the Facebook team had been promoting as a way to get free Internet to the masses. (Here on the subcontinent, more than 300 million people use the Internet — but that’s only about a quarter of the population.) The idea: Facebook would allow free access to a handful of websites (the “basics”) to everyone; users would pay for further content. The objections: On the dramatic end came comparisons to colonialism; on the wonkier, objections based on the principles of net neutrality, or the idea that all Internet content should be treated the same. The threat the critics saw in Free Basics was that of the Web as a two-lane highway — the free stuff for the poor folks, and the good stuff for those who can afford it.

Mumbai-based Sanjena Sathian spoke to CIS cofounder and policy director Pranesh Prakash about the changing landscape of web rights that led up to the news.

OZY:

Tell us what you’re thinking in the wake of India’s decision.

Pranesh Prakash:

The order seemed to fix the issue with a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel. It over-regulates and bans things that are beneficial along with that that aren’t. They should have aimed for discriminatory pricing, but they’ve instead eliminated all differential pricing, even when it’s not discriminatory.

What should come next, in my opinion — it is imperative to ensure that governmental resources are used to provide free access to the Internet. If you’ve taken away something that could have helped and said no, no, no, it’s not good for you, then you are under an obligation to provide a replacement.

OZY:

How do you think the larger political conversations going on in India right now seep into the debates about digital rights?

PP:

Many people think the largest divider is between those who are from a developing country or a developed country. I think the larger divide is between those who are politically skeptical of states — more libertarian — versus those who are more trusting of states and see states as having a role to play in Internet governance. How you think the poor in India should get Internet — should that be provided by government or by market mechanisms — well, your political philosophies will play a role. In India, one tends to find fewer free-market fundamentalists than one would meet in, say, San Francisco.

OZY:

I think, increasingly, post-Snowden in particular, people think of digital rights as human rights. Where do you see things going wrong on a rights front here in India?

PP:

Oh, wow … so many ways. In India we have a situation where, right now, more than 3,000 websites were blocked by the government, but no one knows what these sites are. No one knows whether they were blocked through mechanisms that ensure accountability. There is no transparency around any of these. And this is just the visible tip of the iceberg. And how do I know this? I sent a right-to-information request to the government and they gave me this answer. But beyond this, they put in place a few years ago a law which allows for websites and any kind of web content to be censored by anyone. And all they have to do is send a request to any “intermediary,” which could be anything from your ISP to your web host to your DNS provider.

OZY:

Wait, so what does that mean? I get annoyed at a site — where do I go to lodge my complaint?

PP:

All these websites are required by the law to appoint a particular person as a “grievance redressal officer.”

OZY:

What a title!

PP:

Yes … and there are more than 40 grounds for grievances that have been listed in the law, including things such as “causing harm to minors” and certain speech being “disparaging.” Now, I engage in disparaging speech at least 12 times a day. And that’s perfectly legal under Indian law!

OZY:

Eep. Any good news, though?

PP:

A case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, [involving a young woman named] Shreya Singhal. There was a section 66A, quite an odious provision, that allowed for any kind of “offensive” or “annoying” speech to cause that person to be put in prison for up to three years.

Two teenage girls in Maharashtra, upon the death of a politician, put out a comment on social media. The death had caused a bandh, a curfew of sorts in Mumbai, and done not officially by the government but by political party workers. One girl said on Facebook, sure, go ahead, respect this politician, but why inconvenience so many citizens? Her friend liked this. And a case was launched against them. Similarly, some cartoons by an anticorruption activist were challenged and he was imprisoned briefly and released on bail.

OZY:

It’s always the cartoonists.…

PP:

Yes, and one professor in Calcutta — for forwarding a cartoon, he was placed under this law too. Many cases of perfectly fine political speech were made illegal thanks to this law. Eventually, though, in a landmark decision, the Supreme Court struck down this law, and this is the first time in almost three decades that the Supreme Court has struck off an entire law for being unconstitutional.

