Centre for Internet and Society

Extractive Charges on Spectrum & Petroleum

Shyam Ponappa — 2014-04-07T03:57:14Z

The author examines whether government levies on these critical inputs are beneficial or detrimental.

The article published in the Business Standard on March 5, 2014 was mirrored in Organizing India Blogspot on March 6, 2014.

spectrum auction last month ended with over Rs 61,000 crore (about $10 billion) bid for the 900 MHz and 1800 MHz bands. Everyone seems upbeat: the government at high bids, and operators at staking out spectrum so that they can continue offering their services. The public at large seems enthused. Is there reason for good cheer? Consider some of the outcomes and the likely consequences.

Outcomes

Dominant operators, namely, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea, have won enough spectrum to continue building their businesses. So has a new potential contender, Reliance Jio.
Winners must pay the amounts they've bid, in addition to making further investments in networks. Their financial compulsion will be to increase prices to amortise a payment of nearly Rs 18,300 crore, followed by the remainder to be paid in 10 annual instalments after a two-year moratorium. Competition will provide a countervailing effect against price hikes. The annual payment by all operators after two years will amount to about Rs 4,400 crore. To put this in perspective, Bharti's profits for FY 2013 were around Rs 5,000 crore and Idea's around Rs 800 crore.

This perpetuates the approach of operators paying first for the right to use spectrum, then dividing available spectrum for their mutually exclusive use. The corollary is that unless operators choose to share some of their infrastructure, as some do for mobile towers, each operator must invest in its own infrastructure. In the absence of voluntary infrastructure sharing to the extent permissible, multiple investments are needed to build parallel networks. This is comparable to railways or transportation companies setting up multiple countrywide railroad and road networks, each for their own exclusive use. The result is a very capital-intensive approach requiring much more investment, while not being sufficiently remunerative.

Consequences

To the extent that there are front-loaded government charges, operators have less capital for network investments.
Resource constraints result in service deprivation in low-potential areas, as is prevalent now. In other words, urban areas may be well served, but not less densely populated rural areas where the majority reside. It is for the same reason that metro cities are better served by airlines or transportation services: the profit potential is higher.
The lack of amenities in rural areas means there is continuing demographic pressure to migrate to cities. The overwhelming societal need for the provision-of-urban-amenities-in-rural-areas ("PURA") is entirely sidelined. Yet, these are the amenities people need most for economic empowerment, productivity and better living conditions.

Contrast this with Sweden's approach to broadband, for instance. Sweden is a pioneer in the use of 700 MHz for broadband. A loosely translated quote from Sweden's information technology minister reads: "A hundred years ago, it was the ability to build good railways, good roads and good physical infrastructure that laid the foundation for jobs and growth. Today it is also about fast enough build-out of good mobile telephony." [1]

Another instance of constructive intervention, and that too in a developed metropolis, is the London Enterprise Panel's approach, because London's broadband is considered insufficiently competitive. Funds "will be invested where the market is failing (particularly where this is proving a barrier to business growth)".[2]

In India, the efficient 700 MHz and 800 MHz bands have not yet been assigned except for limited 800 MHz spectrum for CDMA. These bands are most effective for broadband in rural and semi-urban areas. However, auctions and high reserve prices militate against their effective deployment at low cost, thwarting an apparent remedy for our deficient coverage. Also, GSM operators have just bid aggressively in the recent auction to survive, and are loaded with debt. Only the financially strong Reliance Jio, which has not bid as much, can offer high bids. Vodafone may also be able to do so. So, one problem is reduced bidding capacity, but a bigger problem is reduced investment capacity: the higher they bid, the less likely they are to provide countrywide broadband quickly at reasonable prices.

Petroleum Levies

Petroleum levies comprise another range of high government charges on critical inputs. In 2006, the taxes on petrol amounted to 52 per cent of the retail price, and on diesel, 30.4 per cent with Rs 45 to the dollar, (Delhi price: Rs 45/litre when Brent crude was $65/barrel). Tax collections now amount to around 30 per cent for petrol and 18 per cent for diesel, with Brent crude at around $110/barrel, and petrol in Delhi at Rs 74/litre. While the percentages collected are lower, the amounts collected are about 70 per cent higher than in 2006 because of the increase in the price of crude oil at a time when the economy is slumping.

There is a rationale for collecting reasonable charges to cover construction and maintenance, environmental impact mitigation and waste disposal (clean-up), and to provide incentives. But it's time our governments stopped being extractive, and rationalised charges based on objectives and policies in the public interest. Governments and politicians should be addressing these, instead of doles and giveaways. The aim should be to maximise life-cycle benefits, which can be optimised by reducing short-term capture in favour of longer-term accruals from growth, and from policies designed to deploy productive infrastructure including applying the principle of common carrier access.

[1]. "Digital TV [700 MHz band] will now provide frequencies for cell phones", writes IT Minister Anna-Karin Hatt - Dagens Nyheter, February 27, 2014: http://www.dn.se/debatt/digital-tv-far-nu-lamna-frekvenser-till-mobilerna/

[2]. London Enterprise Panel - 2014-2020 European Structural & Investment Funds Strategy for London, January 2014: https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/London LEP ESIF Strategy 2014-20 (1).pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/business-standard-march-5-2014-shyam-ponappa-extractive-charges-on-spectrum-petroleum

Institute for Internet & Society 2014, Pune

samantha — 2014-04-07T11:31:23Z

Last month, activists, journalists, researchers, and members of civil society came together at the 2014 Institute for Internet & Society in Pune, which was hosted by CIS and funded by the Ford Foundation. The Institute was a week long, in which participants heard from speakers from various backgrounds on issues arising out of the intersection of internet and society, such as intellectual property, freedom of expression, and accessibility, to name a few. Below is an official reporting summarizing sessions that took place.

Day One

February 11, 2014

Time	Detail
9.30 a.m. – 9.40 a.m.	Introduction: Sunil Abraham, Executive Director Centre for Internet and Society
10.00 a.m. – 10.15 a.m.	Introduction of Participants
10.15 a.m. – 12.00 p.m.	Internet Governance and Privacy: Sunil Abraham
12.00 p.m. – 12.30 p.m.	Tea-break
12.30 p.m. – 1.00 p.m.	Keynote: Bishakha Datta, Filmmaker and Activist, and Board Member, Wikimedia Foundation
1.00 p.m. – 2.00 p.m.	Lunch
1.30 p.m. – 3.00 p.m.	Participant Presentations
3.00 p.m. – 3.15 p.m.	Tea Break
3.15 p.m. – 4.45 p.m.	Histories, Bodies and Debates around the Internet: Nishant Shah, Director-Research, CIS

This year’s Internet Institute, hosted by the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS), kicked off in Pune to put a start to a week of learnings and discussions surrounding internet usage and its implications on individuals of society. Twenty two attendees from all over India attended this year, from backgrounds of activism, journalism, research and advocacy work.

Attendees were welcomed by Dr. Ravina Aggarwal, Program Officer for Media Rights & Access at the Ford Foundation, the event’s sponsor, who started off the day by introducing the Foundation’s initiatives in pursuit of bridging the digital divide by addressing issues of internet connectivity.

Internet Governance & Privacy, Sunil Abraham
The Institute’s first session was led by Sunil Abraham, Executive Director of CIS, and engaged with issues of internet governance and privacy with reference to four stories: 1) a dispute between tweeters from the US and those in South Africa over the use of hashtag #thingsdarkiesays, which is said not to be as racially derogatory as it is in the US; 2) Facebook’s contested policies on photos featuring users breastfeeding, 3) a lawsuit between Tata and Greenpeace over the organization’s use of Tata’s logo in a video game created for public criticism of their environmentally-degrading practices, and lastly, 4) the case of Savita Bhabhi, an Indian pornographic cartoon character which had been banned by India’s High Court and which had served as a landmark case in expanding the statutory laws for what is considered to be pornographic.

Each of these stories has one major thing in common: due to their nature of taking place over the internet, they are not confined to one geographic location and in turn, are addressed at the international level. The way by which an issue as such is to be addressed cuts across State policies and internet intermediary bodies to create quite a messy case in trying to determine who is at fault. Such complexity illustrates how challenging internet governance can be within today’s society that is no longer restricted to national or geographic boundaries.

Sunil also goes on in explaining the relationship between privacy, transparency, and power, summing it up in a simple formula; privacy protection should have a reverse relationship to power—the more the power, the less the privacy one should be entitled to. On the contrary, a direct correlation goes for power and transparency—the more the power, the more transparent a body should be. Instead of thinking about these concepts as a dichotomy, Sunil suggests to see them as absolute rights in themselves—instrumental in policies and necessary to address power imbalances.

The Web We Want, Bishakha Datta
The Institute’s kickoff was also joined by Indian filmmaker and activist, Bishakha Datta, who had delivered the keynote address. Bishakha bridged together notions of freedom of speech, surveillance, and accessibility, while introducing campaigns that work to create an open and universally accessible web, such as the Web We Want and Sexuality and Disability. Bishakha stresses how the internet as a space has altered how we experience societal constructs, which can be easily exhibited in how individuals experience Facebook in the occurrence of a death, for example. Bishakha initiated discussion among participants by posing questions such as, “what is our expectation of privacy in this brave new world?” and “what is the society we want?” to encompass the need to think of privacy in a new way with the coming of the endless possibilities the internet brings with it.

Histories, Bodies and Debates around the Internet, Nishant Shah
CIS Research Director, Nishant Shah, led a session examining internet as a technology more broadly, and our understandings of it in relation to the human body. Nishant proposes the idea that history is a form of technology, as well as time, itself, for which our understanding only comes into being with the aid of technologies of measurement. Although we are inclined to separate technology from the self, Nishant challenges this notion while suggesting that technology is very integral to being human, and defines a “cyborg” as someone who is very intimate with technology. In this way, we are all cyborgs. While making reference to several literary pieces, including Haraway’s Cyborg: Human, Animus, Technology; Kevin Warwick’s Living Cyborg; and Watt’s small world theory, Nishant challenges participants’ previous notions of how one is to understand technology in relation to oneself, as well as the networks we find ourselves implicated within.

Also brought forth by Nishant, was the fact that the internet as a technology has become integral to our identities, making us accessible (rather than us solely making the technology accessible) through online forms of documentation. This digital phenomenon in which we tend to document what we know and experience as a means of legitimizing it can be summed in the modern version of an old fable: “If a tree falls in a lonely forest, and nobody tweets it, has it fallen?”

Nishant refers to several case studies in which the use of online technologies has created a sense of an extension of the self and one’s personal space; which can then be subject to violation as one can be in the physical form, and to the same emotional and psychological effect—as illustrated within the 1993 occurrence referred to as “A Rape in Cyberspace.”

Attendee Participation
Participants remained engaged and enthusiastic for the duration of the day, bringing forth their personal expertise and experiences. Several participants presented their own research initiatives, which looked at issues women face as journalists and as portrayed by the media; amateur pornography without the consent of the woman; study findings on the understandings of symptoms of internet addiction; as well as studies looking at how students engage with college confession pages on Facebook.

Day Two

February 12, 2014

Time	Detail
9.30 a.m. – 11.00 a.m.	Wireless Technology: Ravikiran Annaswamy, CEO and Co-founder at Teritree Technologies
11.00 a.m. – 11.15 a.m.	Tea-break
11.15 a.m. – 12.45 p.m.	Wired Technology: Ravikiran Annaswamy
12.45 p.m. – 1.30 p.m.	Lunch
1.30 p.m. – 3.00 p.m.	Network, Threats and Securing Yourself: Kingsley John, Independent Consultant
3.00 p.m. – 3.15 p.m.	Tea Break
3.15 p.m. – 4.45 p.m.	Practical Lab: Kingsley John
4.45 p.m. – 5.00 p.m.	Wrap-up: Sunil Abraham

Day Two of the Institute entailed a more technical orientation to “internet & society” across sessions. Participants listened to speakers introduce concepts related to wired and wireless internet connectivity devices and their networks, along with the network of internet users and how one may secure him or herself while “online.”

Wireless & Wired Technology, Ravikiran Annaswamy
Senior industry practitioner, Ravikiran Annaswamy had aimed to enable the Institute’s participants to “understand the depth and omnipresent of telecom networks” that we find ourselves implicated within. Ravikiran went through the basics of these networks—including fixed line-, mobile-, IP-, and Next Generation IP-networks—as well as the technical structuring of wired and wireless broadband. Many participants found this session to be particularly enriching as their projects aimed to provide increased access to internet connectivity to marginalized areas in India, and had been without the know-how to go about it.

Network, Threats and Securing Yourself, Kinglsey John
An instructional session on how to protect oneself was given by Kingsley John, beginning with a lesson on IP Addresses—what they are and the different generations of such, and how IP addresses fit into a broader internet network. Following, Kingsley demonstrated and explained email encryption through the use of software, Kleopatra, and how it may be used to generate keys to encrypt emails through Thunderbird mail client.

Evening Discussion

A handful of participants voluntarily partook in an evening discussion, looking at the role of big players in the global internet network, such as Google and Facebook, how they collect and utilize users’ data, and what sorts of measures can be taken to minimize the collecting of such. Due to the widely varying backgrounds of interest among participants, those coming from this technical orientation towards the internet were able to inform their peers on relevant information and types of software that may be found useful related to minimizing one’s online presence.

Day Three

February 13, 2014

Time	Detail
9.30 a.m. – 11.00 a.m.	Free Software: Prof. G. Nagarjuna, Chairperson, Free Software Foundation
11.00 a.m. – 11.15 a.m.	Tea-break
11.15 a.m. – 12.45 p.m.	Open Data: Nisha Thompson, Independent Consultant
12.45 p.m. – 1.30 p.m.	Lunch
1.30 p.m. – 3.00 p.m.	Freedom of Expression: Bhairav Acharya, Advocate and Adviser, Centre for Internet and Society
3.00 p.m. – 3.15 p.m.	Tea-break
3.15 p.m. – 4.45 p.m.	Copyright: Nehaa Chaudhari, Program Officer, Centre for Internet and Society

The third day of the Internet Institute incorporated themes presented by speakers ranging from free software, to freedom of expression, to copyright.

Free Software, Prof. G. Nagarjuna
Chairman on the Board of Directors for the Free Software Foundation of India, Professor G. Nagarjuna shared with the Institute’s participants his personal expertise on software freedom. Nagarjuna mapped for us the network of concepts related to software freedom, beginning with the origins of the copyleft movement, and also touching upon the art of hacking, the open source movement, and what role software freedom plays in an interconnected world.

Nagarjuna looks at the free software movement as a political movement in the digital space highlighting the user’s freedoms associated to the use, distribution, and modification of software for the greater good for all. This is said to distinguish this movement from that of Open Source—a technical and more practical development-oriented movement. The free software movement is not set out to compromise the fundamental issues for the sake of being practical and in that sense, ubiquitous. Instead, its objective is “not to make everybody use the software, but to have them understand why they are using the software,” so that they may become “authentic citizens that can also resonate why they’re doing what they’re doing. We want them to understand the ethical and political aspects of doing so,” Nagarjuna says.

Open Data, Nisha Thompson
Participants learned from Nisha Thompson on Open Data; what it is, its benefits, and how it is involved in central government initiatives and policy, as well as civil society groups—generally for uses such as serving as evidence for decision making and accountability. Nisha explored challenges concerning the use of open data, such as those pertaining to privacy, legitimacy, copyright, and interoperability. The group looked at the India Water Portal as a case study, which makes accessible more than 300 water-related datasets already available in the public space for use from anything from sanitation and agriculture to climate change.

Freedom of Expression, Bhairav Acharya
Bhairav Acharya, a constitutional lawyer, traced the development of the freedom of speech and expression in India. Beginning with a conceptual understanding of censorship and the practice of censorship by the state, society, and the individual herself, Bhairav examines the limits traditionally placed by a nation-state on the right to free speech.

In India, modern free speech and censorship law was first formulated by the colonial British government, which broadly imported the common law to India. However, the colonial state also yielded to the religious and communitarian sensitivities of its subjects, resulting in a continuing close link between communalism and free speech in India today. After Independence, the post-colonial Indian state carried forward Raj censorship, but tweaked it to serve to a nation-building and developmental agenda. Nation-building and nationalism are centrifugal forces that attempt to construct a homogenous 'mainstream'; voices from the margins of this mainstream (the geographical, ethnic, and religious peripheries) and of the marginalised within the mainstream (the poor and disadvantaged), are censored.

Within this narrative, Bhairav located and explained the evolution of the law relating to press censorship, defamation, obscenity, and contempt of court. Free speech law applies equally online. Broadly, censorship on the internet must survive the same constitutional scrutiny that is applied to offline censorship; but, as technology develops, the law must innovate.

Copyright, Nehaa Chaudhari
CIS Programme Officer, Nehaa Chaudhari examined the concept of Copyright as an intellectual property right in discussing its fundamentals, purpose and origins, and Copyright’s intersection with the internet. Nehaa also explained the different exceptions to Copyright, along with its alternatives, such as opposing intellectual property protection regimes, including the Creative Commons and Copyleft. Within this session, Nehaa also introduced several cases in which Copyright came into play with the use of the internet, including Hunter Moore’s “Is Anyone Up?” website, which had showcased pornographic pictures obtained by submission bringing rise to the phenomenon of “revenge porn.” Instances as such blur the lines of what is commonly referred to as intellectual property, and what specific requirements enables one to own the rights to such.

Day Four

February 14, 2014

Time	Detail
9.30 a.m. – 11.00 a.m.	E-Accessibility and Inclusion: Prashant Naik, Union Bank
11.00 a.m. – 11.15 a.m.	Tea-break
11.15 a.m. – 12.45 p.m.	Patents: Nehaa Chaudhari
12.45 p.m. – 1.30 p.m.	Lunch
1.30 p.m. – 2.00 p.m.	Fieldwork Assignment

Day Four of the Internet Institute introduced concepts of eAccessibilty and Inclusion on the internet for persons with disabilities, along with patents as an intellectual property right. Participants were also assigned a fieldwork exercise as a hands-on activity in which they were to employ what they’ve learned to initiate conversation with individuals in public spaces and collect primary data while doing so.

eAccessibility and Inclusion, Prashant Naik

Prashant Naik started off the day with his session on E-Accessibility and Inclusion. Prashant illustrated the importance of accessibility and what is meant by the term. Participants learned of assistive technologies for different disability types and how to create more accessible word and PDF documents, as well as web pages for users. Prashant demonstrated to participants what it is like to use a computer as a visually impaired individual, which provided for an enriching experience.

Patents, Nehaa Chaudhari
Nehaa Chaudhari led a second session at the Internet Institute on intellectual property rights—this one looking at patents particularly and their role within statutory law. Nehaa traced the historical origins of patents before examining the fundamentals of them, and addresses the questions, “Why have patents? And is the present system working for everyone?” Nehaa also introduced notions of the Commons along with the Anticommons, and perspectives within the debate around software patents, as well as different means by which the law can address the exploitation of patents or “patent thickets”—such as through patent pools or compulsory licensing.

Fieldwork Assignment, Groupwork
Participants were split into groups and required to carry out a mini fieldwork assignment in approaching individuals in varying public spaces in Pune in attempts to collect primary data. Questions asked to individuals were to be devised by the group, so long as they pertained to themes examined within the Internet Institute. Areas visited by groups included the Pune Central Mall, MG Road, and FC Road.