But, yes. Mostly? It’s not been pretty.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/ozy-february-19-2016-sanjena-sathian-why-internet-is-making-india-furious

Why Indians are turning down Facebook's free internet

praskrishna — 2016-01-17T16:25:10Z

Imagine a billion of the world’s poorest gaining overnight access to health information, education, and professional help — for free. Add to this one rich man who wants to make that dream a reality.

The article by Nimisha Jaiswal was published in the Global Post on January 13, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

That’s the invitation that Facebook has sent to India. Many there, however, are rejecting such benevolence.

Facebook has introduced its Free Basics project in 36 countries. The company claims that the app acts as a stepping-stone to the internet for those who are otherwise without access, by providing them with a few essential sites — or “basics” — to get started.

“We know that when people have access to the internet they also get access to jobs, education, healthcare, communication… We know that for India to make progress, more than 1 billion people need to be connected to the internet,” wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a recent op-ed for a major Indian newspaper. “Free Basics is a bridge to the full internet and digital equality.”

However, net neutrality researchers and activists in India define it quite differently.

“Free Basics is a zero-rated walled garden that gives users a tiny subset of the world wide web,” Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society, told GlobalPost.

The Free Basics app is part of Facebook’s Internet.org, a “zero-rating” internet service that provides limited access for no charge to the consumer. The original Internet.org was heavily criticized in India for violating net neutrality, the principle that all content on the web should be accessible to consumers at the same speed, without discrimination by providers.

Last spring, as part of a homegrown Save The Internet movement, over 1 million people wrote to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to protest services that disrupt net neutrality by providing only a small fraction of the internet to their users.

India’s Department of Telecommunications has already recommended that such platforms be disallowed. Before it makes its own recommendations this month, the TRAI asked concerned citizens for another round of input on zero-rating apps. The criticism has been so loud that, at the end of December, Free Basics’ local telecom partner was ordered to take the service down until a decision is reached.

Though Free Basics does not require payment from the websites it shares, Facebook’s competitors are unlikely to participate and provide user data to their rivals. And while there are currently no advertisements on Free Basics, Facebook reserves the right to introduce them in the future to garner revenue from their “walled-in” clients.

According to Abraham, such a platform harms free speech, privacy, innovation and diversity by adding another layer of surveillance and “censoring” the internet.

Mahesh Murthy, a venture capitalist who is part of India’s Save The Internet movement, puts it more bluntly.

“What Facebook wants is our less fortunate brothers and sisters should be able to poke each other and play Candy Crush, but not be able to look up a fact on Google, or learn something on Khan Academy, or sell their produce on a commodity market, or even search for a job on [Indian recruitment website] Naukri,” said Murthy.

Zuckerberg and Facebook’s India team have vigorously rebutted net neutrality activists in India, including Murthy, challenging their criticism of Free Basics and accusing activists of deliberately trying to prevent the masses from gaining internet access.

“Critics of the program continue to spread false claims — even if that means leaving behind a billion people,” wrote Zuckerberg in his Times of India op-ed.

According to Abraham, this is a misleading assertion. “They are falsely framing the debate, they are making it look like we have only two choices,” he told GlobalPost. “The choice is not between less people on the internet and unregulated [Free Basics].”

Several alternatives are being proposed. Abraham does not advocate a complete ban on Free Basics, instead suggesting a “leaky” walled garden where users would be given 100 MB of full internet access for every 100 MB of Free Basics consumed.

The Save the Internet campaign, however, wants Free Basics barred altogether. It proposes returning to previously implemented schemes like providing data on the purchase of a phone, or letting users access the full internet after watching an ad. The Universal Service Obligation Fund, set up by the Department of Telecommunications to provide affordable communication technology in rural areas, could also be used to finance free data packs.

While Facebook could potentially contribute to such funds to promote its connectivity goals, the millions of dollars it has spent loudly defending Free Basics in India suggest that the company is deeply attached to its own scheme.

Facebook has claimed that “more than four in five Indians support Free Basics,” according to a survey that it paid for. Indian users of the social network have received notifications encouraging them to send a template letter to the regulator in support of Free Basics. Even users in the US were “accidentally” notified to add their backing to the Indian campaign.

Some of the company's critics suggest that it is driven less by philanthropy, more by guaranteeing itself a stream of new users.

Murthy points out that a large number of the world’s population not yet on the internet are in India and China — and Facebook is banned in China. “So who becomes essential to Mark Zuckerberg’s balance sheet? Enter us Indians.”

While Indian activists agree that connectivity is an important goal, they insist that Free Basics in its current form is not the solution or even the only option right now. All it does is whets the appetite of the consumer, according to Abraham.

“You can compare Free Basics to when you go through the mall: You see the people selling cookies, and the aroma fills the whole mall,” he said. “That’s what Free Basics does — it gets you interested in the cookie. But it doesn’t solve the affordability question.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/global-post-nimisha-jaiswal-why-indians-are-turning-down-facebook-free-internet

Why India snubbed Facebook's free Internet offer

praskrishna — 2016-02-27T07:49:08Z

The social media giant wanted to give the people of India free access to a chunk of the Internet, but the people weren't interested.

The blog post by Daniel Van Boom was published by Cnet on February 26, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

Mark Zuckerberg's ambitious mission to provide free Internet access to rural India was rejected by the people it was intended to help long before the country's regulators banned it earlier this month.

Around the country, farmers, labourers and office workers scorned Facebook's offer. Called Free Basics, it provided only limited access to the Internet through a suite of websites and services that, unsurprisingly, included Facebook. They felt the limited service didn't follow the open nature of the Internet, where all sites and online destinations should be equally accessible, so they organized real-world protests and an online Save The Internet campaign, with the message that Zuckerberg's efforts weren't welcome.

You might think people would jump at the opportunity to access Facebook for free, especially since more than a billion people use the social network every day. But it's that hitch -- that they can't access everything else -- which is precisely the problem, said Sunil Abraham, the executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society India. "Even if somebody spends 90 percent of their time on Facebook, that 10 percent is equally as important."

Indian regulators sided with popular opinion and cut off Free Basics in the world's second-most populous country on February 8. The ruling by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) forbids all zero-rating plans, meaning anyone offering customers free access to only a limited set of services of sites are banned. It was championed as a victory for Net neutrality, the principle that everyone should have equal access to all content on the Internet.

The decision was undoubtedly a blow for Facebook, which says it wants to connect the billions of have-nots around the world to the Internet through the program. While more than half the world's online population uses Facebook each month, the company's efforts to connect with the developing world -- with Free Basics also being available in over 30 other countries, such as Kenya and Iraq -- could be a boon for business.

"[The Internet] must remain neutral for everyone, individuals and businesses alike. Everyone must have equal access to it," said Rajesh Sawhney, a Mumbai-based tech entrepreneur, in support of TRAI's decision to reject Free Basics. He believes the zero-rating scheme can be misused by telcos and other companies to create divisive ecosystems, where certain brands or companies are included and others aren't.

The package wasn't without its supporters though, with some being disappointed with the government's intervention in the marketplace.

"It is generally assumed that there is something sinister behind violations of Net neutrality...but that is not always true," says software engineer Shashank Mehra. "ISPs trying to match consumer demand isn't something sinister, it is a market process."

The social media giant further defends itself by pointing out that Free Basics is open to any and all developers, including competitors Twitter and Google, as long as they meet the program's technical standards. This evidently wasn't enough to convince much of India.

The problem persists

Facebook disputes claims that its interest in India is commercial, saying its efforts are humanitarian. In speeches over the past few months, Zuckerberg has painted Internet access as a tool for global good. "The research has shown on this that for every 10 people who get access to the internet, about one person gets a new job, and about one person gets lifted out of poverty," he said at a Townhall Q&A in Delhi last October. "Connecting things in India is one of the most important things we can do in the world."