Day Five

February 15, 2014

Time	Detail
9.30 a.m. – 11.00 a.m.	E-Governance: Manu Srivastav, Vice President, eGovernments Foundation
11.00 a.m. – 11.15 a.m.	Tea-break
11.15 a.m. – 12.45 p.m.	Market Concerns: Payal Malik, Economic Adviser, Competition Commission of India
12.45 p.m. – 1.30 p.m.	Lunch
1.30 p.m. – 3.00 p.m.	Digital Natives: Nishant Shah
3.00 p.m. – 3.15 p.m.	Tea-break
3.15 p.m. – 4.45 p.m.	Fieldwork Presentations

Day Five of the Internet Institute brought with it sessions related to themes of e-governance, market concerns of telecommunications, and so called “Digital Natives.”

eGovernance, Manu Srivastava
Vice President of the eGovernments Foundation, Manu Srivastava led a session on eGovernance—the utilization of the internet as a means of delivering government services communicating with citizens, businesses, and members of government. Manu examined the complexities of the eGovernance and barriers to implementation of eGovernance initiatives. Within discussion, participants examined the nuanced relationship between the government and citizens with the incorporation of other governing bodies in an eGovernance system, as well as new spaces for corruption to take place.

Market Concerns, Payal Malik
Payal Malik, Advisor of the Economics Division of the Competition Commission of India shared her knowledge on market concerns of the telecommunications industry, and exclaimed the importance of competition issues in such an industry as a tool to create greater good for a greater number of people. She demonstrated this importance by stating that affordability as a product of increased access can only be possible once there is enough investment, which generally only happens in a competitive market. In this way, we must set the conditions to make competition possible, as a tool to achieve certain objectives. Payal also demonstrated the economic benefits of telecommunications by stating that for every 10% increase in broadband penetration, increase in GDP of 1.3%. She also examined the broadband ecosystem in India and touched upon future possibilities of increased broadband penetration, such as for formers and the education sector.

Digital Natives, Nishant Shah
Nishant Shah shed some light on one of the areas that the Centre for Internet & Society looks at within their research scope, this being the “Digital Native.” As referred to by Nishant, the Digital Native is not to categorize a specific type of internet user, but can be said for simply any person who is performing a digital action, while doing away with this false dichotomy of age, location, and geography.

Nishant examines varying case studies in which “the digital is empowering natives to not merely be benefactors of change, but agents of change,” from the Blank Noise Project’s “I NEVER Ask for it…” campaign in efforts to rethink sexual violence, to Matt Harding’s foolish dancing with groups of individuals from all over the world.

As occurrences in the digital realm, however, these often political expressions may be rewritten by the network when picked up as a growing phenomenon, in order to make it accessible to online consumers by the masses. In doing so, the expression is removed from its political context and is presented in the form of nothing more than a fad. For this reason, Nishant stresses the need to become aware of the potential of the internet in becoming an “echo-chamber”—in which forms of expression are amplified and mimicked, resulting in a restructuring of the dynamics surrounding the subject—whether it be videos of boys lipsyncing to Backstreet Boys in their dorm room going viral, or a strong and malicious movement to punish the Chinese girl who had taken a video of her heinously and wickedly killing a kitten after locating her using the Human Flesh Search Engine.

Fieldwork Presentations, Groupwork

To end off the day, participant groups presented findings collated from the prior evening’s fieldwork exercise, in which they were to ask strangers in various public places of Pune questions pertaining to themes looked at from within this year’s Institute. Participants were divided into four groups and visited Pune’s FC Road, Mahatma Gandhi Road, and Central Mall.

Groups found that the majority of those interviews primarily accessed the phone via the mobile. There was also a common weariness of using the internet and concern for one’s privacy while doing so, especially with uploading photos to Facebook and online financial transactions. People were also generally concerned about using cyber cafes for fear of one’s accounts being hacked. Generally people suspected that so long as conversations are “private” (i.e. in one’s Facebook inbox), so too are they secure. Just as well, those interviewed shared a sense of security with the use of a password.

Day Six

February 16, 2014

Time	Detail
9.30 a.m. – 11.00 a.m.	Wikipedia: Dr. Abhijeet Safai
11.00 a.m. – 11.15 a.m.	Tea-break
11.15 a.m. – 12.45 p.m.	Open Access: Muthu Madhan (TBC)
12.45 p.m. – 1.30 p.m.	Lunch
1.30 p.m. – 3.00 p.m.	Case Studies Groupwork
3.00 p.m. – 3.15 p.m.	Tea-break
3.15 p.m. – 4.45 p.m.	Case Studies Presentations

As the Institute came closer to its end, participants got the opportunity to hear from speakers on topics pertaining the Wikipedia editing in addition to Open Access to scholarly literature. Participants also worked together in groups to examine specific case studies referenced in previous sessions, and then presented their conclusions.

Wikipedia, Dr. Abhijeet Safai
The Institute was joined by Medical Officer of Clinical Research at Pune’s Symbiosis Centre of Health Care, Dr. Abhijeet Safai, who led a session on Wikipedia. Having edited over 3700 Wikipedia articles, Dr. Abhijeet was able to bring forth his expertise and familiarity in editing Wikipedia to participants so that they would be able to do the same. Introduced within this session were Wikipedia’s different fundamental pillars and codes of conducts to be complied with by all contributors, along with different features and components of Wikipedia articles that one should be aware of when contributing, such as how to cite sources and discuss the contents of an article with other contributors.

Open Access, Muthu Madhan
Muthu Madhan joined the Internet Institute while speaking on Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature. Within his session, Muthu examined the historical context within which the scholarly journal had arisen and how the idea of Open Access began within this space. The presence of Open Access in India and other developing nations was also examined in this session, and the concept of Open Data, introduced.

Case Studies, Groupworks

Participants were split up into groups and assigned particular case studies looked at briefly in previous sessions. Case studies included #thingsdarkiessay, a once trending Twitter hashtag in South Africa which had offended many Americans for its use of “darkie” as a derogatory term; the literary novel, The Hindus, which offers an alternative narrative of Hindu history had been banned in India for obscenity; a case in which several users’ avatars had been controlled by another in a virtual community and forced to perform sexual acts, referred to as A Rape Happened in Cyber Space; and lastly, a pornographic submission website, Is Anyone Up?, for which content was largely derived from “revenge porn.” Each group then presented on the various perspectives surrounding the issue at hand.

The Cyborg, Nishant Shah
Nishant Shah led an off-agenda session in the evening looking more closely at the notion of the human cyborg. Nishant deconstructs humanity’s relationship to technology, in suggesting that we “think of the human as produced with the technologies… not who produces technology.” Nishant explores the Digital Native as an attained identity for those who, because of technology, restructure and reinvent his or her environment—offline as well as online. Among other ideas shared, Nishant refers to works by Haraway on the human cyborg in illustrating our dependency on technology and our need to care for these technologies we depend on.

Day Seven

February 17, 2014

Time	Detail
9.30 a.m. – 11.00 a.m.	Internet Activism: Laura Stein, Associate Professor, University of Texas and Fulbright Fellow
11.00 a.m. – 11.15 a.m.	Tea-break
11.15 a.m. – 12.45 p.m.	Domestic and International Bodies: Chinmayi Arun, Research Director
12.45 p.m. – 1.30 p.m.	Lunch
1.30 p.m. – 3.00 p.m.	Participant Presentations
3.00 p.m. – 3.15 p.m.	Tea-break
3.15 p.m. – 4.45 p.m.	Hot Question Challenge

The last day of the week-long Internet Institute examined concepts of Internet Activism and Domestic and International Bodies. Some participants led presentations on topics of personal familiarity, before a final wrap-up exercise, calling upon individuals to share any new formulations resulting from the Institute.

Internet Activism, Laura Stein

Associate Professor from the University of Texas, Laura Stein, spoke on activism on the internet. Laura examined some grassroots organizations and movements taking place on the online and the benefits that the internet brings in facilitating their impact, such as its associated low costs, accessibility and possibility for anonymity. Despite the positive effects catalyzed by the internet, Laura stresses that the “laying field is still unequal, and movements are not simply transformed by technology.” Some of the websites exemplifying online activism that were examined within this session includes the It Gets Better Project, which aims to give hope to LGBT youth facing harassment, and the national election watch by the Association for Democratic Reforms. Additionally, Laura spoke on public communication policy, comparing that of the US and India, and how this area of policy may influence media content and practice.

Domestic and International Bodies, Chinmayi Arun
As the Internet Institute’s final speaker, Research Director for Communication Governance at National Law University , Chinmayi Arun, explores the network of factors that affect one’s behavior on the internet—these including: social norms, the law, the markets, and architecture. In referring to Lawrence Lessig’s pathetic dot theory, Chinmayi illustrates how individual’s—the pathetic dots in question—are functions of the interactions of these factors, and in this sense, regulated, and stresses the essential need to understand the system, in order to effectively change the dynamics within it. It is worth noting that not all pathetic dots are equal, and Google’s dot, for example, will be drastically bigger than a single user’s, having more leveraging power within the network of internet bodies. Also demonstrated, is the fact that we must acknowledge the need for regulation by the law to some extent, otherwise, the internet would be a black box where anything goes, putting one’s security at risk of violation.

Hot Question Challenge
The very last exercise of the Institute entailed participants asking each other questions on demand, relating back to different themes looked at within the last week. Participants had the chance, here, to bridge together concepts across sessions, as well as formulate their own opinions, while posing questions to others that they, themselves, were still curious about.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/institute-for-internet-society-2014-pune

February 2014 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2014-04-07T07:27:46Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) welcomes you to the second issue of its newsletter (February) for the year 2014:

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Highlights
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We published revised chapters for the states of Mizoram, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana, as part of our National Resource Kit project.
In the concluding blog post of a three-part study Ananth Padmanabhan looks at the Indian law in the Copyright Act and the Information Technology Act, and concludes that both those laws restrain courts and private companies from ordering an ISP to block a website for copyright infringement.
Telugu Wikipedia celebrated its 10^th anniversary. An event was co-organized in Vijaywada to celebrate the same.
The second Institute on Internet and Society was held in Pune from February 11 to 17. The proceedings from the workshop are captured in a blog post.
CIS announced an Open Call for Comments for the latest draft of the Privacy Bill, 2013 prepared by Bhairav Acharya.
Forbes India published its “30 Under 30 List”. Pranesh Prakash is featured in the list.
As part of the Making Change Project, Denisse Albornoz wrote a blog post that compares the production behind a performance with the process of storytelling.
Beli gives an introduction to spectrum sharing. The post looks at GSM and CDMA, and touches upon LTE, and how they might share spectrum.

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Jobs
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CIS is seeking applications for the post of Program Officer (Access to Knowledge): http://bit.ly/1fnydB0. There are two vacancies for this post and it is full-time based in Delhi. To apply, please send your resume to Sunil Abraham (sunil@cis-india.org), Nirmita Narasimhan (nirmita@cis-india.org) and Pranesh Prakash (pranesh@cis-india.org) with three writing samples of which at least one demonstrates your analytic skills, and one that shows your ability to simplify complex policy issues.

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Accessibility and Inclusion
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As part of our project (under a grant from the Hans Foundation) on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India, we bring you draft chapters for the states of Mizoram, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana. With this we have completed compilation of draft chapters for 35 states.

Based upon discussion with the office of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities (CCPD) the following chapters were revised:

► National Resource Kit Chapter

The Mizoram Chapter (by CLPR, February 5, 2014): http://bit.ly/1eUSvxW
The Dadra & Nagar Haveli Chapter (by CLPR, February 6, 2014): http://bit.ly/1mv3YhJ
The Haryana Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, February 10, 2014): http://bit.ly/1dVOiKI
The Himachal Pradesh Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, February 12, 2014): http://bit.ly/1jSk03x

► Other

# Participation in Events

National Consultation on Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities in Development Process (organized by CBM India in collaboration with United Nations Solution Exchange for Gender Community, WHO Regional office for South-East Asia, New Delhi, February 12, 2014). Anandhi Viswanathan participated in a panel discussion. She made a presentation on the National Resource Kit project: http://bit.ly/OlkHVq.
Zero Project Conference on Accessibility: Innovative Policies and Practices for Persons with Disabilities (organized by Essl Foundation, the World Future Council and the European Foundation Centre, United Nations Office, Vienna, February 27 and 28, 2014). Pranesh Prakash spoke on Affordable Text-to-Speech Software from India: http://bit.ly/1czo32s. Nominations on e-speak were recognised as examples of innovative practices and policies from India. Pranesh Prakash was also a speaker on Copyright Exception for Accessible Formats: http://bit.ly/1l8HRth.

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Access to Knowledge
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The Access to Knowledge programme addresses the harms caused to consumers and human rights, and critically examines Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, and Open Access to Law, Open Content, Open Standards, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software.

# Analyses

Can Judges Order ISPs to Block Websites for Copyright Infringement? (Part 2) (by Ananth Padmanabhan, February 5, 2014): http://bit.ly/1cddoKm. Analyses the law laid down by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Delhi High Court on secondary and contributory copyright infringement.
Can Judges Order ISPs to Block Websites for Copyright Infringement? (Part 3) (by Ananth Padmanabhan, February 5, 2014): http://bit.ly/1g35mDg. Analyses the Indian law in the Copyright Act and the Information Technology Act.

# Participation in Events

2nd International Conference on Managing Intellectual Property Rights and Strategy (MIPS 2014) (organized by Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, IIT Bombay with support from the Ministry of Human Resources Development IPR Chair Project, Government of India): http://bit.ly/PsPEbq.
Consultation on Institutional Arrangements for IP management under MHRD (organized by the Planning Commission and Ministry of Human Resource Development, New Delhi, February 21, 2014). Nehaa Chaudhari participated in this consultation: http://bit.ly/1fTCoar.
National Conference on Use of Technology in Higher Education (organized by the Ministry of Human Resource and Development and Planning Commission in partnership with Microsoft Research and British Council, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, February 25, 2014): http://bit.ly/P6u78i. Nehaa Chaudhari participated in the event as a panelist in the session on "Future of Content Creation".

# Media Coverage

Pranesh Prakash: Influencing India's IP Laws (by Samar Srivastava, Forbes India, February 15, 2014): http://bit.ly/1kBzLMq.

The following has been done under grant from the Wikimedia Foundation (http://bit.ly/SPqFOl). As part this project (http://bit.ly/X80ELd), we organised 4 workshops in the month of January, published an article in DNA, and signed a memorandum of understanding with KIIT University and Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences to further the development of Odia Wikipedia:

►Wikipedia

# Articles / Blog Entries

Odia Language's Presence in Digital Media and Wikipedia's Role (by Subhashish Panigrahi, The Samaja, March 2, 2014): http://bit.ly/1ieF3sC.
Indian Wikimedia community coordinates Women’s History Month (by Netha Hussain and Jeph Paul, Wikimedia Foundation, March 6, 2014): http://bit.ly/1cyRfqf,

# Events Co-organized

Cinemathon2014 Bangalore (organized by Pad.ma and CIS-A2K, CIS, Bangalore, February 8-9, 2014): http://bit.ly/MRRkZz.
Tewiki 10th Anniversary (organized by CIS-A2K and Telugu Wikipedia community, February 15, 2014): http://bit.ly/1iI2Pxs. T. Vishnu Vardhan and Rahmanuddin Shaikh were speakers at the event.
Cinemathon2014 Mumbai (organized by Pad.ma and CIS-A2K, CAMP Studio, Mumbai, February 15-16, 2014): http://bit.ly/P5YGL8.
Wikipedia Mangalore Workshop (organized by Roshini Nilaya and CIS-A2K, Mangalore, February 26, 2014). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja gave a presentation on Wikipedia with a special focus on students and women.

CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

# Media Coverage

Father-son duo promote Punjabi online (by Jatinder Preet, Sunday Guardian, February 1, 2014): http://bit.ly/1l87b2h.
୧୦ ବର୍ଷରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ୱିକିପିଡିଆ (Rabibara Sambad (Sunday supplement of Odia newspaper The Sambad), February 9, 2014): http://bit.ly/1igMynn. This is a feature about Odia Wikipedia's 10th anniversary and the story of a dead volunteer community reviving after 8 years.
Wikipedia Mangalore Workshop (Prajavani, February 27, 2014): http://bit.ly/1gVMG6f.

# Participation in Event

The Dynamics of Education to Employment Journey: Opportunities and Challenges (organized by KIIT School of Management, KIIT University, Bhubaneswar, February 21-22, 2014). T. Vishnu Vardhan gave a talk: http://bit.ly/1ePwqHc.

Event Organized

Wiki Women's Workshop (ICG – Dona Paula, Goa, March 9, 2014): http://bit.ly/MRRJLy. The event is being organized as part of the commemoration of the International Women's Day.

Openness

# Event Organised

Bitcoin & Open Source with Aaron Koenig (CIS, Bangalore, February 7, 2014): http://bit.ly/1fbN6mP.

# Call for Comments

The Privacy Protection Bill, 2013 (by Bhairav Acharya, February 25, 2014): http://bit.ly/1g3TwIX. CIS announced an Open Call for Comments to the latest version of the bill.

# Articles

The Internet Way (by Nishant Shah, Biblio Vol. 19 No.8 (1&2), January – February 2014): http://bit.ly/1kBp9gJ. Dr. Nishant Shah's review of the book “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” by Bantam Press/Random House Group, London can be found on page 16.
Surveillance and the Indian Constitution - Part 3: The Public/Private Distinction and the Supreme Court’s Wrong Turn (by Gautam Bhatia, Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy Blog, February 25, 2014): http://bit.ly/1kBosnw. This was originally published on Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy Blog.
Big Democracy, Big Surveillance: India's Surveillance State (by Maria Xynou, Open Democracy, February 28, 2014): http://bit.ly/1nkg8Ho.
Will You be Paid to Post a Picture? (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, February 18, 2014): http://bit.ly/P65d8L.

# Blog Entries

February 11: The Day We Fight Back Against Mass Surveillance (by Divij Joshi, February 14, 2014): http://bit.ly/1e7drCV.
Calcutta High Court Strengthens Whistle Blower Protection (by Divij Joshi, February 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/1cG8v7t.
CIS Welcomes 52nd Report on Cyber Crime, Cyber Security, and Right to Privacy (by Elonnai Hickok, February 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/1oviMJ4.
UIDAI Practices and the Information Technology Act, Section 43A and Subsequent Rules (by Elonnai Hickok, February 25, 2014): http://bit.ly/1fbSfep.

# Events Organized

Nullcon Goa Feb 2014 — International Security Conference (organised by Nullcon, Bogmallo Beach Resort, Goa, February 12 – 15, 2014). CIS is one of the sponsors for this event: http://bit.ly/1lrBu5I.
Counter Surveillance Panel: DiscoTech & Hackathon (co-organized by CIS, MIT Centre for Civic Media Co-Design Lab, Tactical Technology Collective, Hackteria.org, and Shristi School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, March 1, 2014): http://bit.ly/NCGMyH

# Participation in Events

First Meeting of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group for India Internet Governance Forum (organized by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, New Delhi, February 10, 2014). Sunil Abraham participated in this meeting: http://bit.ly/1fKu5xz.
Internet Intermediary Liability: Towards Evidence-based Policy and Regulatory Reform to Secure Human Rights on the internet (organized by Association for Progressive Communications, The Wedgewood, Melville, Johannesburg, February 10-11, 2014): http://bit.ly/1fMAEK2. Elonnai Hickok was a speaker.
Towards an Equitable and Just Internet (organized by IT for Change, New Delhi, February 14-15, 2014). Bhairav Acharya was a speaker: http://bit.ly/1cz9EDt.
Workshop on Media Law & Policy Curriculum Development (organized by the 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, February 16, 2014, National Law University, Delhi): http://bit.ly/1ovoT00. Bhairav Acharya was a speaker.
The Changing Role of the Media in India: Constitutional Perspectives (organized by School of Law, Christ University, February 28, 2014): http://bit.ly/1lB2nTO. Snehashish Ghosh moderated a session at this conference.

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News & Media Coverage
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CIS gave its inputs to the following recent media coverage:

The Dangers of Birdsong (by Namrata Joshi, Outlook, January 25, 2014): http://bit.ly/1kB8J7L.
A Tale of Two Internet Campaigns (by Deepa Kurup, The Hindu, February 11, 2014): http://bit.ly/1lDdRZy.
Dark days for the creative class in India: Siddiqui (by Haroon Siddiqui, thestar.com, February 16, 2014): http://bit.ly/1gdtgbC.
The Forbes India 30 Under 30 List (by Abhilasha Khaitan, Forbes India, February 21, 2014): http://bit.ly/1ovnvKM. Pranesh Prakash features in the list.
India ‘tea parties’ enable politicians to woo urban youth with technology (by Avantika Chilkoti, Financial Times, February 26, 2014): http://bit.ly/1cGfOMm.