Zuckerberg appears to have taken the loss in stride. During a keynote address at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona earlier this week, he admitted to being disappointed by the ruling, but added, "We are going to focus on different programs [in India]...we want to work with all the operators there." A Facebook spokesperson said the company "will continue our efforts to eliminate barriers and give the unconnected an easier path to the Internet and the opportunity it brings."

Those ideals could certainly help in India, where around 68 percent of its population -- about 880 million people -- live in rural conditions or poverty. The promise of free access to health, education, local and national news through an Internet connection could potentially improve quality of live. So what's the problem?

The service providers would also be granting free Facebook.

Peggy Wolff, a volunteer coordinator at education NGO Isha Vidhya, says Facebook is just the latest in a long line of international companies hoping to crack rural India, where the bulk of the country's poor live.

While admitting that low cost or free Internet is imperative in rural areas, that "smart villages" are needed to help ease the human burden on India's increasingly overcrowded cities, she says, "Free basics is just a bit suspicious to most people. There's just too much vested interest."

"The big question." Sawhney says, "is how do we give fast and free Internet to a large section of society in India?"

There are alternatives. United States-based Jana, for instance, developed an Android app called mCent that allows its growing userbase of 30 million to earn data by downloading and using certain apps or watching advertisements from sponsors. Unlike Free Basics, that data can be expended on any online destination.

Jana's CEO Nathan Eagle, like Zuckerberg, says his mission is to bring Internet connectivity to the next billion people. "Today, Internet connectivity in emerging markets is much more an issue of affordability, rather than access," he explains. "1.3 billion people in emerging markets now have Android phones...it's the cost of data that is prohibitive."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/why-india-snubbed-facebooks-free-internet-offer

Why Geospatial Bill is draconian and how it will hurt startups

praskrishna — 2016-07-02T04:57:35Z

Last week, the Indian government rejected Google’s plans to map Indian cities, tourist spots and mountain ranges, using the 360-degree panoramic Google Street View feature.

The article was published in Indian Express on June 13, 2016

Last week, the Indian government rejected Google’s plans to map Indian cities, tourist spots and mountain ranges, using the 360-degree panoramic Google Street View feature. The government officials cited “national security” as a reason for not granting permission to Google. It is expected that the Google’s Street View permission would be relooked at, once the draft Geospatial Information Regulation Bill, 2016, is enforced as law. Many however feel that this draft bill is draconian and will have serious repercussions on the startup ecosystem.

The Geospatial Bill seeks to make creating, accessing and distribution or sharing of map related information, illegal and that every company will have to take prior permission and license from the government for the same. Wayback in 2011, Google had announced the introduction of Street View for Bangalore, on Google Maps. But the project ran into trouble with Bangalore Police stopping Street View cars from plying in the city, citing security reasons.

Google Street View, launched in 2007, is popular in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Denver, New York and Miami, which allows users to navigate virtual streets from photographs gathered from directional cameras on special vehicles. While the service has been hugely successful it has caused problems of privacy in some countries.

In 2010 almost 250,000 Germans told Google to blur pictures of their homes on the Street View service, while Czech government also banned Google from taking any new photos for the service. In Switzerland, the matter went to the court and it was accepted that Google would be obliged to pixelate 99% of images to blur faces, vehicle registrations and that it would not be filming certain sensitive places such as schools, prisons and shelter homes.

This adds to the list of recent controversies on Google Earth, and the draft Geospatial Information Regulation Bill, on adoption of mapping technology in India. Commenting on the development, Sumandro Chattapadhyay, research director at the Centre for Internet and Society said, the key country where the Google Street View faced legal challenge, and was fined too, is Germany. This legal challenge, however, was not based on the concern for national security but on that for the privacy of the citizens. However, it was eventually allowed to roll out Street View in Germany provided that it asks for consent from the house owners before images of any house.”

“One of the crucial concerns with the draft Geospatial Information Regulation Bill remains its vast scope of application. Not only initiatives like Google Street View may be regulated under it (for capturing geo-referenced imagery from the street level) but absolutely any mobile application that requires the user’s geo-location (either automatically detected, or manually entered by the user) would be within the purview of this Bill. This evidently creates a great pressure upon the entire ICT-enable product and service sector in India,” Chattapadhyay added.

This would mean that, any company, particularly the new age startups, those in the food tech, fintech and e-commerce space, which uses geo-location to identify the customer location to either deliver goods, food products, or the likes of Ola and Uber which uses maps to pickup and drop customers, will have to obtain license from the government.

Raman Shukla, director—strategy and product, Medikoe, said, “At Medikoe we are helping users to locate the nearest healthcare service provider with the available technologies. Google Maps is one of key feature our company banks on. Though we understand the country’s security concerns, the draft bill, if implemented, would be a violation of independent internet. We believe that a much better solution can be identified to solve security concerns.”

Venu Kondur, founder of LOBB, the online truck booking platform said, “Geostatial data is a very important data for our business. Customers booking truck through LOBB platform get real-time track & trace facility. Our customers rely heavily on this data for their day-day activity. Startups like us depend largely on maps data for real-time tracking of consignment. Lot of our business intelligence data is drawn out of it.”

In case, if the draft gets implemented, many startups will be forced to change the business model and while it will also increase the product delivery time. A group of 15 volunteers created a SaveTheMap.in portal to educate the readers about the draft bill and also give complete information on how the bill have an impact on the citizen and users of certain application. Sajjad Anwar one of the volunteer, said, through the portal about 1700 mails have been sent to the ministry of home affairs airing their view on why they do not support the draft Bill.

Comparing with other countries, Chattapadhyay further said, “At first, other countries deal with the question of display of security establishments in publicly available maps through direct interactions with large mapping companies, and does not turn this into a financial and political burden for the entire economy. Secondly, it is the concern about privacy of the citizens that should frame the Indian government’s response to products and services like Google Street View, and not concerns regarding national security.”

What the draft bill says

No person shall, in any manner, make use of, disseminate, publish or distribute any geospatial information of India, outside India, without prior permission from the security vetting authority under the Central government.

Penalty

Whoever acquires any geospatial information of India in contravention to the rules, shall be punished with a fine ranging from Rs 1 crore to Rs 100 crore and /or imprisonment for a period upto seven years.

Application for license

Every person who has already acquired any geospatial imagery or data of any part of India either through space or aerial platforms such as satellite, aircrafts, airships, balloons, unmanned aerial vehicles or terrestrial vehicles shall within one year from the commencement of this Act, make an application along with requisite fees to the security vetting authority.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/financial-express-prabhu-mallikarjunan-june-13-2016-why-geospatial-bill-is-draconian-and-how-it-will-hurt-startups

When #GOIBlocks, twitterati fly off their ‘handles’

praskrishna — 2012-08-26T05:56:19Z

Ever since the news broke mid-week that some genuine Twitter accounts and six spoof accounts were blocked, the social networking platform has been in a tizzy.

Published in the Hindustan Times on August 26, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

Hashtags like #GOIblocks and variations on the same theme began “trending” and the twitterati, functioning like a virtual democracy, have been bombarding the world in real time with posts about the issue. 16 accounts of the 15 million twitter users in India, among them those of a few journalists, spoof accounts like @PM0India, a right-wing parody of @PMOIndia, the official twitter account of the Prime Minister’s office, and a few anonymous accounts like Barbarian Indian (@barbarindian) and Dosabandit (@dosabandit) were blocked.