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Digital Humanities
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CIS is building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Digital will be used as a way of unpacking the debates in humanities and social sciences and look at the new frameworks, concepts and ideas that emerge in our engagement with the digital. The clusters aim to produce and document new conversations and debates that shape the contours of Digital Humanities in Asia:

# Blog Entries

Defending the Humanities in the Digital Age (by Nishant Shah, DML Central, February 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/1czdZqg.
Digital Humanities in India- Mapping Changes at the Intersection of Youth, Technology and Higher Education (by Sneha PP, February 21, 2014): http://bit.ly/1qd6xo4.

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Digital Natives
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CIS is doing a research project titled “Making Change”. The project will explore new ways of defining, locating, and understanding change in network societies. Having the thought piece 'Whose Change is it Anyway' as an entry point for discussion and reflection, the project will feature profiles, interviews and responses of change-makers to questions around current mechanisms and practices of change in South Asia and South East Asia:

►Making Change Project

# Blog Entries

Storytelling as Performance: The Ugly Indian and Blank Noise 1 (by Denisse Albornoz, February 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/1jX4qBb.
Storytelling as Performance: The Ugly Indian and Blank Noise 2 (by Denisse Albornoz, February 27, 2014): http://bit.ly/1fKwQil.

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Telecom
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Shyam Ponappa, a Distinguished Fellow at CIS is a regular columnist with the Business Standard. The articles published on his blog Organizing India Blogspot is mirrored on our website:

# Newspaper Column

Centre- or State-Driven Development? (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, February 5, 2014, Observer India Blogspot, February 7, 2014): http://bit.ly/1ceuWFS.

# Blog Entry

An Introduction to Spectrum Sharing (by Beli, February 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/NZlknd.

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Knowledge Repository on Internet Access
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CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project to create a knowledge repository on Internet and society. This repository will comprise content targeted primarily at civil society with a view to enabling their informed participation in the Indian Internet and ICT policy space. The repository is available at the Internet Institute website: http://bit.ly/1iQT2UB.

►Event Organized

Institute on Internet and Society (organised by Ford Foundation and CIS, Yashada, Pune, February 11-17, 2014): http://bit.ly/1fpTdDS. Bishakha Datta, Ravikiran Annaswamy, Kingsley John, Prof. G. Nagarjuna, Nisha Thompson, Prashant Naik, Nehaa Chaudhari, Bhairav Acharya, Manu Srivastav, Dr. Abhijeet Safai, Payal Malik, Nishant Shah, Laura Stein, Sunil Abraham, Madan Muthu and Chinmayi Arun taught at the institute.

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About CIS
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The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
Visit us at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge
E-mail: a2k@cis-india.org

► Support Us

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

► Request for Collaboration:

We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org.

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

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/february-2014-bulletin

An Introduction to Spectrum Sharing

beli — 2014-03-20T09:34:06Z

We will look at how current technology – mainly GSM, but also CDMA and touching upon LTE - shares spectrum, how they might share spectrum, the trade-off between spectral (in this case, 'trunking') and 'economic' efficiency in the traditional, purely intra-operator shared scenario, and how it might be overcome by inter-operator sharing.

The Current Scenario – Wi-Fi, GSM and CDMA: A Primer from the Perspective of Spectrum Coordination

Sharing spectrum is not a radically new idea: it's probably being shared in many places in your living room. Your family's phones could be communicating with your laptops using Bluetooth; your Wi-Fi router is sharing Wi-Fi spectrum with your next door neighbor's. There is no central brain that tells each device how to share spectrum, but each device pair (phone+laptop, for example) has some unique identifier (a code) that enables them to hear each other over the “noise” created by the other devices, as though they were speaking different languages. Each device can access the same frequencies at the same time and place, but does not know in advance which other devices are going to use them, and as long as there aren't too many such devices close to each other, the scheme works well.

From a technological standpoint, this is one of two kinds of spectrum coordination that's currently in wide use: the second is where each device is given a narrow sliver of frequency to itself for a specified period of time.[1] This is what happens with GSM cellphone technology: the service provider's tower allocates frequency — from the pool of frequencies available — to users on a per-call basis: this is called Frequency Division Multiple Access, or FDMA. GSM further divides access between different users in the same frequency channel in the time domain with bursts of data of the order of milliseconds, something called Time Division Multiple Access or TDMA; you'd be sharing your frequency channel with up to seven other people[2] and your content would be sent in sub-millisecond bursts approximately every five milliseconds.

Code Division Multiplexing, or CDMA, Is concept that assigns a user a 'code' for the duration of her call that effectively makes interference from other users, with other codes, appear as noise. The following picture illustrates FDMA, TDMA and CDMA:[3]

The preceding discussion would suffice for a single cell tower, alone in a desert. In the real world, there's more than one tower, so we'll have to create a system so that no two adjacent towers end up allocating the same frequency at the same time. The simplest way to do that, and the only one currently used, is splitting the available spectrum such that the range of frequencies available to a tower does not intersect with that available to any of its neighbors, ever – that way, a tower can only allocate from its own set of frequencies, but it need not concern itself with what its neighbors are doing. If adjacent towers were to share spectrum, then the preceding condition only needs to apply at that exact moment in time – at that precise instant a tower should be aware of the frequencies being used by all towers that are close enough to interfere with it, and pick a frequency outside that set, which it can use for the duration of a call.

Frequency Reuse

When there weren't so many cellphones crowding up the spectrum, it did not make economic sense to invest in the extra infrastructure required to make neighboring towers 'talk' to each other with low latency, so the solution we have now, even within the towers of a single service provider, is that any tower's neighbors do not intrude upon the spectrum assigned to that particular tower — what a neighbour is in this statement is qualified below. To start with, let's look at how towers could ideally be placed. We want to place towers on the ground in some regular pattern that makes them end up equidistant from each other: there are as many ways of doing that as there are of tiling a plane, which you can think of as tiling a bathroom with regular shapes (called 'regular polygons' by the pedantic).

Starting from the simplest, we can do it with tiles shaped like triangles, squares or hexagons, and a little thought will convince you that these are the only choices. Since a tower's signal would be 'strong enough' only up to some maximum radius, we'd ideally like to tile our plane with circles, but if we settle for the next best thing, the closest shape to a circle with which to tile the plane is a hexagon, in a honeycomb pattern; if you're looking at it from above, the towers would be placed as in the diagram below.[4]

This is just a part of a much larger honeycomb on the ground; the towers go in the center of the hexagons, where the numbers are; why the numbers are as they are will become clear in a couple of lines. Let's focus at tower 1 in the center of the diagram for our example. If the signals decay slow enough — so that the signals radiated from the nearest neighbors (towers surrounding 1, i.e. 2 through 7) and the next-nearest neighbors (towers two steps away from 1, with numbers from 2 through 7), interfere significantly with tower 1 in the center, but the next-to-next-nearest neighbors (three steps away from 1) do not, then the frequency reuse pattern can be like what we see in the diagram above, with towers denoted by the same number (and only the same number) using same exclusive set of frequencies. In this example, the closest towers with the same frequency as the central tower are the 1's in the hexagons at the edge – the frequency reuse factor is 3 (see footnote). In this diagram, the ordering of the numbers makes no difference – the situation would be the same if we exchanged the position of every, say, 1 and 3.

In reality the grid of towers of a particular operator covering a city is rarely hexagonal, due to local constraints, so what needs to be taken care of is not to use the frequencies that the nearest neighbors, next-nearest neighbors and so on are using depending upon the frequency reuse factor.[5] It's clear that without the towers being able to communicate in near-real time, with and FDMA/TDMA system like GSM, this is the optimal — and, in fact, the only — way to go.

Neighbouring towers sharing spectrum

Everything changes, though, if the towers can communicate and coordinate fast enough — in theory, at least, all the service provider's towers could pick spectrum from a common pool.[6] In fact, every service providers could put their spectrum into a common pool from which frequencies can be allocated to users as before. This would increase trunking efficiency and thereby the maximum number of users per tower dictated by quality of service limits (both terms are defined in the next section), making more efficient use of the spectrum.

The Current Trade-off between Trunking and 'Economic' Efficiency: The Principal Argument for (Inter-operator) Shared Spectrum

Imagine the following scenario:

We have 5 MHz of spectrum split it into five channels of one MHz each;
Five thousand people own cell phones and each is assigned a channel so that there are a thousand cellphone users per channel;
People call infrequently: calls are randomly distributed but on average, in each channel, five people attempt to make a call every minute and each call is ten seconds long.

In this way, a lot of people can use a few channels with a reasonable hope that their calls will be connected, a phenomenon called 'trunking'. Chances are high, however, that at least one person's going to make a call before the previous caller on her channel is done, and end up being blocked. The probability that a call will go through is factored into the Quality of Service (QoS) through the Erlang B Formula; roughly speaking, the less chance there is of a caller being blocked, the higher your QoS. It's essentially a question of queuing: the same logic can be applied to beds at a hospital. The number of hospital beds in a town would be much fewer than the number of people, but it works because everyone's not sick all the time; if people are sick more often, or for longer durations, the chances that someone won't get a bed would be higher:[7]

Suppose someone own an Airtel phone and Airtel's channels are all in use, but Vodaphone has a channel free at the time. Let's look at two alternatives:

a) she's not allowed to switch, and cannot make her call;
b) she's allowed to switch to the empty channel, and her call goes through.

Clearly, the second choice is better — and it has greater trunking efficiency.

In the current scenario, service providers get exclusive rights to chunks of spectrum. Naively, the more competitors (in this case, service providers like Airtel and Vodaphone) you have in a market, the better the competition. This, unfortunately, leads to a decrease in trunking efficiency — it's inversely proportional to the number of players in the market because every chunk of frequencies split between two service providers (every successive split) increases the chances for an event such as the one described above happening. The question that logically follows is: what is the optimal number of service providers for the Indian market? This is hard to find, and differs depending on who you ask — incumbents, for instance, may quote a smaller number, whereas prospective new entrants may quote a larger one. The number is controversial within policy-making circles as well, and is being debated as this article is being written. We note in passing that the number of competitors — and thus fragmentation of spectrum — is higher in the Indian market than most others.

If spectrum were shared, however, all this would be moot. This, therefore, is the primary argument towards spectrum sharing: better trunking efficiency as well as more competition — you can , in this instance, have it both ways.

CDMA and Spectrum Sharing

GSM is a simple example, where both the difficulty and the benefits of intra-operator spectrum sharing are readily apparent. Things get more difficult conceptually if we talk about newer technologies, so we'll have to get a little deeper into the technicalities. Code Division Multiple Access, or CDMA, allows phones to communicate using the same frequencies at the same time and place, but differentiated by codes — similar to WiFi but using different encoding schemes and technology. CDMA might look (from the analogy with Wifi) to require no central planning, but quality of service guarantees require that various phones in a 'cell' coordinate, and the coordinating agent happens to be that cell's tower. Two things need to happen: one, the code allocated to each phone needs to be sufficiently different,[8] at least with respect to other nearby phones, which means the tower has to allocate codes. Additionally, the distance involved between cellphone and tower (as against laptop and router) causes the near-far problem.[9]

For synchronous CDMA, the concept analogous to frequency reuse is code reuse — a tower needs to take into account the codes being used by its nearest neighbors, next-nearest neighbors and so on, which might be easier than coordinating timing in a TDMA system. For asynchronous CDMA (the most commonly used variant), even that is not required — the low cross-correlation pseudorandom codes that are used have so many possibilities that the likelihood of a collision would be small, though other users would appear as gaussian noise, so just like GSM, the number of users is limited by QoS limits. This makes intro-operator sharing of spectrum between adjacent towers easier and asynchronous CDMA ends up with a frequency reuse factor of 1, meaning that a tower can access the same set of frequencies as its (intra-operator) neighbor, hypothetically making it easier to use in a shared-spectrum system.

LTE

LTE uses Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing, or OFDM, which can be – very roughly — thought of as combining ideas used in FDMA as well as CDMA, in that information is redundantly split between several frequencies ('subcarriers' in the literature) and each frequency can have more than one channel, using an orthogonal coding schemes like (synchronous) CDMA, where, as mentioned earlier, a mobile phone can distinguish its channel by its code. As it's an FDMA system, the benefits of frequency sharing for LTE can be inferred as above for GSM.

The Regulatory Perspective

The European Commission has this to say about shared spectrum:[10] “From a regulatory point of view, band sharing can be achieved in two ways: either by the Collective Use of Spectrum (CUS), allowing spectrum to be used by more than one user simultaneously without a license; or using Licensed Shared Access (LSA), under which users have individual rights to access a shared spectrum band”.

CUS is how unlicensed spectrum like Wi-Fi is currently used, which does not require a central 'brain' allocating spectrum to users. It requires no setup or organization before or during use. LSA is what shared spectrum would have to be like when used by service providers: it requires setup and organization but could offer better efficiency and quality of service because the central 'brain' — in this case the CPU at the cellphone tower — can figure out the most efficient way to allocate spectrum to users, just like a city's traffic lights coordinate the flow of traffic to prevent jams, and for that multiple towers — or multiple transmitters on a single tower — would have to coordinate somehow. In other words, you don't require approval before setting up your Wi-Fi router in your living room, but (depending upon the router, how many neighbors have routers, how close they are, and how far you are from your router) your connection might get dropped; this kind of thing is okay because there usually aren't that many people with routers living that close to each other, though that's fast changing. The 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi band is further crowded in by other microwave radio technologies, like Bluetooth and microwave ovens. Cellphones are a different thing altogether, because you wouldn't want your cellphone to stop working in the middle of a crowded bus if you're late en route to meeting someone at a coffee shop, or if you're being mugged and need to call the police. Therefore it is the service providers' and regulatory agencies' responsibility to provide a high (minimum) quality of service. This classification is symbolized by the following diagram:[11]

CUS falls on the left, being contention-based – that is, different user devices (eg, laptops) could contend with each other for the attention of the base station (eg, Wi-Fi router — random access, CSMA), whereas LSA is conflict-free (which would be the case if the router decides, period). The potential for conflict exists in CUS, there being multiple devices asking for spectrum, whereas for LSA, a central authority decides which device to allocate spectrum to at any particular point in space and time. CUS isn't total chaos, however: it would now be appropriate — taking a leaf from ex-FCC chief technology officer Jon M. Peha – to introduce the concepts of coexistence and etiquette.

In our Wi-Fi example, the Wi-Fi routers merely coexist, and the technological standard allows them to try and use the codes/spectral bands that are in their best interests, to best communicate with their client devices (though actual Wi-Fi routers also follow some sort of etiquette with other routers). One could additionally introduce some sort of etiquette into the equation by requiring that one router should, for example, “wait in the cue” for another — and vice versa — as and when required, as well as other requirements for cooperation depending upon the technology used. This minimal cooperation would be enough for them to, in Mr Peha's words, “greatly improve efficiency if and only if designed appropriately for the applications in the band” - depending upon the technology used, being too 'polite' could cause longer wait times that decrease efficiency. The situation is complicated by the existence of multiple technologies at the same spot – for example, your Bluetooth receiver, two-way radio and Wifi router working in the same room. If there is potential for interference, common communication protocols could be implemented to enable all those devices to 'talk' to each other and effectively follow some form of wireless etiquette so that they can cooperate and not get in each others way. This is all the more important as Wi-Fi will become an essential part of the cellphone communication network for 4G.

To conclude, there are many ways shared spectrum technology could hypothetically work, and in practice the core technologies that are used would dictate the details of the spectrum sharing solution. Spectrum sharing would reduce the regulatory conundrum that is spectrum allocation, and make more efficient use of spectrum — most obviously through trunking efficiency, though there may be other technological benefits depending upon the core technology used. For maximum efficiency and robustness, there would have to be some kind of rules followed, so that devices apply for spectrum like people in a cafeteria queue as opposed to the scrum you might find trying to get into an Indian bus; the etiquette we were talking about earlier should be baked into the design of the communication infrastructure. Some services (like voice calling) by their nature, need a guaranteed high QoS — need to be conflict-free — and therefore need Licensed Shared Access. Others need a minimum of regulation — but with the movement of what used to be CUS-appropriate devices (In many plans for 4G LTE-Advanced, specifically Wi-Fi) towards LSA-appropriate applications, a careful optimization needs to be done in deciding where to draw the line.

The Big Question: Infrastructure Sharing

We've gone through a thought experiment on intra- and inter-operator sharing of spectrum for the particular case of mobile towers in adjacent cells, and come to the general conclusion that the solution is in principle a question of fast and efficient coordination between the geographically separated towers, toward which there are two driving forces at present: the demand for more efficient use of spectrum by a growing body of users with growing data needs, and the supply of low latency, cheaper and higher bandwidth communication options using fiber-optic cables.

There are essentially two parts to the big question we're going to ask: one, what happens when there are multiple operators serving the same geographical area, and two, is it necessary to have multiple towers standing right next to each other for multiple operators?

To answer the first question, one could have a 'roaming' agreement between multiple operators at the same spot: if all the channels of one operator are busy, the user just has to switch to a channel of an operator which isn't. For the second, a single tower (the physical tower structure as well as the transmitting equipment on it) could serve any operator, who could rent it's usage on a per-call basis. That, in fact, already seems to be the case: Airtel and Vodaphone, for instance, each own a 42% share in India's largest tower corporation Indus Towers, the remaining 16% belonging to Idea Cellular.

To answer the first question, one could have a 'roaming' agreement between multiple operators at the same spot: if all the channels of one operator are busy, the user just has to switch to a channel of an operator which isn't.

For the second, a single tower (the physical tower structure as well as the transmitting equipment on it) could serve any operator, who could rent it's usage on a per-call basis. That, in fact, already seems to be the case: Airtel and Vodaphone, for instance, each own a 42% share in India's largest tower corporation Indus Towers, the remaining 16% belonging to Idea Cellular.

Infrastructure sharing will be explored further in a forthcoming post.

Coarse-grained Spectrum Sharing

For completeness, we should point out that there are more course-grained (simpler but less efficient) means of sharing in time as well as geography: the appropriate thought experiment is to imagine a radio station at the base of a hill that only has two shows, one for breakfast and one for dinner. Using its radio spectrum on the other side of that hill, or beyond the area it serves, would be fine at anytime; using it's spectrum in between the morning and evening shows would be fine anywhere.

Caveats

It must be emphasized at this point that the above is a purely hypothetical scenario, and not a prescription. Getting this to work would involve technical hurdles that a brief overview such as the one above could not bring up, that could only be discovered in the process of bringing the technology to market. Each technological solution – GSM, CDMA and LTE – would present its own difficulties, which may become apparent only when the product is shipped, so to speak. Fine technical judgments would need to be made: an example of the difficulty involved could be gauged from the early debates comparing the first CDMA standard (IS-95) with GSM at the time.

The economic model to use for shared spectrum and shared infrastructure is also something under intense discussion right now, and a number of scholarly papers have already been written up.

[1]. This is what you'd get in your first few Google search results when you look for “shared spectrum”, because the former has become so widely accepted that it's now part of the linguistic background.

[2]. Explained on http://www.radioraiders.com/gsm-frequency.html, referring to 3GPP spec http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/latest/Rel-7/45_series/45005-7d0.zip

[3]. From http://www.umtsworld.com/technology/cdmabasics.htm

[4]. From Mike Buehrer, William Tranter-Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA)-Morgan & Claypool Publishers (2006).

[5]. There are multiple definitions; the simplest one is “how many steps (in cells) that you have to walk from the tower before you can reuse the frequency”, which will suffice for us.

[6]. Of course, it's going to be messier in practices.