While Narendra Modi turned his twitter display picture black in solidarity with the idea of freedom of speech (and was promptly termed a hypocrite with many like @JagPaws, who has 641 followers, tweeting, “Whoa!! Is he supporting Jihadi sites?”), Pankaj Pachauri, (49,827 followers) Communications Adviser to the Prime Minister’s office, has put up twitter rules and the National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon’s ominously pro-surveillance keynote address at the release of the IDSA report on “India’s Cyber Security Challenge”.

Many like Nitin Pai @acorn, with 16,988 followers, founder of Takshashila Institute, a public policy think tank, tweeted that “under extraordinary circumstances, the govt must do whatever it can under the constitution to prevent loss of life” and added that targeted and temporary blocks of sites, facebook pages and twitter handles that spewed hate were acceptable. Others like film maker Harini Calamur (@calamur) (11,277 followers) who says she is against censorship tweeted that “Blocking internet handles & sites is silly” and “the Govt’s job is to uphold the constitution & protect our fundamental rights. Not make value judgements.” Much of the debate has led to a genuine exchange, sometimes making comrades of people from opposing camps. Kanchan Gupta, a journalist known for his pro-Hindutva views, whose twitter handle @KanchanGupta (26,424 followers) was among those blocked, accepted on TV that scores of “people from all communities” many of whom “disagreed violently” with him had extended their support on twitter.

Others like writer Shivam Vij (@Dilidurast), who has 3,296 followers, whom Hindutvawadis has often branded ‘pseudo sickular’, surprised baiters by speaking against the ban.

Many were strident in their criticism of the arbitrary nature of the blocks and tweeted that it was indicative of authoritarianism. “Internet blocks in India have been increasing in frequency&intensity. I wouldn't put this down to knee-jerk/foolishness.There is *intent*,” tweeted Nikhil Pahwa (@nixxin), founder and editor of @medianama. Others like business journalist Samidha Sharma @samidhas worried that the government’s frequent attacks on freedom of expression shows that it is “following china in all the wrong things”.

While Pranesh Prakash (@pranesh_prakash) of the Centre for Internet and Society tweeted, “They've blocked sites from all parts of the spectrum: Muslim right-wing, Hindu right-wing, neutral news sites, etc. No politics”, many others saw the move as a “self-serving” one. “Dear GoI: why not be honest enough to say that this web censorship has NOTHING to do with security+ all to do with your own arrogance” tweeted Sunny Singh (@sunnysingh_nw3).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-hindustan-times-aug-26-2012-when-goi-blocks-twitterati-fly-off-their-handles

What the experts said on live chat

praskrishna — 2015-03-26T02:35:49Z

Three eminent panellists shared their views and answered questions from readers on the Supreme Court verdict striking down Section 66 A of the IT Act that allowed the arrest of people posting “offensive content” on the Internet, in a live chat hosted by The Hindu.

The article was published in the Hindu on March 25, 2015. Geetha Hariharan was one of the panelists.

Does this now mean anything goes on the Internet, asked one reader.

“No, the standard penal laws — against defamation, hate speech (S. 153A), religious incitement (S. 295A) — continue to apply,” said Gautam Bhatia, a practicing lawyer and author of forthcoming book “Offend, shock or disturb: Free Speech under the Constitution.” The argument that the Internet needed separate rules when it came to the content of speech was what was rejected by the Court, he said.

What was the rationale for the Court upholding Section 69 A, allowing the blocking of websites, asked another.

“One wishes that the court had paid as much attention to the blocking orders as they did to 66A,” said Lawrence Liang, lawyer and researcher at Alternative Law Forum working on free speech.

Geetha Hariharan, a Programme Officer at Centre for Internet and Society, focusing on Internet governance and freedom of expression, was the third expert on the panel.

Click here to read the full transcript of the chat

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-hindu-march-25-2015-what-the-experts-said-on-live-chat

What lurks beneath the Network

nishant — 2012-08-25T07:10:38Z

There is a series of buzzwords that have become a naturalised part of discussions around digital social media—participation, collaboration, peer-2-peer, mobilisation, etc. Especially in the post Arab Spring world (and our own home-grown Anna Hazare spectacles), there is this increasing belief in the innate possibilities of social media as providing ways by which the world as we know it shall change for the better. Young people are getting on to the streets and demanding their rights to the future.