[7]. From http://www.vumc.com/branch/PICA/Software/

[8]. Orthogonal for synchronous CDMA, or 'sufficiently' orthogonal for asynchronous CDMA

[9]. Remember that the receiver on the tower has to demux (split) the signals received from many cellphones, and while a Wifi router would perhaps service multiple laptops in the same building, a CDMA tower has to work for a couple of hundred phones at varying distances – some a building-length away and some, many kilometers away. Every receiver has its own maximum signal to noise ratio, where the strength of the signal received has to be more that a certain fraction (which can be quite small, for a good receiver) of the strength of the electromagnetic (radio) noise it receives from other sources; cellphone towers have to deal with much larger signal to noise ratios than Wifi routers. For an FDMA or TDMA system, different users' data arrives at different frequency or time-slots, so as long as those slots are properly differentiated, one user's signal won't be another user's noise. For the commonly used asynchronous CDMA system, however, this is not the case, so at a receiver on a tower, the signal transmitted by a distant cellphone could be swamped by that from a much closer phone. The way this is dealt with is to have phones closer to the tower decrease their transmission power. So even in CDMA, the tower is still telling the phone what to change, only in this case it's the transmission power as opposed to the exact frequency and time.

[10]. http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/promoting-shared-use-europes-radio-spectrum

[11]. From Mike Buehrer, William Tranter-Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA)-Morgan & Claypool Publishers (2006)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/an-introduction-to-spectrum-sharing

Broadband Internet needs attention: Sunil Abraham

praskrishna — 2014-02-17T08:59:24Z

Telecom regulation is mostly a success, but wired and wireless broadband needs attention, says Centre for Internet and Society executive director.

The article by Sidin Vadukut was published in Livemint on February 3, 2014. Sunil Abraham was interviewed.

First of all from a policy perspective, how have priorities changed when it comes to technology in India from 2007 to now? Has it moved on from an issue of the infrastructure itself, to how this pipeline is used and managed?

Yes and no. Regarding carriage, telecom regulation has been mostly a success in terms of penetration and affordability, but wired and wireless broadband regulation still needs urgent attention for shared back haul, shared spectrum, unlicensed spectrum, quality of service, etc. We are making slow progress on privacy, security and cross-jurisdictional issues.

In 2014, what do you think are the key public policy issues facing technology in India? What forces do you see colliding with each other?

Privacy and data protection: Here there is conflict with transparency and innovation. Also we have to optimize privacy with security. Free speech: here traditional norms collide with potential of new technologies and energy of digital natives. Intellectual property: here the challenge is how to spread dissatisfaction equally between innovators, entrepreneurs, consumers, state and the public.

The Internet in India, and the many apps that ride on it, is pointed out as a disruptor on many accounts. From politics to social welfare to news and media. Is it too soon to see how Internet has changed Indian society? Or are we beginning to get a sense of this?

I would channel Evgeny Morozov here: there is no such thing as the Internet. Especially in India, many of the so-called data users on mobile phones are trapped within walled gardens created by Google, Facebook and Twitter. In short, specific technologies have social consequences within specific sites. We have anecdotal evidence that the availability of OERs (open educational resources), MOOCs (massive open online courses) and shadow libraries have transformed Indian classrooms in the cities. But there are very few empirical studies establishing causation between the Internet and Indian social phenomena.

When we say Internet in India, we really mean English language Internet in India. How substantial are the efforts to make the web more accessible to non-English speakers? What is holding this back?

The situation is absolutely depressing. For most languages there is a lot of work that remains to be done when it comes to input methods, fonts, rendering technology, spelling and grammar assistance, thesaurus, optical character recognition, text-to-voice, voice-to-text, machine translation, etc. We need large-scale government funding to create market incentives so that the Indian technology gap is bridged using open standards and technologies. We need government mandates to ensure that manufacturers produce some models of their products that comply with these standards.

What two-three policy changes can truly make technology an agent of social change in India?

Device level patent pool and compulsory licence for mobile devices to ensure proliferation of devices at the both ends of the pyramid. We need to move from community radio (FM only) policy to a technology neutral (terrestrial TV, Wi-Fi, mobile technologies, ADSL, fibre, etc) community media policy.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/livemint-february-3-2014-sidin-vadukut-broadband-internet-needs-attention

Centre- or State-Driven Development?

Shyam Ponappa — 2014-02-12T16:47:43Z

Federalism requires a strong Centre as well as strong states, and effective organisation and coordination -- which can be facilitated by using the Internet.

Shyam Ponappa's article was published in the Business Standard on February 5, 2014, and in Observer India Blogspot on February 7, 2014.

There are opposing views on the merits of centrally driven development compared with states developing on their own approach. At one level, some corporate leaders as well as politicians and members of civil society exhort states to compete for capital investment. This debate extends beyond states going their own way, to community-level local government, as in the Aam Aadmi Party's (AAP's) "Swaraj" through mohalla sabhas (town-hall meetings or open assemblies) for local government.

Basic Weakness: Lack of Organization & Coordination

While the benefits of community-led initiatives for local issues are indisputable, advocates emphasising decentralisation perhaps overlook some fundamental aspects of our reality. These are the extent of the inadequacies in our infrastructure networks, our organisational set-up, and in our ability to achieve effective coordination. Years ago, when Swaran Singh was food and agriculture minister in 1964, he reportedly said that one of our basic weaknesses was "lack of adequate administrative coordination and absence of a unified set-up at different levels" and that it should be "possible to achieve more rapid and lasting progress through a comprehensive and integrated approach than through uncoordinated and isolated efforts of different agencies and organisations operating at different levels…." [1] He couldn't have been more right, even today.

Result: Poor Infrastructure

The lack of unified organisation and effective coordination has a direct bearing on infrastructure. This is what people really need, no matter what else they might want. Take the current focus in Delhi on water and electricity. To these two, we must add roads, transport and communications as elements of essential first-order infrastructure services. People everywhere in the country need these services. Likewise, their second-order service needs include healthcare, education and finance. All these services are subject to network economics, and no local community can be self-sufficient without integration with external linkages. At the appropriate levels ("centres") of city, region, state and country (for example, for national highways or communications networks), these services need "centrally" organised supply and coordinated distribution for effective and efficient delivery. Aside from problems related to corruption, it is in ignoring organisation and coordination, or in handling them ineptly, that our governments fail. Centrally driven development is not just an option we fail at, mostly; it is an absolute necessity to empower ourselves, and until we get it right, we will be hamstrung by this deficiency.

Oblivious to Sewerage & Sanitation

As an aside, another major failure in not appreciating the systems required for basic infrastructure is in ignoring the linkage of water supply with sewerage and sanitation, historically and even now. Sewerage is concomitant with water supply; having water entails having to deal with sewage. Water and sanitation systems need significant "central" design - in the sense of overarching integrated systems at the appropriate level - with expert inputs in system development and implementation. This is usually not feasible at the local-community level alone. Ignoring this results in open sewage, polluted water bodies, unhygienic conditions and stinking surroundings. In this context, while building new smart cities is good, the dire need is to upgrade the systems in our existing cities, towns and villages, so that we live better. Such steps may not grab the headlines, but this is the stuff of our lives.

Virtual Mohalla Sabhas (Townhall Meetings)

Next, consider the approach to community participation in local government. There is certainly considerable potential for community participation, but not through methods like the "janata darbar" open assembly last month by the AAP in Delhi, or the Nationalist Congress Party's limited online interaction sessions. Doing so effectively and with efficiency is likely to require well-designed and deployed processes using Web-based technologies and methods, rather than, by way of example, the AAP's approach of live mohalla sabhas. Press reports suggest the AAP plans 2,700 mohalla sabhas in Delhi, the idea being that government representatives will attend these open assemblies, where issues will be discussed and resolved.[2] This seems like it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve in practice. Instead, if the proponents of these ideas adopted the approach of online town-hall meetings or virtual mohalla sabhas, governments could design and implement Internet-based systems using asynchronous communications - eliciting inputs and recommendations from domain experts and discussion by citizens for decision making by authorised functionaries. Such systems could also allow for realistic project time frames and ensure follow-ups on water and sanitation, electricity, transport, health, education, or whatever else. If political parties, especially the experienced administrators and engineers/MBAs supporting these parties, bend their minds to these tasks, we are likely to have better systems with more impressive results on the ground.

For instance, take garbage clearing. This might well improve if ward committees oversaw the work of sanitation workers, as mentioned here [3]; but the prerequisite is a system-wide design in place with processes that work, as suggested in this broad critique. [4] These services need overarching system design and implementation far beyond the scope of any mohalla sabha, except at the local deployment level.

Internet-Based Systems & Procedures

Many political parties use Internet technology for fund-raising and membership mobilisation. It should be feasible for them to consider extending this to governance - although this will be quite a stretch in terms of their understanding and adopting the principles of organisation, logical processes and systems when compared with the relatively simple tasks of membership drives and fund-raising. But this is how our politics and governance need to evolve. We need systematic processes using the Internet. This could facilitate and channel discussions to explore and define objectives, generate and evaluate alternatives, make trade-offs, order priorities, and arrive at actionable decisions implemented over an extended period, with sound project management methodologies and tools. There's off-the-shelf software available, such as Microsoft's TownHall and others like OnlineTownHalls and MindMixer. Perhaps there's scope for systems developed specifically for our purposes. What's needed is to adopt this systems approach, regardless of the software.

[1]. Lack of coordination", Swaran Singh, 1964, The Hindu: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-miscellaneous/this-day-that-age-dated-february-4-1964/article5651028.ece

[2]. http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/aap-plans-2-700-mohalla-sabhas-in-city/99/

[3]. http://m.ibnlive.com/blogs/vivianfernandes/1878/64973/can-aam-aadmi-partys-mohalla-sabhas-work.html

[4].http://www.ndtv.com/article/opinion/op-ed-the-problem-with-aap-s-mohalla-sabhas-467074

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/organizing-india-blogspot-shyam-ponappa-centre-or-state-driven-development

January 2014 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2014-04-07T07:09:59Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) welcomes you to the first issue of its newsletter (January) for the year 2014:

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Highlights
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Amba Salelkar provides an analysis of the three stages of the Rights for Persons with Disabilities 2013 since it was initially commissioned.
We published revised chapters for the states of Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh as part of our National Resource Kit project.
In the first of a three-part study Ananth Padmanabhan examines the "John Doe" orders that courts have passed against ISPs, which entertainment companies have used to block websites.
The second Institute on Internet and Society is being held in Pune from February 11 to 17.
CIS signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with KIIT University and Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences for furthering Odia Wikipedia.
Dr. Nishant Shah co-authored a chapter on video games in a book published by Palestinian Art Court-al Hoash.
Sneha gives an overview of the research enquiry in the field of Digital Humanities in her blog post on Mapping Digital Humanities in India.
In the first of the insightful seven part series, Gautam Bhatia looks at surveillance and the right to privacy in India from a constitutional perspective, tracing its genealogy through Supreme Court case law and compares it with the law in the USA.

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Jobs
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CIS is seeking applications for the posts of Program Officer (Access to Knowledge): http://bit.ly/1fnydB0 and Program Officer (Internet Governance): http://bit.ly/1aA57K6. There are two vacancies each for these posts and these are full-time based in Delhi. To apply, please send your resume to Sunil Abraham (sunil@cis-india.org), Nirmita Narasimhan (nirmita@cis-india.org) and Pranesh Prakash (pranesh@cis-india.org) with three writing samples of which at least one demonstrates your analytic skills, and one that shows your ability to simplify complex policy issues.

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Accessibility and Inclusion
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As part of our project (under a grant from the Hans Foundation) on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India, we bring you draft chapters for the states of Madhya Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh, and the union territory of Daman and Diu. With this we have completed compilation of draft chapters for 27 states and 5 union territories.

Based on the feedback and comments received from our readers the following chapters were revised:

► National Resource Kit Chapter

Andhra Pradesh Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, January 31, 2014): http://bit.ly/1lzUFcG.
Chhattisgarh Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, January 31, 2014): http://bit.ly/1fY4NZ0.

# Blog Entry

The Right of Persons with Disabilities Bill 2013 and the Lack of Access to Accessibility Rights (by Amba Salelkar, January 31, 2014): http://bit.ly/1diSg40.

# Analysis

Can Judges Order ISPs to Block Websites for Copyright Infringement? (Part 1) (by Ananth Padmanabhan, January 30, 2014). Ananth looks at the theory behind John Doe orders and finds that it would be wrong for Indian courts to grant "John Doe" orders against ISPs: http://bit.ly/1nteYaK.

# Blog Entries

Open Letter to the Vatican: Request for Holy See to Comment on IPR (by Samantha Cassar, January 31, 2014): http://bit.ly/1dGN7OS.
The Game of IPR: Insights from the 6th Global Intellectual Property Convention in Hyderabad (by Samantha Cassar, January 31, 2014): http://bit.ly/1fY5qS6.

►Wikipedia

# Articles / Newspaper Columns

Odia Wikipedia: Three Years of Active Contributions Gives Life to a Ten Year Old Project (by Subhashish Panigrahi, HASTAC, January 31, 2014): http://bit.ly/1jvxD8r.
WikiSangamotsavam 2013 brings Indian Wikimedians together (by Netha Hussain and Subhashish Panigrahi, DNA, January 14, 2014). The article was edited by Rohini Lakshane: http://bit.ly/1jvynKP.

# Announcement

CIS-A2K, KIIT University and Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences sign MoUs (by Subhashish Panigrahi, January 11, 2014): KIIT University, Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences and the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoUs) for furthering Odia Wikipedia: http://bit.ly/1j1qtFv.

# Blog Entries

Wikipedia Editing as Assessment Tool in the Indian Higher Education Classroom (by Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana, Ashwin Kumar A.P. and T. Vishnu Vardhan, January 30, 2014): http://bit.ly/1m5QHMD.
Wikipedia at Forefront in Christ University (by Syed Muzamiluddin, January 29, 2014): http://bit.ly/LTFA8E.

# Events Organised

Odia WikiMeetup (Bhubaneswar, January 11, 2014): http://bit.ly/NBkFJi.
Introductory talk about "Wikipedia in Academics" (KIIT School of Technology, Bhubaneswar, January 12, 2014): http://bit.ly/1j1yv1f.
Odia Wikipedia's 10th anniversary @ KISS (Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences, Bhubaneswar, January 28, 2014): http://bit.ly/1gsqkJC.
Odia Wikipedia 10th anniversary (Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal, January 29, 2014): http://bit.ly/1dGRBoy.

# Event Participated In

The Dynamics of Education to Employment Journey: Opportunities and Challenges (organized by KIIT School of Management, KIIT University, Bhubaneswar, February 21-22, 2014). T. Vishnu Vardhan gave a talk: http://bit.ly/1ePwqHc.

# Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Digitising contest to preserve rare books in Malayalam (The Hindu, January 4, 2014): http://bit.ly/NBtVgz.
‘With Internet in every pocket, power to the people’ (by Shubhadeep Chaudhury, The Tribune, January 12, 2014): http://bit.ly/1ojb1IZ. Shubhadeep interviews T. Vishnu Vardhan on internet and social media.
ଆଦିବାସୀଭାଷାରଉନ୍ନତିକଳ୍ପେଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆ(Odishan.com, January 12, 2014):http://bit.ly/1kAWJmG.
KIIT University to lead building free knowledge repository initiative (India Education Diary.com, January 20, 2014): http://bit.ly/1j1Rzwk.
Odisha: KISS to create tribal languages and heritage repository (Odisha Diary Bureau, January 20, 2014): http://bit.ly/1bLBhmB.
FDC recognition for the Centre for the Internet and Society (Wikimedia Foundation, January 30, 2014): http://bit.ly/1fYdxOz. Wikimedia Foundation published a resolution declaring CIS eligible for funding through the Annual Plan Grants program.
Tech-savvy students given tips to enter IT field (The Times of India, January 31, 2014): http://bit.ly/1j1QvIX.
Odia Wikipedia (Sanchar, January 31, 2014): http://bit.ly/1ePwAON.

Openness

# Event Organised

What is happening in South America and how Openness is an opportunity to Social, Political and Activist Movements? (Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, January 17, 2014): http://bit.ly/1bnZaq0.

# Analyses

Surveillance and the Indian Constitution - Part 1: Foundations (by Gautam Bhatia, January 13, 2014): http://bit.ly/1ntqsen.
Surveillance and the Indian Constitution - Part 2: Gobind and the Compelling State Interest Test (by Gautam Bhatia, January 27, 2014): http://bit.ly/1dH3meL.

# Newspaper Columns / Book Chapter

Big Brother is Watching You (by Chinmayi Arun, The Hindu, January 3, 2014): http://bit.ly/1cGpg0K.
Making the Powerful Accountable (by Chinmayi Arun, The Hindu, January 30, 2014): http://bit.ly/1nvzSpC.
Video Games: A Case Study of a Cross-cultural Video Collaboration (by Larissa Hjorth and Nishant Shah, January 31, 2014): http://bit.ly/1eTaXLX. A new book focusing on Palestinian artists’ video, edited by Bashir Makhoul and published by Palestinian Art Court- al Hoash, 2013, includes a chapter co-authored by Larissa and Nishant.

# Blog Entries

Letter requesting public consultation on position of GoI at WGEC (by Snehashish Ghosh, January 7, 2014): http://bit.ly/1g66bL7.
Electoral Databases – Privacy and Security Concerns (by Snehashish Ghosh, January 16, 2014): http://bit.ly/Mb4ktM.
GNI Assessment Finds ICT Companies Protect User Privacy and Freedom of Expression (by Elonnai Hickok, January 20, 2014): http://bit.ly/1mjbpmL.
Interview with Mathew Thomas from the Say No to UID campaign - UID Court Cases (by Maria Xynou, January 27, 2014): http://bit.ly/1eT9XHv. Maria interviewed Mathew Thomas on UID.
India's Central Monitoring System (CMS): Something to Worry About? (by Maria Xynou, January 30, 2014): http://bit.ly/1gsM4oQ.

# Events Organized

Biometrics or Bust? Implications of the UID for Participation and Inclusion (CIS, Bangalore, January 10, 2014). Malavika Jayaram gave a talk: http://bit.ly/1lJZhuK.
Digital Citizens: Why Cyber Security and Online Privacy are Vital to the Success of Democracy and Freedom of Expression (CIS, Bangalore, January 14, 2014): http://bit.ly/KucEU5. Michael Oghia gave a talk.
Nullcon Goa Feb 2014 — International Security Conference (organised by Nullcon, Bogmallo Beach Resort, Goa, February 12 – 15, 2014). CIS is one of the sponsors for this event: http://bit.ly/1lrBu5I.

# Events Co-organised

CPDP 2014 Reforming Data Protection: The Global Perspective (organised by CPDP, Brussels, January 22 – 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/KsgCws. CIS is one of the sponsors for this event. Malavika Jayaram was a speaker.
The Future of the Internet, Who Should Govern It and What is at Stake for You? (organised by Internet and Mobile Association of India, Cellular Operators Association of India, Internet Democracy project, Media for Change, SFLC and CIS, India International Centre, January 29, 2014): http://bit.ly/1eqkSUu. Chinmayi Arun moderated a session. Snehashish Ghosh participated in the event as a speaker.

# Events Participated In

Seminar on "Hate Speech and Social Media" (organized by NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad and British Deputy High Commission, Hyderabad, January 4 – 5, 2014): http://bit.ly/1dmcEkT. Chinmayi Arun was one of the speakers.
Multistakeholders Consultation on International Public Policy Issues (organized by the Department of Electronics & Information Technology, New Delhi, January 21, 2014): http://bit.ly/Mbfkao. Snehashish Ghosh participated in this meeting.
Internet Governance and India: The Way Forward (organized by Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi, January 22, 2014): http://bit.ly/1ePFueY. Snehashish Ghosh participated in the event.
Data Privacy Day 2014 (organized by Data Security Council of India, Infosys, Bangalore, January 28, 2014). Elonnai Hickok was a panelist: http://bit.ly/1ePFfk8.
TACTIS Symposium 2014 (organized by Tata Consultancy Service, TCS Siruseri, Chennai, January 28 and 29, 2014): http://bit.ly/1bo9y0R. Sunil Abraham gave the keynote address.

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News & Media Coverage
--------------------------------
CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Inventions that will make a difference (by Geeta Padmanabhan, The Hindu, January 1, 2014): http://bit.ly/MKwmfu.
Rise of the bot: all you need to know about the latest threat online (by Danish Raza, Hindustan Times, January 5, 2014): http://bit.ly/1dHgNex.
Despite apex court order, IOC proceeds with Aadhaar-linked DBT (by Deepa Kurup, The Hindu, January 6, 2014): http://bit.ly/1g6ffjn.
Worldwide: International Privacy - 2013 Year in Review – Asia (by Gonzalo S. Zeballos, James A. Sherer and Alan M. Pate, Mondaq Yearly Review, January 8, 2014): http://bit.ly/1iOaYRO.
Election panel rejects Google’s proposal for electoral services tie-up (by Anuja and Moulishree Srivastava, Livemint, January 9, 2014): http://bit.ly/1gpaGjF.
Social Notworking - 'Murder by Twitter'(by Malini Nair, The Times of India, January 19, 2014): http://bit.ly/1j2kT63.
The net is taking over (by Veenu Sandhu and Surabhi Agarwal, Business Standard, January 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/1hb4eQL.
The Dangers of Birdsong (by Namrata Joshi, January 25, 2014): http://bit.ly/1kB8J7L.
Is Bhutan selling its soul to Google? (by Lucky Wangmo from Thimphu and Pema Seldon form Bangalore, Business Bhutan, January 25, 2014): http://bit.ly/1fYl3sO.
What is net neutrality and why it is important (The Times of India, January 30, 2014): http://bit.ly/1ePFZ8P.

# Blog Entry

Mapping Digital Humanities in India (by Sneha PP, January 16, 2014): http://bit.ly/1gsQEEQ.

►Making Change Project

# Blog Entry

Creative Activism - Voices of Young Change Makers in India (UDAAN) (by Denisse Albornoz, January 20, 2014): http://bit.ly/1cxXAMI.

►Other
# Newspaper Column

10 Ways to Say Nothing New (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, January 19, 2014): http://bit.ly/1gsONjn.

►Ongoing Event

Institute on Internet and Society (organised by Ford Foundation and CIS, Yashada, Pune, February 11-17, 2014): http://bit.ly/180mQi9.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter:https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
Visit us at:https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge
E-mail: a2k@cis-india.org

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

► Request for Collaboration:
We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/january-2014-bulletin

December 2013 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2014-02-25T13:51:47Z

Our newsletter for the month of December 2013 can be accessed below.

We at the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) wish you all a great year ahead and welcome you to the twelfth issue of its newsletter (December) for the year 2013:

-------------------------------
Highlights
-------------------------------

The National Resource Kit team has published a draft chapter highlighting the state of laws, policies and programmes for persons with disabilities in the state of Gujarat.
Government of India has passed the National Electronic Accessibility Policy. CIS had worked with the Department of Electronics and Information Technology to formulate this policy. We bring you a brief analysis of the policy and provisions therein in a blog post.
Nehaa Chaudhari on behalf of CIS submitted comments on the Proposed WIPO Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations to the Ministry of Human Resource Development.
CIS-A2K team has published a report highlighting the key accomplishments about the work accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia from September to December 2013.
Vipul Kharbanda has provided an analysis of the laws and regulations that apply to Bitcoin in India concluding that government can regulate Bitcoin.
We released the first documentary film (DesiSec) on cyber security in India in Bangalore on December 11.
In the module on Global Histories of the Internet (part of the Knowledge Repository on Internet Access project) Nishant Shah analyses the understanding of the internet, cyberspace and everyday life and why do we need to know the history of the internet.
The second "Institute on Internet and Society" will be held in Yashada, Pune from February 11 to 17, 2014.
As part of the Making Change project, Denisse Albornoz provides an analysis of the benefits and limitations of increasing access to information to enable citizenship and political participation.

-----------------------------------------------
Jobs
-----------------------------------------------
CIS is seeking applications for the posts of Program Officer (Access to Knowledge) and Program Officer (Internet Governance): http://bit.ly/1aA57K6. There are two vacancies each for these posts and these are full-time based in Delhi. To apply, please send your resume to Sunil Abraham (sunil@cis-india.org) and Pranesh Prakash (pranesh@cis-india.org) with three writing samples of which at least one demonstrates your analytic skills, and one that shows your ability to simplify complex policy issues.

----------------------------------------------
Accessibility and Inclusion
----------------------------------------------
As part of our project (under a grant from the Hans Foundation) on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India, we bring you draft chapters for the states of Madhya Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh, and the union territory of Daman and Diu. With this we have completed compilation of draft chapters for 27 states and 5 union territories. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for the following chapter:

► National Resource Kit Chapter

The Gujarat Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, December 31, 2013): http://bit.ly/Kxbg3b.

Note: All of the chapters published so far in this project are early drafts and will be reviewed and updated.

►Other

# Media Coverage

An “Advocacy” Saga and the Inspiring Legacy of Rahul Cherian (by Shamnad Basheer, Spicy IP, December 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/1a5B7sU.

# Blog Entry

National Policy on Universal Electronic Accessibility – An Analysis (by Anandhi Viswanathan, December 27, 2013): http://bit.ly/1dfCW3I.

# Submission

Comments on Proposed WIPO Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations (by Nehaa Chaudhari, December 7, 2013). CIS submitted its comments to the Ministry of Human Resource Development: http://bit.ly/1hpWeuu.

# Events Participated In

3rd Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest & Open A.I.R. Conference on Innovation and IP in Africa (organized by University of Cape Town, December 9-13, 2013). Sunil Abraham participated as a speaker in the sessions on Bridging into the Global Congress: Global Issues, Local Answers?, User Rights Track: What Medicines Can Teach Tech: Exploring Patent Pooling and Compulsory Licensing in the Indian Mobile Device Market (http://bit.ly/1f74yir), User Rights Track: Reclaiming the World Trade Organisation: A Modest Proposal for a WTO Agreement on the Supply of Global Public Goods (http://bit.ly/1f74yir), and was a keynote speaker on The Freedom Continuum (http://bit.ly/1dH1WEM). Nehaa Chaudhari also participated in this event: http://bit.ly/1bJArFJ.
Twenty-Sixth Session of the Standing Committee on Copyrights and Related Rights (organized by WIPO, Geneva, December 16 – 20, 2013). CIS gave its statement on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives (http://bit.ly/JWnjq7) and on Limitations and Exceptions for Education, Teaching and Research Institutions and Persons with Other Disabilities (http://bit.ly/JWnjq7). Nehaa Chaudhari participated as a speaker. India and the United States introduced 6 proposals on the WIPO Broadcast Treaty: http://bit.ly/1edqvr3.

The following has been done under grant from the Wikimedia Foundation (http://bit.ly/SPqFOl). As part this project (http://bit.ly/X80ELd), we held 3 workshops in the month of December, published a detailed report of key accomplishments of the work done in Konkani Wikipedia, a report on Train the Trainer Program held in the month of October and published an article in DNA.

►Wikipedia

# Article

Telugu Wikipedia completes 10 years (by Rahmanuddin Shaik, DNA, December 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/19OAvUV. The article was edited by Rohini Lakshané.

# Report

CIS-A2K: Work Accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia (by Nitika Tandon, December 31, 2013): http://bit.ly/1l6ttmp. The report throws some light on the work accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia from September to December 2013.

# Blog Entries

First ever Train-the-Trainer Program in India (by Nitika Tandon, December 5, 2013): http://bit.ly/1euwSXt.

The following are videos of participants from the Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization project (jointly organised by CIS-A2K and Goa University) speaking on their experiences with Wikimedia projects.

Priyadarshini Tadkodkar on Konkani language (by Subhashish Panigrahi, November 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1hldNM8. We are featuring this here as we didn’t carry this in the last newsletter.
Varsha Kavlekar on Konkani Wikipedia Incubator (by Nitika Tandon, December 12, 2013): http://bit.ly/KmxyFo.
Darshan Kandolkar on Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Process (by Nitika Tandon, December 13, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cqKyQ2.
Darshana Mandrekar speaks on Konkani Wikipedia (by Nitika Tandon, December 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/1keWyya.
Pooja Tople on Wikimedia Projects (by Nitika Tandon, December 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1hlbubU.

# Events Organised

You Too Can Write on Wikipedia! — Training workshop (National Institute of Tourism and Hotel Management, Gachibowli, Hyderabad, December 5, 2013): http://bit.ly/1edmx1z.
Telugu Wikipedia Training Workshop (KBN College, Vijaywada, December 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/1i8ScnL.
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Alvas Vishva Nudisiri Virasat (Moodabidre, December 19 – 22, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja gave a presentation about Kannada Wikipedia and also conducted a workshop on Kannada Wikipedia as a parallel track. The event was covered by Prajavani (December 22), Hosadigantha (December 22), and Deccan Herald (December 22): http://bit.ly/1dGTBkw.

# Events Co-organised

Wikipedia Orientation Workshop (organised by CIS-A2K and Christ University, Bangalore, December 2, 2013): http://bit.ly/1lrkwEy.
Wikipedia Training Session @ Tiruvur (organised by CIS-A2K and Telugu Wikipedia community, Srivahini College, Tiruvur, December 19, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan and Rahmanuddin Shaik conducted the workshop: http://bit.ly/1e3oQX7. It was covered by Andhraprabha (http://bit.ly/1bU5VsQ), Eenadu (http://bit.ly/19fsttf), Sakshi (http://bit.ly/1e3pQdU), and Prajasakthi (http://bit.ly/JJs7ja) on December 19, 2013.

# Event Participated In

A Wikipedia Workshop at IISC (organised by the Assamese Wikipedia community, Bangalore, December 1, 2013). CIS-A2K team and Wikipedian Shiju Alex supported this event: http://bit.ly/1dSutY2.

# Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs for the following media coverage:

A Feature on Telugu Wikipedia (Namaste Telengana Newspaper, December 8, 2013): http://bit.ly/19Yjwj6.
Odisha: Odia Wikipedia reaching 5000 article mark! (Odisha Diary Bureau, December 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1dGU2vc.

-----------------------------------------------
Internet Governance
-----------------------------------------------
CIS is doing a project (under a grant from Privacy International and International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) on conducting research on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). So far we have organised seven privacy round-tables and drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill. This month we bring you an analysis on whether Bitcoin can be banned by the government and a blog post on misuse of surveillance powers in India. As part of its project (funded by Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and support from the IDRC) on mapping cyber security actors in South Asia and South East Asia a film DesiSec: Episode 1was screened. We also did an interview with Pranesh Prakash on cyber security. With this we have completed a total of 13 video interviews so far:

# Analysis

Can Bitcoin Be Banned by the Indian Government? (by Vipul Kharbanda, December 24, 2013): http://bit.ly/1lJrnGF.

# Blog Entries

Misuse of Surveillance Powers in India (Case 1) (by Pranesh Prakash, December 6, 2013): http://bit.ly/1donbaJ.
Brochures from Expos on Smart Cards, e-Security, RFID & Biometrics in India (by Maria Xynou, December 18, 2013): http://bit.ly/1f714fN.
India’s Identity Crisis (by Malavika Jayaram, December 31, 2013 Internet Monitor Annual Report: Reflections on the Digital World, published by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society): http://bit.ly/1lTRuuz.

# Upcoming Events

Digital Citizens: Why Cyber Security and Online Privacy are Vital to the Success of Democracy and Freedom of Expression (CIS, Bangalore, January 14, 2014): http://bit.ly/KucEU5. Michael Oghia will give a talk.
CPDP 2014 Reforming Data Protection: The Global Perspective (Brussels, January 22 – 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/KsgCws.
Nullcon Goa Feb 2014 — International Security Conference (organised by Nullcon, Bogmallo Beach Resort, Goa, February 12 – 15, 2014). CIS is one of the sponsors for this event: http://bit.ly/1lrBu5I.

# Events Organised

Big Democracy: Big Surveillance - A talk by Maria Xynou (CIS, Bangalore, December 3, 2013): http://bit.ly/19YnA31.
DesiSec: Episode 1 - Film Release and Screening (CIS, December 11, 2013): http://bit.ly/1lJt2fm.
Legal Issues pertaining to Cloud Computing (NLSIU Campus, Bangalore, December 14-15, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cvcmGq.
Biometrics or Bust? Implications of the UID for Participation and Inclusion (CIS, Bangalore, January 10, 2014). Malavika Jayaram will give a talk: http://bit.ly/1lJZhuK.

# Events Participated In

Convention on Crisis of Capitalism and brazen onslaught on Democracy (organized by INSAF, December 6, 2013). Snehashish Ghosh participated as a speaker: http://bit.ly/1gAxmNy.
International View of the State-of-the-Art of Cryptography and Security and its Use in Practice (IV) (jointly organized by Microsoft Research India, Indian Institute of Science, and Indian Institute of Technology Madras, December 6, 2013). Sunil Abraham was a panellist: http://bit.ly/1eAXl5t.
Technology in Government and Topics in Privacy (organized by Data Privacy Lab, CGIS Cafe, Cambridge Street, Harvard University Campus, December 9, 2013). Malavika Jayaram participated as a speaker on Biometrics in Beta – India's Identity Experiment: http://bit.ly/1bJDqht.
Cyberscholars Working Group at MIT (organized by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, December 12, 2013): Malavika Jayaram made a presentation on Biometrics or Bust - India’s Identity Crisis: http://bit.ly/1eIpHef.
Seventh NLSIR Symposium on “Bridging the Security-Liberty Divide” (organised by National Law School, Bangalore, December 21-22). Chinmayi Arun and Bhairav Acharya were speakers at this event: http://bit.ly/1gjsxYe.

--------------------------------
News & Media Coverage
--------------------------------
CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

MongoDB startup hired by Aadhaar got funds from CIA VC arm (by Lison Joseph, Economic Times, December 3, 2013): http://bit.ly/1f77bRg.
A Three-Way Race Draws Delhi’s Young, and Everyone Else, Out to Vote (by Betwa Sharma, New York Times, December 4, 2013): http://bit.ly/1gAxoFf.
India for UN body to resolve internet governance issues (by Kim Arora, The Times of India, December 5, 2013): http://bit.ly/JWESqe.
Card transactions with Aadhaar validation need more time: experts (by Kirti V. Rao and Moulishree Srivastava, Livemint, December 5, 2013): http://bit.ly/1hq35UL.
Indian government wakes up to risk of Hotmail, Gmail (originally published by AFP, December 7, 2013): http://bit.ly/19LrlOS. This was also mirrored in The Times of India (http://bit.ly/1hpYEJu), Reuters (http://bit.ly/1gaHhZk), Dawn (http://bit.ly/1azuV95), NDTV (http://bit.ly/19Ys7lS), Yahoo News (http://yhoo.it/JCSreE), The Malaysian Insider (http://bit.ly/1eAPAMW) and Asia One Digital (http://bit.ly/JWuw9R). A slightly modified version was published by Silicon India on December 11: http://bit.ly/1gAtzjd.

# Announcement

Pranesh Prakash has been elected as the Asia-Pacific representative to the executive committee of the NonCommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) (part of the Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group, which is in turn part of the Generic Names Supporting Organization, which is in turn part of ICANN): http://bit.ly/KuIVeC.

--------------------------------
Telecom
-------------------------------
Shyam Ponappa, a Distinguished Fellow at CIS is a regular columnist with the Business Standard. The articles published on his blog Organizing India Blogspot is mirrored on our website:

# Newspaper Column

For a Telecom Revival (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, December 4, 2013 and Organizing India Blogspot, December 5, 2013): http://bit.ly/1avRDii.

# Blog Entry

The Conflict of Konigsberg (by Anirudh Sridhar, December 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cEXhhU.

►Making Change Project

# Blog Entries

Tactical Technology: Information is Power? (by Denisse Albornoz, December 26, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cEUrcY.
Tactical Technology: Designing Activism (by Denisse Albornoz, December 27, 2013): http://bit.ly/1a9IuzH.

►Other

# Newspaper Column

Digital Native (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, December 22, 2013): http://bit.ly/1f7mU2P.

------------------------------------------------------------
Knowledge Repository on Internet Access
------------------------------------------------------------
CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project to create a knowledge repository on Internet and society. This repository will comprise content targeted primarily at civil society with a view to enabling their informed participation in the Indian Internet and ICT policy space. The repository is available at the Internet Institute website: http://bit.ly/1iQT2UB.

# Upcoming Event

Institute on Internet and Society (organised by Ford Foundation and CIS, Yashada, Pune, February 11-17, 2014): http://bit.ly/180mQi9. Registrations are closed for this event.

# Modules

History of the Internet: Building Conceptual Frameworks (by Nishant Shah, December 31, 2013): http://bit.ly/19WRHLb.
Internet Privacy in India (by Elonnai Hickok, December 31, 2013): http://bit.ly/19SNk6v.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter:https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
Visit us at:https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge
E-mail: a2k@cis-india.org

► Support Us

► Request for Collaboration:
We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/december-2013-bulletin

For a Telecom Revival

Shyam Ponappa — 2014-01-13T04:32:25Z

The government announced momentous decisions, subject to Cabinet approval, on telecom policy on December 3.

This was published in Organizing India Blogspot on December 5, 2013. The article originally appeared in the Business Standard on December 4, 2013.

There are some major pluses: increased spectrum made available, and higher market shares allowed through acquisitions. Less constructive for the sector are decisions like acquirers having to pay for spectrum above a floor (4.4 MHz for GSM and 2.5 MHz for CDMA) at market rates unless the spectrum was won through auctions. While there are positive decisions, more are needed for true resurgence in this sector.

Perhaps there's also a need to curb the inappropriate application of direct-democracy to complex issues. This refers to choices influenced by uninformed but vociferous public opinion, whereas the requirement is for logical conclusions based on knowledge and understanding of the facts, domain expertise, and skill in problem formulation, solution design and implementation. The underlying constructs may include factors like technology; economics and its dissimilar sibling, finance; society's organisation, capacity and inclinations; and the law. This is especially true for infrastructure, a recognised weakness in our economy. The issue is that misdirected policies can result from the indiscriminate application of old frames of reference, customary practices, or just following the herd.

Consider the state of telecom and broadband: how bad our services are, and how badly the sector is doing, despite the enormous potential. Decisions on spectrum have profound effects on how these services affect productivity and living standards, with inappropriate policies resulting in impediments and misdirection. This is especially important in developing economies because the opportunity losses are unaffordable, and recovery is difficult in the absence of robust institutions and processes. Negative examples like the drive to refarm 900 MHz spectrum and maximising short-term government revenues from spectrum make a mockery of government-for-the-people. "Refarming" refers to mobile operators having to give up most of their 900 MHz band holdings for redeployment of newer technology, primarily because more developed economies did so. Existing operators would lose much of this spectrum, unless they win it back through auctions or acquisitions. This is like taking away captive mines from established steel manufacturers to create a "level playing field".

There are differences, of course, between spectrum and mineral resources. Unlike minerals, spectrum is not depleted by usage, the time taken to develop a new mine is usually more than to deploy a new network, and so on. But refarming will entail significant costs for new networks with many more base stations. This will take years, requiring interim arrangements to avoid service disruption to existing users. It seems like an enormous burden, in effect cross-subsidising newer technology for the high-end user segment.

How bad is the situation for the industry? Take indicators like profitability, debt, and spectrum costs. Chart 1 shows Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation and Amortisation (EBITDA) as a percentage of revenue for mobile network operators in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Thailand and Singapore, with India being lowest at 20 per cent.

Chart 1: Mobile Network Operators’ Profitability - APAC

Source - GSMA + BCG: http://www.gsmamobileeconomyindia.com/GSMA_Mobile_Economy_India_Report_2013.pdf

Regarding indebtedness, two Indian operators have Debt/EBITDA ratios at 4 and 6, well above acceptable levels. Others, whose debt is in line with Asian operators, are less able to service it because of lower revenues. While some urge that leveraged companies in difficulties be allowed to fail, the magnitude is such that there is a serious risk of destabilising the economy.