Nishant Shah's column on the North East exodus and digital networks was published in Down to Earth magazine on August 24, 2012

Citizens are mobilising themselves to overthrow authoritarian governments. Socio-economically disadvantaged people, who have always been an alternative to the mainstream, are finding ways of expressing themselves through collaborative practices. Older boundaries of nation, region and body are quickly collapsing as we all become avatars of our biological selves, occupying futures that were once available only to science fiction heroes.

To this list of very diverse phenomena, I want to add the recent tragic and alarming exodus of people from the north eastern states, from the city of Bengaluru, where I live. There might not be many connections between this state of fear which instigated thousands of people, fearing their safety and security, to leave Bengaluru and return home and the global spectacles of political change that I listed earlier. And yet, there is something about the digital networks, the social web and the ways in which they shape our information societies, that needs to be thought through. In the Arab Spring like events, which are events of global spectacle, there is a certain imagination of digital technologies and its circuits that gets overturned.

These events challenge the idea that digital networks are always outward looking—connecting us to somebody and someplace ‘out there’ in a world that is quickly getting flat—and show how these networks actually create new local and specific communities around information production, consumption and sharing. These networks that connect people in their information practices, often make themselves simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible. So that the interfaces that we operate through—laptops, cellphones and other portable computing devices—become such a part of our everyday life, that we stop noticing them. They are a natural element of our everyday mechanics of urban survival, and in their omnipresence, become invisible.

This invisibility or naturalisation of the digital technologies, often make us forget the intricate and inextricable way in which they are woven into our basic survival strategies. Especially with the younger generation that has ‘grown up digital’, the interface, the gadget and the network is the default space that they turn to for their everyday needs. We develop intimate relationships with these technologised circuits, making them such a part of our quotidian existence that we often forget that these technologies are external to us. Which is why we come across articulations like, “I love my computer because my friends live in it,” or “I feel amputated when you take away my cell-phone”. These are ways in which we naturalise and internalise the digital technologies that we live in and live with. However, in times of crises, we suddenly realise the separation, as the technologies make themselves present, unable to sustain the new conditions of crises. It would be fruitful to see then that the eruption in our seamless connection with the digital technologies is a sign of an external crisis –something that we have seen in the Arab Spring or the Anna Hazare campaign, where these networks became visible to signal towards an external crisis. The emergence of networks into public view is a symptom that there is something that has gone wrong and so we see the separation of the digital ecosystem from its external reality and context.

The unexpected visibility of the network indicates that the regular information ecologies have been disrupted, the contexts which support community interaction at the local level have been changed, and those changes need to be accounted for and addressed in order for the network to become the transparent infrastructure of new urban communities again. In many ways, it resonates with the science fiction logic of the Matrix Trilogy where, if you can see the matrix, it means that something has gone wrong in the fabric of reality and it needs to be fixed.

The exodus of the north eastern people also needs to be examined in this context. In an immigrant city like Bengaluru, the sense of belonging and community is often deeply mediated by the digital ecologies of information sharing. Beneath the veneer of a global city that is to connect with the external world, there is also a huge network of local, specific and invisible practices that do not become a part of the global spectacle of digital technologies, and operate in a condition of relative invisibility. However, when the logic of a migrant city gets disrupted because the conditions of its work force get threatened, these networks go into an overdrive. They become gossip and rumour mills. They become visible and suddenly create conditions of fear, danger and crisis that were unexpected. And so, without a warning, over-night, a huge number of people, who were a part of these networks, decided to abandon their lives and head home, because the larger social, cultural and political threats transmitted through these local networks before they could become global spectacles that we could consume.