Spectrum reserve prices in India are much higher than in other countries (Chart 2), despite the average revenue per user (ARPU) being much lower in terms of purchasing-power parity (PPP), rendering investments unattractive.

Chart 2

Source - GSMA + BCG: http://www.gsmamobileeconomyindia.com/GSMA_Mobile_Economy_India_Report_2013.pdf

It is because of this stressed situation that the authorities, the industry, and the public need to reconsider their basic approach to spectrum needs. One reason for the forced refarming is supposedly that 900 mHz spectrum is needed for more efficient technologies. Another is that some operators with no 900 mHz spectrum are at a genuine disadvantage in terms of in-building coverage. Of course, the most compelling reason may be simply the government's need for revenues to cover its deficit, despite the enormous negative consequences to the long-term public interest. The question is whether there have been adequate efforts to explore less disruptive alternatives to achieve the objectives of reliable, inexpensive communication services.

Spectrum Bands & Ecosystems

As of May 2013, the prevalent frequencies in LTE networks in Asia were as shown in Chart 3.

Chart 3: Spectrum Bands in LTE Networks (Asia) May 2013

Source: Wireless Intelligence http://www.mobileworldlive.com/asias-apt700-band-plan-leads-the-way-to-large-scale-4g-lte-growth

The most common were 1800 MHz and 2.6 GHz networks. The 2.3 GHz band used in India (and China) is not very widespread, while 900 MHz is barely there. Bands that are not widely used are unlikely to benefit from scale economies. From this perspective, it is more logical to refarm 1800 mHz for LTE rather than 900 MHz, and the now widely adopted 700 MHz band.

The adoption of the APT700 band across Asia (including India), Latin America and Europe opens up the possibility of evolving into the largest LTE ecosystem with significant scale economies. As Verizon's established 700 MHz band in America differs from the APT700 band, the availability of devices may be a concern.

However, the fact that many countries have adopted the APT700 band improves the chances of quick development of equipment, starting with Telstra's planned trials in December 2013/January 2014.

For the resurgence of telecom and widespread access to broadband, the current positive moves to cut reserve prices somewhat, allow spectrum trading and consider uniform spectrum usage charges are not enough. Public opinion tends to view these steps as favouring telecom operators, or as sops to one operator or group. However, policies need to be formulated from considerations of the public interest, including that of users, the industry, and the government. Regarding auctions, there needs to be rethinking on the lines of the Swedish approach of bids for network investment and rollout, perhaps with incentives for faster delivery.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/organizing-india-blogspot-december-5-2013-shyam-ponappa-for-a-telecom-revival

November 2013 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2014-01-04T04:38:08Z

Our newsletter for the month of November 2013 can be accessed below.

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) welcomes you to the eleventh issue of its newsletter (November) for the year 2013:

Highlights

CIS is pleased to announce the second "Institute on Internet and Society" to be held in Yashada, Pune from February 11 to 17, 2014. Any members from the civil society (students, research scholars, academicians, scientists, legal professionals, etc.) who engage in issues concerning Internet and Society are encouraged to apply.
The National Resource Kit team is pleased to bring you its research for the states of Tripura, Nagaland and Chattisgarh.
CIS-A2K team signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Christ University in Bangalore to introduce Wikipedia in classrooms.
The Access to Knowledge narrative report capturing the work done by CIS-A2K team in the first ten months of the grant along with its strategy for the next 1 year is published.
Last month we organised the Seventh Privacy Round-table in collaboration with FICCI, DSCI, and Privacy International in Delhi. The developments are captured in a report by Elonnai Hickok.
Along with Wikimedia India and Acharya Narendra Dev College, we organised the Relaunch of Creative Commons in India. Dr. Shashi Tharoor was the chief guest.

Accessibility and Inclusion

As part of our project (under a grant from the Hans Foundation) on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India, we bring you draft chapters for the states of Madhya Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh, and the union territory of Daman and Diu. With this we have completed compilation of draft chapters for 27 states and 5 union territories. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for the following chapters:

► National Resource Kit Chapter

The Tripura Chapter (by CLPR, November 13, 2013): http://bit.ly/1bCFPwq.
The Nagaland Chapter (by CLPR, November 13, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cmKzq0.
The Chattisgarh Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, November 30, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cSczSt.

Note: All of these are early drafts and will be reviewed and updated.

► Other Accessibility Update

# Events Participated In

E-Accessibility Workshop 2013 (organised by Directorate of Information Technology, Government of Maharashtra, Mahaonline Limited and National Internet Exchange of India, November 19-20, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cQ0wd8. CIS was one of the trainer organisations for the event.
National Conference on Harnessing Technology for the Empowerment for Persons with Visual Impairments (organized by NAB Centre for Blind Women & Disability Studies, Indian Islamic Cultural Centre, New Delhi, November 19, 2013). Dr. Nirmita Narasimhan participated as a speaker: http://bit.ly/IzLOty.

Access to Knowledge

The following has been done under grant from the Wikimedia Foundation (http://bit.ly/SPqFOl). As part this project (http://bit.ly/X80ELd), we held 8 workshops, signed a MoU with Christ University for teaching Wikipedia to students, published a detailed narrative report of activities done during the initial period of the Wikimedia grant.

►Wikipedia

# Articles

ಅಂತರ್ಜಾಲದಲ್ಲಿ ನೆಟ್ಟ ಸಸಿಗೆ ಈಗ ಹತ್ತು ವರ್ಷ (by Dr. U.B. Pavanaja, Kannada Prabha, November 1, 2013): http://bit.ly/17LOw4O. The article highlights 10 years of Kannada Wikipedia, the current status of the Kannada Wikipedia vis-a-vis number of articles, number of editors, active editors, and page views per month.
Train The Trainer Programme for Wikipedians (by Subhashish Panigrahi, DNA, November 14, 2013): http://bit.ly/1ehr8kz. The article was edited by Rohini Lakshane of DNA.

# Announcement

CIS Signs MoU with Christ University, Bangalore (November 20, 2013): The Access to Knowledge team signed a MoU as part of which CIS-A2K and Christ University will impart Wikipedia education in Indian classrooms: http://bit.ly/1ehr8kz.

# Report

CIS-A2K Narrative Report (September 2012 – June 2013) (by T. Vishnu Vardhan, Nitika Tandon and Subhashish Panigrahi, November 29, 2013): http://bit.ly/1dFyjpO. The report throws some light on the CIS-A2K program strategy in the next one year.

# Blog Entries

Note: A couple of the below blog entries were carried in the Access to Knowledge newsletter last month.

Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project (by Nitika Tandon, November 13, 2013): http://bit.ly/1dodyuK.
Konkani Vishwakosh Under CC-BY-SA (by Nitika Tandon, November 13, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cm9wBH.
Train the Trainer Program (by Subhashish Panigrahi, November 18, 2013): http://bit.ly/18hjw0n.

# Event Co-organised

The Relaunch of Creative Commons India (co-organised by Wikimedia India, Acharya Narendra Dev College and CIS, India Islamic Cultural Centre, November 12, 2013): http://bit.ly/HPxrAO. Dr. Shashi Tharoor, Minister of State for Human Resource Development was the chief guest at the event.

# Events Organised

Wikipedia Orientation Programme for MA Students (Christ University, Bangalore, November 12, 2013): http://bit.ly/ItxAtu. Syed Muzammiluddin was the trainer. Twenty students participated.
Wikipedia Orientation Programme for the Second Language Students (Christ University, Bangalore, November 12, 13, 16 and 19, 2013): http://bit.ly/1bxsOYF. T. Vishnu Vardhan, Syed Muzammiluddin and Dr. U.B.Pavanaja were the trainers. About 1200 second language students participated in the programme.
Documentation and Wikipedia Contribution — A One Day Workshop (Kalinga Institute of Social Studies, Bhubaneswar, November 14, 2013). The workshop was conducted by Subhashish Panigrahi: http://bit.ly/1fSvl1v.
Documentation and Wikipedia Workshop (Kalinga School of Management, Bhubaneswar, November 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/Imf0DV. Subhashish Panigrahi conducted the workshop.
Konknni Wikipedia Workshop (organised by Dalgado Konknni Akademi and CIS-A2K, Goa Central State Library, November 16 and 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1fSwiH5.
Tenth Anniversary of Wikipedia (H N Multimedia Hall, National College, Basavanagudi, Bangalore, November 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1eJ6da9. Dr. U R Ananthamurthy, Prof. G. Venkatasubbiah and Ravi Hegde were the guests of honour. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja conducted the workshop.
First Phase of Odia Wikipedia Workshop (Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Bhubaneswar, November 18, 2013): http://bit.ly/18doDer. Subhashish Panigrahi conducted the workshop.
Konkani Wikipedia Workshop (Nirmala Institute of Education, Goa, November 19, 2013): http://bit.ly/1fSAUwT. Nitika Tandon conducted the event.

# Event Participated In

Wikimedia Diversity Conference (organized by German Wikipedia Community, GLS Campus, Berlin): http://bit.ly/Ixr9W8.

# Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs for the following media coverage:

Kannada Wikipedia and its Tenth Anniversary (RadioCity, November 2, 2013): http://bit.ly/1dHEwBI.
10th anniversary of Kannada wikipedia (The Times of India, November 15, 2013): http://bit.ly/IxqDr7.
Tenth Anniversary of Kannada Wikipedia (Udayavani, November 15, 2013): http://bit.ly/1aFwqF1.
ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯಕ್ಕೆ ಈಗ ದಶಮಾನೋತ್ಸವ. ಅದರ ಪ್ರಯುಕ್ತ ಒಂದು ಆಚರಣೆ (Avadhi Website, November 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/ImiBSy.
ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯಗೆ 10, ಬೆಳವಣಿಗೆ ಸಾಲದು : ಪ್ರೊ .ಜಿವಿ (OneindiaKannada, November 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1fSAUwT.
Tenth Anniversary of Kannada Wikipedia (Vijayavani, November 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1b7exSa.
ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯಕ್ಕೆ ದಶಮಾನೋತ್ಸವ ಸಂಭ್ರಮ (Prajavani, November 18, 2013): http://bit.ly/1hWtt9v.
ಕನ್ನಡದ ಆನ್‌ಲೈನ್ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ ದುರ್ಬಲ (Vijaya Karnataka, November 19, 2013): http://bit.ly/1hWtsCy.
Panaji: DKA organizes two day Konkani Wikipedia workshop (Daijiworld, November 18, 2013): http://bit.ly/1inoi03.

Note: The following are not a part of the Wikimedia Grant:

► Other

# Blog Entries

History of Creative Commons in India (by Priyank Dwivedi, November 13, 2013): http://bit.ly/17txcH7.
How Can We Make Open Education Truly Open? (by Dr. Nishant Shah, DML Central, November 22, 2013): http://bit.ly/1ezsAyj.

# Events Participated In

Conference on e-Governance for India: Opportunities, Challenges and Policy Alternatives (organised by OECD Korea Policy Centre in partnership with the Centre for Good Governance, Hyderabad, November 6-7, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cGP13c. Sunil Abraham was a panelist in the session on OECD Principles on eGovernment and their applicability to the developing world and India.
Indo-European Conference on the Role of the Patent System in Fostering Innovation and Technology Transfer (organized by European Patent Office, FICCI and European Business & Technology Centre, November 29, 2013, New Delhi). Nehaa Chaudhari participated in this conference.

Internet Governance

CIS is doing a project (under a grant from Privacy International and International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) on conducting research on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). So far we have organised seven privacy round-tables and drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill. This month we bring you a report from the seventh privacy round-table held in Delhi, and an analysis on why Facebook is more dangerous than government spying. As part of its project (funded by Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and support from the IDRC) on mapping cyber security actors in South Asia and South East Asia we did an interview with Namita A Malhotra, a researcher and lawyer from Alternative Law Forum. With this we have completed a total of 12 video interviews:

►Privacy

# Event Report

Seventh Privacy Round-table (organised by FICCI, DSCI, Privacy International and CIS, October 19, 2013): http://bit.ly/187pFOO. The report was published in the month of November.

# Newspaper Columns

Open Secrets (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, October 27, 2013): http://bit.ly/1b5uvK0.
I Just Pinged to Say Hello (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, November 24, 2013): http://bit.ly/183H34t.

# Blog Entries

An Interview with Caspar Bowden (by Maria Xynou, November 6, 2013): http://bit.ly/17LQqFX.
India's Response to WGEC Questionnaire (by Snehashish Ghosh, November 13, 2013): http://bit.ly/HX0r96.
Why 'Facebook' is More Dangerous than the Government Spying on You (by Maria Xynou, November 19, 2013): http://bit.ly/HWLFzi.
CIS Supports the UN Resolution on “The Right to Privacy in the Digital age” (by Elonnai Hickok, November 30, 2013): http://bit.ly/1c2A89q.

# Events Organised

IDEX Impact Assessment Workshop (organised by IDEX, CIS, Bangalore, November 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/1bxRfFm.
The Evolving Cyber Threat and How to Address It (CIS, Bangalore, November 22, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cEkUZY.
Panel on Privacy, Surveillance & the UID in the post-Snowden era (Institution of Agricultural Technologists, Bangalore, November 30, 2013): http://bit.ly/1ctSHW3.

# Events Participated In

Chances and Risks of Social Participation (organised by Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society and Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Berlin, November 22, 2013). Dr. Nishant Shah gave the keynote: http://bit.ly/18PcMXN.
Expert Committee Meeting on Human DNA Profiling Bill (organised by the Ministry of Science & Technology, Government of India, New Delhi). Sunil Abraham participated in the meeting: http://bit.ly/19CpDbD.

# Upcoming Event

Big Democracy: Big Surveillance - A Talk by Maria Xynou (CIS, Bangalore, December 3, 2013): http://bit.ly/1j4mzgu.

► Cyber Security

Laird Brown, a strategic planner and writer with core competencies on brand analysis, public relations and resource management and Purba Sarkar who in the past worked as a strategic advisor in the field of SAP Retail are working in this project:

# Video Interview

Part 12: An Interview with Namita A. Malhotra (November 15, 2013): http://bit.ly/1j8MCjN.

# Documentary Film

First Look: Cyber Security Film (by Purba Sarkar, November 18, 2013): http://bit.ly/1alHhVu. The trailer was presented by Laird Brown recently at the IGF.

# Upcoming Event

DesiSec: Episode 1 - Film Release and Screening (December 11, 2013): Screening of the first documentary film on cyber security in India.

News & Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

EC guidelines on social media: Welcome move, but not enough (by Shruti Dhapola, FirstPost, November 1, 2013): http://bit.ly/1c3fNkt.
NSA leaks helping India become 'Big Brother' state? (British Broadcasting Corporation, November 1, 2013): http://bit.ly/1b7ftDG.
Spy agencies, IB and RAW, put spanner in proposed privacy law (by Nagender Sharma and Aloke Tikku, Hindustan Times, November 2, 2013): http://bit.ly/1aox4HP.
India must support UN's e-snooping move: Human rights activists (by Indu Nandakumar, Economic Times, November 11, 2013): http://bit.ly/18LrI5s.
Social media promotions can backfire, too (by Ratna Bhushan and Varuni Khosla, The Times of India, November 11, 2013): http://bit.ly/1gMj7rg.
YouTube is the answer to what has changed in India (by Moulishree Srivastava, Livemint, November 20, 2013): http://bit.ly/1fg214A.
When the virtual world wakes up the real one (by Malini Nair, November 24, 2013): http://bit.ly/1hovyd3.

Digital Natives

CIS is doing a research project titled “Making Change”. The project will explore new ways of defining, locating, and understanding change in network societies. Having the thought piece 'Whose Change is it Anyway' as an entry point for discussion and reflection, the project will feature profiles, interviews and responses of change-makers to questions around current mechanisms and practices of change in South Asia and South East Asia.:

► Making Change

# Blog Entries

Methods to Conceive and Condense Social Change (by Denisse Albornoz, November 30, 2013): http://bit.ly/1ezrBhw.
Blank Noise and the Active Citizen Dissonance (by Denisse Albornoz, November 30, 2013): http://bit.ly/IwOHu9.

► Other

# Blog Entry

Digitally Enhanced Civil Resistance (by Denisse Albornoz, November 20, 2013): http://bit.ly/18ndc7p.

Telecom

Shyam Ponappa, a Distinguished Fellow at CIS is a regular columnist with the Business Standard. The articles published on his blog Organizing India Blogspot is mirrored on our website:

► Newspaper Column

Predictability in Infrastructure (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, November 6, 2013 and Observer India Blogspot, November 10, 2013): http://bit.ly/1dLZ0Fp.

Knowledge Repository on Internet Access

CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project to create a knowledge repository on Internet and society. This repository will comprise content targeted primarily at civil society with a view to enabling their informed participation in the Indian Internet and ICT policy space. The repository is available at the Internet Institute website: http://bit.ly/1iQT2UB.

►Upcoming Event

Institute on Internet and Society (organised by Ford Foundation and CIS, Yashada, Pune, February 11-17, 2014): http://bit.ly/180mQi9. The application form is available at http://internet-institute.in/form. Registrations close on December 15, 2013.

► Modules

Internet Engineering Task Force (by Anirudh Sridhar, November 30, 2013). The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is an open standards body with no requirements for membership and does not have a formal membership process either: http://bit.ly/1c4aOQr.
World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) (by Anirudh Sridhar, November 30, 2013). The World Summit on Information Society was first proposed by the International Telecommunication Union in 1998. The main focus of the WSIS was to address issues related to the global digital divide. However, the scope of the WSIS was broadened later to include internet related public policy issues: http://bit.ly/186dbnV.

Digital Humanities

CIS is building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Digital will be used as a way of unpacking the debates in humanities and social sciences and look at the new frameworks, concepts and ideas that emerge in our engagement with the digital. The clusters aim to produce and document new conversations and debates that shape the contours of Digital Humanities in Asia:

► Event Participated In

From Seemingly Transparent to Definitely Opaque (organised by University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, November 4-7, 2013): http://bit.ly/19b6IW1. Nishant Shah taught this course and also presented on a panel on 'Secrets of Digital Culture'.

About CIS

The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
Visit us at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge
E-mail: a2k@cis-india.org

► Support Us

► Request for Collaboration:

We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/november-2013-bulletin

Predictability in Infrastructure

Shyam Ponappa — 2013-11-18T08:47:05Z

Systematic planning and execution can reduce the need for crisis management in infrastructure and manufacturing.

The article first appeared in the Business Standard on November 6, and was cross-posted in Organizing India Blogspot on November 10.

Problems related to projects in infrastructure and manufacturing are either predictable or unpredictable. For the type of problem that is more predictable, the "known known", we need to apply ourselves to facilitate productivity across sectors. An example of the unpredictable variety is in the developments dogging the erstwhile Dabhol project.

Until we plan and build infrastructure systematically, our current account deficit will continue to overshadow our economic prospects, including our ability to increase exports. The United States' easy-money policy is no more than a stopgap thumb-in-the-dyke. While unpredictable infrastructure problems require crisis management, no amount of clever short-term measures can substitute for timely, co-ordinated actions that are within the controllable domain. Whether it's power generation and distribution, telecommunications and broadband, the railways, or air travel, any form of infrastructure - apart from exceptions such as the Delhi Metro - suffers from our inability or unwillingness to plan and execute systematically.

The Unpredictable: Dabhol

Consider the continuing, unforeseen problems with the Dabhol project. This power plant with a separate liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal nearby is going through yet another crisis. The owner and operator is Ratnagiri Gas and Power Private Limited, owned by public sector units, the state and banks. This joint venture - between the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), Gas Authority of India Ltd (GAIL), the Maharashtra State Electricity Board, and some banks - was constituted to pick up the pieces after Enron. Yet, the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Ltd (called MahaVitaran), after taking most of the plant's output, is significantly behind on payments. Second, after the drop in gas production by the supplier, Reliance Industries' KG D-6, gas supplies have been reduced and are now cut off. The plant has been running well below capacity because of limited gas supply since 2012. Imported gas prices are so high that the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Ltd refuses to buy power at prices nearly double that of domestic gas, so the plant may have to be shut down.

There we have it: a potentially valuable asset providing a critical resource, electricity, with a substantial, untidy set of problems that have dragged on for a decade. It's ironic that desperately needed energy assets were shut down because the output was deemed too expensive at first and then restarted without the "rapacious" private sector - only to run short of fuel, with state payments in arrears, and now close to another shutdown. This kind of problem needs hard decisions like getting state entities to pay on time, and the capacity to devise creative solutions and co-ordinated execution to tide over the crisis in the long-term public interest. Unless we muster the resolve to deal with such unforeseen, unstructured problems through hard decisions, Dabhol will continue to sap national resources.

Yet, when Chandrababu Naidu as chief minister in Andhra Pradesh dared to attempt rational tariff increases in 2004, the electorate swept him aside for the populists, who gleefully reverted to unsustainable free electricity and other handouts. More recently, the Aam Aadmi Party's plank in Delhi's state elections included lower-priced electricity, triggering another unsustainable race to the bottom. But there is a public outcry against accepting hard decisions in governance - and a consequent political unwillingness to deal with them, or to display the leadership to create public awareness. Raucous public opinion is not a substitute for knowledgeable and informed inputs and judgement. Until we break out of this self-abasing, illogical spiral of seeking instant gratification or short-term gains over balanced, reasoned, deferred gratification, the race to the bottom will continue.

Predictable Infrastructure: Telecom, Power, Railways, Airlines…

There's the other kind of problem, the one that is amenable to forward-planning, but doesn't seem to get it. The kind that it is impossible to put in place without comprehensive, integrated planning and execution. The classic cases from the 1990s have been telecom and power.

In telecom, the recent emergence of three national operators with smaller, localised successes reaffirms the oligopolistic structure of this sector. Three operators account for 67 per cent of the market in India, 82 per cent in Brazil, 90 per cent in the US, and 98 per cent in the UK; in China, two operators have 99 per cent. If policymakers accept this principle regarding market structure, the refrain that more competition is always better can be jettisoned in favour of delivery and results, with the objectives of quality services at reasonable prices. Once the focus is on these objectives, the primacy of delivering services over collecting government revenues becomes apparent, except from narrow "fiscal deficit" considerations. The point is that planning and project management have to be done upfront to be effective, and are much less powerful when retrofitted to problematic situations, as in stranded power generation or telecom services.

However, even with the best of intentions and skills, there can be mistakes requiring course correction in predictable processes. A good example is South Korea's adoption of WiMAX and the attempted creation of their own standard, WiBro. While successful initially, it turned out to be inferior to a newer technology, LTE. What South Korea has done after evaluating its alternatives is to abandon WiBro in favour of LTE. This is the approach and capacity that we must strive to cultivate. To be unafraid to commit - but equally, unafraid to retract and change tack if and when a choice proves inappropriate.

By recommending reduced reserve prices in auctions, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has indicated for the first time that delivery and price may be acceptable as concomitant goals alongside government revenues. Meanwhile, the department of telecommunications is reportedly considering lower levies on operators, although insisting on higher reserve prices, perhaps because of the finance ministry and/or public opinion. What is unclear is how public opinion will react to the focus on delivery and price. Contrarily, it favours auctions of inputs like coal mines and spectrum, but lower tariffs for power and telecom/broadband; auctions will have the opposite effect. Populists are more likely to go with public opinion, instead of analysing and resolving logical contradictions.

Every situation need not result in a crisis and firefighting. Systematically addressing end-to-end processes beforehand with those involved and experts can help in the resolution of a large set of predictable processes in areas like infrastructure and manufacturing.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/organizing-india-blogspot-november-10-2013-shyam-ponappa-predictability-in-infrastructure

October 2013 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2014-01-04T04:31:01Z

Our newsletter for the month of October 2013 can be accessed below.

Highlights

The National Resource Kit team is pleased to bring you its research for the states of Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh, and the Union Territory of Daman and Diu.
The Department of Electronics and Information Technology invited comments on the Framework on the proposed adoption of Open Source Software in E-Governance Systems. CIS gave its feedback.
The Access to Knowledge team in collaboration with the Goa University re-released the Konkani Vishwakosh under Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-3.0.
Sunil Abraham, Pranesh Prakash and Chinmayi Arun participated in the Internet Governance Forum held in Bali, Indonesia from October 21 to 25. Overall CIS spoke in 7 panels.
In an article on Spy Files, Maria Xynou examines the legality of India’s surveillance technologies and their potential connection to India’s central monitoring system.
A clause-by-clause comments on the Working draft version of the Human DNA Profiling Bill, 2012 was sent to the Ministry of Science and Technology.
CIS started the first Privacy Watch in India. The map includes data on the UID, NPR and CCTNS schemes, installation of CCTV cameras and the use of drones throughout the country.

Accessibility

As part of our project (under a grant from the Hans Foundation) on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India, we bring you draft chapters for the states of Madhya Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh, and the union territory of Daman and Diu. With this we have completed compilation of draft chapters for 24 states and 5 union territories. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for the following chapters:

National Resource Kit

The Daman and Diu Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, October 28, 2013).
The Arunachal Pradesh Chapter (by CLPR, October 29, 2013).
The Madhya Pradesh Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, October 30, 2013).
The Delhi Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, October 31, 2013).

Note: All of these are early drafts and will be reviewed and updated.

Survey (Other Organisation)

Accessibility of Banks and Financial Services Institutions: A Global Survey (posted by Nilofar Ansher, October 20, 2013). G3ict and Scotiabank, requests senior managers, COO / CEOs, Managing Directors, IT Directors, HR Directors, and accessibility professionals from banks and financial services companies to participate.

Blog Entry

Bengali eSpeak Aids in Disaster Management (by Anirudh Sridhar, October 15, 2013).

Access to Knowledge

The Access to Knowledge programme addresses the harms caused to consumers and human rights, and critically examines Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, and Open Access to Law, Open Content, Open Standards, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software. We produced a column in the Economic and Political Weekly, submitted our feedback on Framework on Open Source Software Adoption in E-Governance Systems, and conducted 3 Wikipedia workshops:

Article

The Fight for Digital Sovereignty (by Sunil Abraham, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol-XLVIII No. 42, October 19, 2013).

Blog Entries

Mobile Phone Patents: Prior Art Survey (by Nehaa Chaudhari, October 23, 2013).
Ambiguity in the App Store: Understanding India’s emerging IT sector in light of IP (by Samantha Cassar, October 24, 2013).

Submission

Feedback on the Framework on OSS Adoption in E-Governance Systems (by Nehaa Chaudhari, October 26, 2013). In September, 2013, the DeitY invited comments on the Framework on the proposed adoption of Open Source Software in E-Governance Systems. CIS gave its feedback.

Events Participated In

OSOD 2013: International Workshop on Open Science and Open Data (organised by Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore, October 7, 2013). Nehaa Chaudhari participated as a panelist and gave a presentation on Government Accessibility and Copyright Conundrum.

National Conference on Opening up by Closing the Circle: Strengthening Open Access in India (co-organised by UNESCO, Central Library, Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia, October 21, 2013). Nehaa Chaudhari was a panelist in the discussion on "Why Open Access?". She gave a presentation on 'Pondering Copyright and Recasting Openness'.

Note: The following has been done under grant from the Wikimedia Foundation (http://bit.ly/SPqFOl). As part this project (http://bit.ly/X80ELd), we held 3 Wikipedia workshops in October:

Event Co-organised

Re-release of Konkani Vishwakosh under CC-BY-SA 3.0 (organised by Goa University and CIS-A2K, Goa University Conference Hall, September 26, 2013). Nitika Tandon has blogged about the event.

Events Organised

Workshop on Wikipedia in the Indian Undergraduate Language Classrooms (October 1, 203, Christ University, Bangalore). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja conducted the workshop.
Train the Trainer — Four-day long Residential Programme (October 3 – 6, 2013, CEO Center, Gubbi, Bangalore. CIS-A2K Team conducted the workshop. Seventeen people participated in the event.
Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization (Goa University, October 19-20, 2013). CIS-A2K team conducted the workshop. Thirty-seven people participated in the event.

Events Participated In

Re-sourcing Indian Cinema: Humanities Research, New Archives and Collaborative Knowledge Production (organised by the Centre for Contemporary Studies and the Centre for Study of Culture and Society, October 29, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan gave a talk on “Let Cinephiles Collaborate: Pleasures and Perils of Indian Film History on Wikipedia”.

Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs for the following media coverage:

Mangalore: Konkani writers resolve to form all-India forum at JKS conference (Daijiworld, October 1, 2013).
Wikipedia in Indian Languages on Mobile Phones (by Megha Prakash, Sci Dev Net, October 15, 2013).
कोंकणी विश्‍वकोश ‘विकिपीडिया’वर (Navprabha Daily, October 22, 2013). A detailed article about the digitalization of Konkani Vishwakosh.

Internet Governance

CIS is doing a project (under a grant from Privacy International and International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) on conducting research on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). So far we have organised seven privacy round-tables and drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill. This month we bring you clause-by-clause comments on the Human DNA Profiling Bill, 2012, and a map monitoring privacy in India. As part of its project (funded by Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and support from the IDRC) on mapping cyber security actors in South Asia and South East Asia we did an interview with Anja Kovacs on cyber security. With this we have completed a total of 10 video interviews:

Internet Governance Forum

Sunil Abraham, Pranesh Prakash and Chinmayi Arun participated in the Internet Governance Forum held in Bali, Indonesia in the month of October. Overall, CIS spoke in 7 panels:

Charting the Charter: Internet Rights and Principles Online (organised by IRP Coalition, October 22, 2013). Pranesh Prakash was a panelist.
Fair process frameworks for cross-border online spaces (organised by the Internet & Jurisdiction Project, Civil Society of France, Western Europe and Others Group and Internet & Jurisdiction Project, Civil Society of Germany, Western Europe and Others Group, October 22, 2013). Sunil Abraham and Chinmayi Arun were panelists for this workshop.
Removing Barriers to Connectivity: Connecting the Unconnected (organised by Internet Society and ETNO, October 23, 2013). Pranesh Prakash was a panelist.
FOSS: Smart Choice for Developing Countries (organised by TechNation and Open Source Alliance of Central Asia, October 23, 2013). Sunil Abraham spoke on FOSS and IT Growth Policies in South Asia.
Privacy: from regional regulations to global connections? (organised by Internet Society, Bali, October 24, 2013). Sunil Abraham was one of the panelists.
Human rights, freedom of expression and free flow of information on the Internet (a Focus Session on Openness, October 24, 2013). Pranesh Prakash was a speaker at this event.
Taking Stock: Emerging Issues - Internet Surveillance (a session on Internet Surveillance, October 25, 2013). Pranesh Prakash made intervention in this session.
Tweets from Bali IGF 2013: To enable research by those who didn't want to mess around with Twitter's APIs, CIS has made available tweets from the IGF as downloadable .CSV files.

Privacy

Magazine Article

What India can Learn from the Snowden Revelations (by Elonnai Hickok, Yahoo, October 23, 2013). The title of the article was changed in the version published by Yahoo.

Blog Entries

Concerns Regarding DNA Law (by Bhairav Acharya, October 9, 2013): http://bit.ly/1aoxXM9.
Interview with Big Brother Watch on Privacy and Surveillance (by Maria Xynou, October 15, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cRDMbV.
Interview with Bruce Schneier (by Maria Xynou, October 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/GS6oDX.
An Interview with the Tactical Technology Collective (by Maria Xynou, October 18, 2013): http://bit.ly/1i1lVNo.
Interview with Dr. Alexander Dix (by Maria Xynou, October 23, 2013): http://bit.ly/1a7dgtQ.
Open Letter to Members of the European Parliament of the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee (by Elonnai Hickok, October 23, 2013): http://bit.ly/17eZntz.
An Interview with Jacob Kohnstamm (by Elonnai Hickok, October 25, 2013): http://bit.ly/17NcQmD.
Spy Files 3: WikiLeaks Sheds More Light on the Global Surveillance Industry (by Maria Xynou, October 25, 2013): http://bit.ly/1d6EmjD.

Comments

Re: The Human DNA Profiling Bill, 2012 (by Bhairav Acharya, October 9, 2013). CIS provided clause-by-clause comments on the on the Working Draft version of the Human DNA Profiling Bill: http://bit.ly/17Jpp63.

Announcement

The India Privacy Monitor Map (by Maria Xynou with assistance from Srinivas Atreya, October 9, 2013). CIS has started a first of its kind Privacy Watch in India. The map includes data on the UID, NPR and CCTNS schemes, as well as on the installation of CCTV cameras and the use of drones throughout the country: http://bit.ly/19A5mCZ.

Event Organised

Privacy Round-table, New Delhi (organised by FICCI, DSCI and CIS, FICCI, Federation House, Tansen Marg, New Delhi, October 19, 2013): http://bit.ly/GAsStr.

Event Participated In

'Free Speech and Media in South Asia: Human Rights Concerns in a Globalizing World (organised by the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford, in collaboration with the Centre for Media and Governance, National Law University, Delhi, Oxford University, October 25, 2013). Chinmayi Arun spoke about “Privacy and Surveillance in India” in a panel discussion: http://bit.ly/18bRGi5.

Cyber Security

Part 11: An Interview with Anja Kovacs (October 15, 2013): http://bit.ly/15EAZOE.

Other IG Updates
Event Organised

Mapping Digital Media: Broadcasting, Journalism and Activism in India (co-organised by Alternative Law Forum, Maraa and CIS, Bangalore International Centre, October 27, 2013). Samantha Cassar has blogged about the event: http://bit.ly/17EVtdw. It was covered by the New Indian Express (http://bit.ly/1dGENE6) and Hindu (http://bit.ly/1bcVUIU) on October 28.

Events Participated In

Religious Pluralism and the Tensions between Freedom of Expression and Respect for the 'Other’ (organised by Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations project, in cooperation with Jamia Millia Islamia, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, October 10, 2013). Chinmayi Arun was a speaker at the session on “Democracy and the Tension between Freedom of Speech and Respect for the Other’s Religion, Culture, Identity, India and Europe”: http://bit.ly/194dtI7.
Fragmentation in a Democracy: The Role of Social Movements and the Media (organised by the Observer Research Foundation, Delhi and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Berlin at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi, October 16, 2013). Sunil Abraham was a panelist in the session on “Impact of Media, Social Media & Technology on Democracy / Governance”: http://bit.ly/17e3PZ9.
Internet, Mobile & Digital Economy Conference (IMDEC) 2013 (organised by FICCI, in association with the Ministry of Communications & IT, Government of India, New Delhi, October 25, 2013). Sunil Abraham participated as a speaker in the session on "The Internet We Want: A Multistakeholder Approach": http://bit.ly/1b8QHDD.

New and Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Decline in web freedom steepest in India: Report (by Javed Anwer, The Times of India, October 3, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cVOJ99.
Google survey: 37% of urban Indian voters are online (by Anuja and Moulishree Srivastava, Livemint, October 8, 2013): http://bit.ly/1gtqqDY.
The quest for genuine clout on the internet (by Karthik Subramanian, October 13, 2013): http://bit.ly/1b8TdKa.
India believes in Complete Freedom of Cyber Space: Kapil Sibal (by Elizabeth Roche, Livemint, October 14, 2013): http://bit.ly/1fZgwd1.
Location Tracking: Why the Govt-Mobile Manufacturer War Won’t End Soon (by Danish Raza, FirstPost, October 15, 2013): http://bit.ly/HkIvF7.
Bouquets & brickbats for Google's new privacy policy (by Indu Nandakumar, Economic Times, October 18, 2013): http://bit.ly/18Rzkqm.
Bali meet to discuss Internet governance issues (by Moulishree Srivastava, October 22, 2013): http://bit.ly/17I4r3M.
Indian politicians yet to tap voters online: CIS’s Abraham (by Venkatesh Upadhyay, Livemint, October 22, 2013): http://bit.ly/17HRV4s.
Beyond the Searchlight (by Debarshi Dasgupta, October 23, 2013): http://bit.ly/17IitlZ.
Nowhere to hide: Govt making your personal details public (by FirstPost editors, FirstPost, October 28, 2013): http://bit.ly/1dGE6KJ.
Your private data may be online, courtesy govt (by Somesh Jha and Surabhi Agarwal, Business Standard, October 29, 2013): http://bit.ly/HpQRMp.
Saving privacy as we knew it (by Somesh Jha and Surabhi Agarwal, Business Standard, October 29, 2013): http://bit.ly/16HNYwu.
E-governance hopes rise as India crosses 1 billion transactions (by J Srikant, Economic Times, October 29, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cnJIKd.

Digital Humanities

Events Participated In

GFM 2013 (organized by the University of Luneberg, Germany, October 3 – 5, 2013). Dr. Nishant Shah participated in a panel discussion with Wendy Chun, Tom Levine and Geert Lovink, around 'The End of Bibliographies: New Media and Research'. Nishant also participated as a panelist in a panel discussion on 'Open Up: Pragmatism and Politics of Open Access': http://bit.ly/1f9LCOH.
Digitalization of Culture (organized by Leuphana University, Luneberg, October 8, 2013). Dr. Nishant Shah did an introduction keynote to 1600 undergraduate students. A video of the lecture can be accessed here: http://bit.ly/1enWQPv.
RENEW: The 5th International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology (hosted by RIXC Centre for New Media Culture in Riga in partnership with the Art Academy of Latvia, Stockholm School of Economics in Riga and Danube University’s Center for Image Science, October 8 - 11, 2013). Dr. Nishant Shah was a part of the selection committee for the conference and chaired a session on Network Art on October 9: http://bit.ly/17e41aJ.

Blog Entry

A Hitchhikers Guide to the Cyberspace (by Anirudh Sridhar, October 4, 2013): http://bit.ly/1ga8yfH.

Knowledge Repository on Internet Access

Modules

World Intellectual Property Organisation (by Anirudh Sridhar and Snehashish Ghosh, October 31, 2013). WIPO is a specialized agency of the United Nations which deals with issues related to intellectual property rights throughout the world. Find out more at http://bit.ly/17a8WEk.
An Interview on Internet Governance with Professor Milton Mueller and Jeremy Malcolm (by Anirudh Sridhar, October 31, 2013). Professor Milton Mueller from the Syracuse University School of Information and Jeremy Malcolm, an Information Technology and Intellectual Property Lawyer, spoke about current issues and debates surrounding internet governance: http://bit.ly/17ix3Ro.

About CIS
The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.

Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K

Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k

Visit us at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge

E-mail: a2k@cis-india.org

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

Request for Collaboration:
We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/october-2013-bulletin

Ambiguity in the App Store: Understanding India’s emerging IT sector in light of IP

samantha — 2014-04-15T08:24:28Z

Mobile applications hold immense potential for India but are not fully understood by even their own developers in the context of India’s intellectual property (IP) regime. This is the first in a series of blog posts introducing CIS's new access to knowledge research initiative that seeks to understand how stakeholders encounter India’s IP law and what this means for the mobile app ecosystem, and in turn, the Indian mobile user. This research also aims to address problematic policy areas for innovation and protection for developers, as well as to comment on India’s regime with respect to the emerging mobile app sector.

India is at a pivotal point within its IT industry as mobile technologies take off like never before. Smartphone usage appears to be replacing PC use altogether for many,[1] and today’s generation is even said to belong to India’s "mobile only generation" as 41% of Indians access the internet through mobile phones.[2] The potential for mobile technologies for India can be better envisioned as various reports compare prior growth rates with astonishing projections for the next few years, and in doing so, demonstrate India’s exponential growth in terms of smart phone and internet penetration.