A large part of the people fleeing the city had already crowded the trains and left their lives behind, before any attempt at regulation or control could be made. All kinds of post-facto theories about the real or perceived nature of the threat, the actual cases of violence, and the conditions of life in the IT City have emerged since then. However, in all these theories is a recognition that the crisis which led to this phenomenon lingers on and cannot be addressed. There is no particular person to hold responsible. The few scattered incidents of attacks, violence or intimidation have been recognised as strategic and opportunistic interventions by local regressive groups. All in all, we have a condition where something drastic and dramatic has happened and there is no real or material person or group of people who can be blamed for it. And so, instead of addressing the crisis and the conditions which led to the exodus, we have committed an ellipsis, where we have made technology the scape-goat of our problems.

And we have done this repeatedly in the history of technology and crises in India. In the early days, when the notorious Delhi Public School MMS clip that captured two under-age students in sexual activity, became hugely visible, instead of addressing the problem at hand, we eventually set up a committee to regulate the conditions of cultural production and distribution online. During the horrifying bomb-attacks in the trains in Mumbai, we tried to block Blogspot and curtail information online as if technology was the reason that these acts were made possible. Last year, Dr. Sibal’s attempts at establishing a pre-censorship regime on information on the social web, because he encountered material that was disrespectful to the Congress party leader Mrs. Gandhi, sought to regulate the web rather than look at the political discontent and dissent that was being established through those articulations. Because there was no way by which the local situation could be controlled or contained, technology became the only site of regulation, inspiring draconian measures that limit the volume of text messaging and try and censor the web for lingering traces of the information mill that catalysed and facilitated this exodus.

This is a remarkable ellipsis where the actual problem – the conditions of life and safety in our global cities – is hidden under a perceived problem, which is the sudden visibility of a digital information ecosystem which was not apparent to us hitherto. And while there is no denying that at the level of tactics, for immediate fire-fighting this kind of regulation is important, nay, necessary, we also need to realise that at the level of strategy, these kinds of knee-jerk regulatory mechanisms are not a resolution of the problem. These laws and attempts at censorship are neither going to correct what has happened, nor are they going to be potent enough to curb such networked information sharing in the future. They are symbolic tactics that are trying to correct the crisis – the feeling of fear and danger – and in that, they do their job well in establishing some sense of control over the quickly collapsing world. However, we need to look beyond the visibility of this network, and realise that the crisis is not its emergence or its functioning but at something else that lurks behind the facade of the network.

Nishant Shah is director (research), Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/down-to-earth-org-nishant-shah-aug-24-2012-what-lurks-beneath-the-network

What Does Facebook's Transparency Report Tell Us About the Indian Government's Record on Free Expression & Privacy?

pranesh — 2015-04-05T05:08:37Z

Given India's online population, the number of user data requests made by the Indian government aren't very high, but the number of content restriction requests are not only high on an absolute number, but even on a per-user basis.

Further, Facebook's data shows that India is more successful at getting Facebook to share user data than France or Germany. Yet, our government complains far more about Facebook's lack of cooperation with Indian authorities than either of those countries do. I think it unfair for any government to raise such complaints unless that government independently shows to its citizens that it is making legally legitimate requests.

Since the Prime Minister of India Shri Narendra Modi has stated that "transparency and accountability are the two cornerstones of any pro-people government", the government ought to publish a transparency report about the requests it makes to Internet companies, and which must, importantly, provide details about how many user data requests actually ended up being used in a criminal case before a court, as well as details of all their content removal requests and the laws under which each request was made.

At the same time, Facebook's Global Government Requests Report implicitly showcases governments as the main causes of censorship and surveillance. This is far from the truth, and it behoves Facebook to also provide more information about private censorship requests that it accedes to, including its blocking of BitTorrent links, it's banning of pseudonymity, and the surveillance it carries out for its advertisers.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/what-does-facebook-transparency-report-tell-us-about-indian-government-record-on-free-expression-and-privacy