In the last 3-4 years, the number of users who access the internet through a 3G connection has long surpassed the number of fixed line broadband connections accumulatively over the last 17 years.[3] The funny part is that 3G has yet to be widely adopted, with only 4% of over 900 million mobile subscriptions using 3G.[4] This number is expected to grow from 36 million to 266 million by 2016—within a mere 3 years,[5] and smartphones, from 67 million this year to 382 million by 2016.[6] At that point, India will likely be within the world’s top 5 countries for smartphones, potentially representing almost 10% of the entire world’s supply—practically five times that of what it was only 5 years prior in 2011.[7] As the cost of data and price of smartphones come down, and as mobile internet and smartphone penetration rates surge tremendously, new pathways are paved for emerging sectors to evolve, such as that of the mobile application market,[8] a market which is expected to have a value of Rs 2,700-crore by 2016.[9]

Every month, 100 million apps are being downloaded in India, ranging from productivity to localized music and language apps, to health and spirituality apps, to banking and e-commerce apps; with ones relating to dating and gaming growing in popularity.[10]

India’s appetite for mobile apps is definitely here to stay. This booming app market is expected to increase demand for an additional three lakh developers in the next five years in India[11] and introduce many new players into market.

Although holding great potential, the mobile app ecosystem has yet to become robust, and is still a place of volatility and ambiguity for developers. As more and more build upon previously produced content within the pursuit of new idea for a mobile application, the lines become blurred as to what is legally acceptable and what is not. For emerging start-ups, these blurred lines are irrelevant, with the main focus on the product and with insufficient manpower and money flow to invest time elsewhere. But for the developers that are on their way up the enterprise ladder, protection is sought out. As developers gain more leverage within app stores, and therefore more exposure, their applications may be at risk for being copied by others, and may begin to seek support commonly in the form of copyright or not-so-often patent protection. As this system of who seeks protection and who does not repeatedly manifests within the Indian mobile app ecosystem, an uneven playing field is further tipped in favour of those for who are willing to pay for a lawyer. Many a time, developers are not aware themselves that they may be infringing upon others’ intellectual property, and as foreign players begin to enter India’s mobile app market — often with overwhelmingly large IP portfolios—Indian developers may unknowingly be at risk for litigation for their own mobile applications.

This blog post kick-starts a new research initiative from the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) as I attempt to understand the many factors at play at the intersection of the mobile app ecosystem and Indian intellectual property (IP) law. It is also the first in a series to attempt to paint a comprehensive picture of what the real implications are of intellectual property within the mobile app ecosystem for India. This initiative falls within CIS’s A2K Programme which ultimately aims to protect citizen, consumer and public interest via IP law reform and by offering alternatives to strictly proprietary-based intellectual property regimes, with those that incorporate principles of openness. These differentiating regimes will be looked at further with reference to mobile applications in the series of postings to come.

In performing this research I hope to attain the following achievements: 1) to understand the legal environment in which the mobile app ecosystem exists, 2) to evaluate India’s current IP regime with respect to its mobile application industry, and lastly, and 3) to work towards creating contextually appropriate conditions to harness the potential of mobile app technologies for India. Each of these objectives are looked at closer below, as I demonstrate how I intend to attain each goal, and for what reason:

To understand the mobile app ecosystem in light of India’s IP regime

As the mobile app market is still on its incline, there is little understanding of the implications of policy decisions on this ecosystem and the stakeholders implicated within it. Consequently, policy decisions are ill-informed and at risk of being determined by foreign players in pursuit of foreign interests. I hope to acquire a sufficient sense of understanding of these implications from the ground up: beginning with the developers themselves. In performing empirical research to survey how stakeholders within the ecosystem encounter Indian IP law, with a main focus on developers themselves, I hope to also be able to identify key determinants of IP-related disputes and areas of concern amongst mobile app developers and understand corresponding implications for the mobile app market, and in turn, the potential for this market’s impact in India.

To evaluate India’s IP regime with respect to the mobile app ecosystem

Through the carrying out of this initiative I hope to produce the research necessary that will get the debate started regarding the role of intellectual property in the mobile applications market in India. In order to do so, I hope to identify and address policy blindspots — if any — within the current IP regime, as well as to make evident the consequences of such. I also hope to be able to draw my own conclusions to assess the current IP regime with respect to the needs of various stakeholders and the market which they drive forward through investigating how policies related to IP law facilitate or hinder levels of innovation, creation, and protection for mobile applications and their developers, to the benefit or detriment of Indian mobile users.

To work towards creating conditions to harness the potential of mobile apps for India

It is evident that within the mobile app market, along with other mobile technologies, lies potential for the future of access to information and means of communication amongst mobile users from all corners of India. Relative trajectories for market trends and mobile and internet penetration should not be taken for granted, however, as the environment within which these trends take course may be considered to be volatile and may consequently enable or undermine what potential this market holds for current and future consumers. Through analyzing primary empirical evidence and research findings in conjunction with market reportings and projections, I hope to be able to identify key conditions for an enabling legal environment in which mobile applications are available and accessible for the fulfillment of their potential.

The IP debate is a highly contested one, with opposing viewpoints and varying manifestations across jurisdictions. In order to understand how India fits into this debate, with respect to the mobile app ecosystem, I intend to guide my research in asking the following questions:

Who are the stakeholders and key players in the mobile app ecosystem, and how does each encounter India’s IP law?
What are the determining and resulting factors at play at the intersection of the mobile app ecosystem within India and India’s IP law regime?
What conditions would create an enabling legal environment for mobile app developers in terms of innovation and protection for their works?

This research will employ a multidisciplinary approach in incorporating theory and contextual aspects related to academic law, philosophy, political science, economics, history, and sociology in attempts to holistically understand the multifaceted picture in question and the different perspectives of such.

As preliminary research to this initiative, I have been in touch with mobile app developers of differing scales within the ecosystem. In speaking with each, I continue to observe a prevalent theme to be that of how each interprets Indian IP law. Regardless of whether they develop mobile apps for clients or their own enterprises, or are part of a small startup enterprise or an Indian success story, or even if they’re IP consultants themselves: in trying to understand the Indian IP landscape, one often encountered experience is confusion. As a result, the ambiguity of what may be protected under intellectual property and what may not be lingers on, to the advantage of some and the disadvantage of many. I intend to continue carrying out interviews with various stakeholders across India — with a special focus on Bangalore as India’s IT hub — including developers, incubators, lawyers, and even consumers, to better understand how each feels about Indian IP law, to what extent developers engage in protection for their IP, and if this theme of ambiguity is truly a consistent one throughout the mobile app ecosystem with regards to the Indian IP regime.

If you are interested in contributing to this initiative, I invite you to contact me by e-mail at samantha@cis-india.org. Any or all contributions may be kept anonymous and your explicit approval will be sought out before incorporating any of your responses into my research.

[1]. Bhine, A., Sharma, K., Rao, S., Mishra, K., Preetham, N., & Nemani, N. (2013). India’s mobile internet: The revolution has begun: An overview of how mobile internet is touching the lives of millions. Avendus . Retrieved from http://www.avendus.com/Files/Fund%20Performance%20PDF/Avendus_Report-India's_Mobile_Internet-2013.pdf

[2]. NextBigWhat.com (2012). Mobile Internet in India: All you need to know about it [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/nextbigwhat/mobile-internet-revolution-in-india-all-that-youd-like-to-know

[3]. Bhine, A. et al. (2013)

[4]. NextBigWhat.com (2012)

[5]. Mobile Marketing Association (2013). India Adspend Report. Retrieved from http://www.mmaglobal.com/whitepaper/india-adspend-report

[6]. Press Trust of India (2013, Sep 29). Mobile games, apps market in India to touch Rs 2,700 cr by 2016: Report. IBN Live. Retrieved from http://ibnlive.in.com/news/mobile-games-apps-market-in-india-to-touch-rs-2700-cr-by-2016-report/425284-11.html

[7]. Bhine, A. et al. (2013)

[8]. Pahwa, N. (2013, Apr 30). TiE India Internet Day: On Smartphones, Mobile App Monetization & Indic Languages. Medianama. Retrieved from http://www.medianama.com/2013/04/223-mobile-app-monetization-smartphones/

[9]. Press Trust of India (2013, Sep 29)

[10]. Kulkarni, V.A. (2013, Aug 22). India in line for the big app boom? Certainly, say developers. Know Your Mobile India. Retrieved from http://www.knowyourmobile.in/applications/8759/india-next-line-big-app-boom-certainly-say-developers

[11]. Nair, R. P. (2013, Aug 13). Booming app market is driving startups to offer mobile technology course. The Economic Times. Retrieved from http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-08-13/news/41375028_1_app-market-mobile-app-development-company-marketsandmarkets

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/ambiguity-in-the-app-store

Alliance aimed at reducing internet cost launched

praskrishna — 2013-10-29T09:08:10Z

A number of government bodies, non-government organizations and private players have joined hands to create a coalition aimed at reducing the cost of internet access worldwide. The coalition -- Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) -- will advocate policy and regulatory reforms to push down the cost of bandwidth in developing and poor countries, where cost of internet access remains very high.

This article was published in the Times of India on October 7, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

"By advocating for open, competitive and innovative broadband markets, A4AI aims to help access prices fall to below 5% of monthly income worldwide, a target set by the UN Broadband Commission. Reaching this goal can help to connect the two-thirds of the world that is presently not connected to the internet and make universal access a reality," the alliance said in a press note, citing figures provided International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

According to ITU, by 2012, fixed-broadband prices represented 1.7% of monthly gross national income in developed countries. In developing countries, the cost of broadband connection accounts for 30.1% of average monthly income.

The A4AI has the backing of World Wide Web Foundation, which was started by the inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee. Sonia Jorge, executive director of the Alliance for Affordable Internet told TOI, "The Web Foundation hosts the A4AI's secretariat and both teams collaborate to benefit from natural synergies among the programmes."

Berners-Lee explained, "The reason for the alliance is simple - the majority of the world's people are still not online, usually because they can't afford to be. In Mozambique, for example, a recent study showed that using just 1GB of data can cost well over two months' wages for the average citizen... The real bottleneck now is anti-competitive policies that keep prices unaffordable. The alliance is about removing that barrier and helping as many as possible get online at reasonable cost."

The global sponsors of the A4AI are Google, UK Department for International Development, US Agency for International Development and Omidyar Network, an firm that often invests in non-profit entities. But Intel, Microsoft, Facebook, Cisco, Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation, the US State Department and several other regional and international bodies are also members of A4AI.

From India, Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is part of the alliance. Sunil Abraham, director of CIS, told TOI his group "hopes to learn from policy work carried out by the alliance and apply the lessons in India where access to good quality broadband services remains prohibitively expensive".

For now there are not many details on how the A4AI is going to achieve its goals. Sonia said it had two telecom companies -- Digicel and Main One - as its members and talks were going on with some other telecom firms for their involvement.

The alliance will begin in-country engagements with three to four countries by the end of 2013, expanding to at least 12 countries by the end of 2015. "We would be very glad to have the opportunity to engage and work in collaboration with the government of India," said Sonia.

A4AI will also produce an annual 'affordability report'. The first edition is expected to come out in December 2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-october-7-2013-alliance-aimed-at-reducing-internet-cost-launched

September 2013 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2013-10-24T06:48:33Z

Our newsletter for the month of September 2013 can be accessed below.

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) welcomes you to the ninth issue of its newsletter for the year 2013. During this month we signed an MoU with the Goa University to enhance digital literacy in Konkani language, submitted a report on Inclusive Disaster and Emergency Management for persons with disabilities to the National Disaster Management Authority, published an updated version of the Privacy Protection Bill, 2013 based on feedback collected from the Privacy Round Table held on August 24, and published an analysis of the Crucifixion Protests in Paraguay. Further, updates on our upcoming events and media coverage are brought in this newsletter.

Our policies on Ethical Research Guidelines, Non-Discrimination and Equal Opportunities, Privacy, Terms of Website Use, and Travel can be accessed here.

Accessibility

As part of our project on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India with the Hans Foundation, we bring you a new draft chapter on the union territory of Andaman and Nicobar. With this we have completed compilation of draft chapters for 21 states and 4 union territories. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for this chapter:

National Resource Kit Chapter

The Andaman and Nicobar Chapter (by CLPR, September 30, 2013).

Reports

Inclusive Disaster and Emergency Management for Persons with Disabilities (by Deepti Samant Raja and Nirmita Narasimhan, September 17, 2013). It was submitted to the National Disaster Management Authority of India (NDMA) on September 17 for their action.
The ICT Opportunity for a Disability-Inclusive Development Framework (by leading international organisations such as G3ict, ITU, Microsoft, UNESCO, et.al.) was released on September 24. CIS gave its inputs to this report.

Access to Knowledge and Openness

The Access to Knowledge team at CIS is working on expanding the Indic language Wikipedia in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation . As part this project, we held seven Wikipedia workshops. Our project on Pervasive Technologies examines the relationship between production of pervasive technologies and intellectual property and we have produced a column in EuroScientist as part of our efforts of promoting openness including open government data, open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software:

Open Access
Column

Open Access: An Opportunity for Scientists around the Globe (by Subbiah Arunachalam, Euro Scientist, September 25, 2013).

Blog Entries

e - DIRAP Google+ Hangout: Open Government (by Christine Apikul, September 18, 2013).
The Indian Council of Agricultural Research Adopts an Open Access Policy (by Nehaa Chaudhari, September 30, 2013).

Wikipedia
Wikipedians from various communities can request for outreach programmes, technical bugs, logistics-merchandize and media, public relations and communications here.

Announcements

CIS Signs MoU with Goa University: The A2K team at CIS has signed an MoU with the Goa University to digitize the “Konkani Vishwakosh” under the Creative Commons license and build a digital knowledge partnership to enhance digital literacy in Konkani language. See here for more details.

Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project: The Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration with the University of Goa invites you to a two-month project on digitization of Konkani Vishwakosh. Please send in your applications by October 5, 2013.

Video

Wikipedians Speak: Piotr Konieczny: This episode brings you a conversation with Piotr Konieczny, a veteran Wikipedian from Poland. He has contributed to over 514 DYK articles on Wikipedia.

Columns and Blog Entries

Recap on Konkani Wikipedia Workshop (by Subhashish Panigrahi, Startup Goa Blog, September 9, 2013).
ଅବସର ପରର ଦ୍ବିତୀୟ ଜୀବନ, ଅବସର ପରେ ସକ୍ରିୟ ଭାବେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡ଼ିଆରେ ଲେଖାଲେଖି ଜାରୀ ରଖିଥିବା ଜଣେ ଡାକ୍ତରଙ୍କ ସ‌ହ ଭାବାଲୋଚନା (by Subhashish Panigrahi, Odiapua, September 10, 2013).
Selection of Programme Officer — Pilot Projects, CIS-A2K (by Nitika Tandon, September 10, 2013).
Wikipedia reaches Classrooms in Hyderabad (by Syed Muzammiluddin, September 20, 2013).

Events Organised

A Kannada Wikipedia Workshop in Mysore (University of Mysore, August 6, 2013): This is a report of the workshop conducted last month. Dr. Pavanaja conducted the workshop.
Wikipedia Introductory Workshop (Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Goa, September 28, 2013). Nitika Tandon conducted this workshop. The details will be posted soon.
Train the Trainer — Four-day long Residential Training Workshop in Bangalore (organised by CIS-A2K, Bangalore, October 3 – 6, 2013).

Events Co-organised

Digital Resources in Telugu: A Workshop for Research Scholars (co-organised by CIS-A2K and the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, September 13, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan participated in this event.
Re-releasing Konkani Vishwakosh & Building Konkani Wikipedia (organised by CIS-A2K and the University of Goa, Conference Hall, Goa University, Taleigao, September 26, 2013).
Wikipedia Introductory Workshop (co-organised by CIS-A2K and wikipedians John Noronha and Supriya Kankumbikar, September 27, 2013). Nitika Tandon participated in this workshop.
Odisha: Wikipedia workshop at IIMC, Dhenkanal (co-organised by CIS-A2K and Odia Wikimedia community, September 30, 2013). Subhashish Panigrahi coordinated the entire event along with members of Odia Wikipedia, Dr Subas Chandra Rout, Mrutyunjaya Kar and Sasanka Sekhar Das. This was covered by Odisha Diary (http://bit.ly/1bna9zd), and eOdisha Samachar (http://bit.ly/1aNJvv4).

Events Participated In

Workshop on e-Content Development (organised by Centre for Staff Training and Development, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Open University, Hyderabad, September 4 – 6, 2013). Vishnu Vardhan gave a guest lecture on Open Source to Open Knowledge, Building Knowledge Bases and Platforms via Mass Collaboration on the Internet, e-Content in Indian languages – History, Challenges and Opportunities, Wikipedia Users to Wikipedia Authors – Exploring Wikipedia as an OER Tool, and e-Content, e-Student, e-Faculty – Reimagining classroom in the digital Age.
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop (organised by Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, SDM College, Ujire, September 15, 2013). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja participated in this workshop.
Konkani Wikipedia Workshop (organised by St. Aloysius College, AIMIT, St Aloysius College (Autonomous), Beeri, Mangalore, September 13, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in this.

Media Coverage

'Help Konkani Wikipedia come out of incubation' (Deccan Herald, September 13, 2013): The article talks about the relative lack of content in Konkani Wikipedia. “To get it out of incubation, many should write Konkani articles for Wikipedia,” Dr. Pavanaja was quoted as having said.
Konkani Vishwakosh relaunch tomorrow (The Hindu, September 26, 2013). A coverage of the re-release of the Konkani encyclopaedia under Creative Commons license.
Goa university re-releasing Konkani encyclopaedia on Sept 26 (The Times of India, September 24, 2013): Goa University and CIS-A2K re-released the four volume 3632 page Konkani Vishwakosh (encyclopaedia) in Goa.
Goa University announces plan to upload Konkani encyclopedia on Wikipedia (Navhind Times, September 27, 2013).
Konkani Wikipedia from Goa University in 6 months (The Times of India, September 27, 2013): Goa University becomes the first varsity in India to allow data produced and copyrighted by an Indian university to be used by internet users. Professors, students and anyone with expertise or love for Konkani can come forward to help with the project for which training will be provided, says Vishnu Vardhan.
Konkani Wikipedia in the making (by Prakash Kamat, The Hindu, September 29, 2013): Goa University re-launched a four-volume Konkani encyclopaedia and will upload it on Wikipedia. The process will be completed in six months times, says Vishnu Vardhan.
For the love of Konkani: Preserving Goa's official language (by Joanna Lobo, DNA, September 29, 2013): Konkani has 24 lakh speakers as per the Census Department of India 2001 but online documentation is limited. CIS-A2K wants to strengthen the Konkani Wikipedia, says Nitika Tandon.
Goa University to make available online Konkani Wikipedia, within 6 months (by Jagran Josh, September 30, 2013).
Goa University Partners CIS India to Build Konkani Wikipedia (by Apurva Chaudhary, Medianama, September 30, 2013).

Access to Knowledge (Copyright and Pervasive Technologies)

The Access to Knowledge programme addresses the harms caused to consumers, developing countries, human rights, and creativity/innovation from excessive regimes of copyright, patents, and other such monopolistic rights over knowledge:

Event Participated In

The Law and Economics of Copyright Users Rights (organised by the American University Washington College of Law, Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington DC, September 26, 2013). Sunil Abraham presented the Pervasive Technologies project.

Internet Governance

We are doing a project on conducting research on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS) with Privacy International and IDRC. So far we have organised six privacy round tables and drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill. This month we bring you the latest version of the Privacy (Protection) Bill and an analysis of the six privacy round tables. We are also doing a project on mapping cyber security actors in South Asia and South East Asia with the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and IDRC. We did an interview with Lawrence Liang on privacy and free speech:

SAFEGUARDS Project
Bill

Privacy (Protection) Bill, 2013: Updated Third Draft (by Bhairav Acharya, September 30, 2013): CIS has been researching privacy in India since 2010 with the objective of raising public awareness around privacy, completing in depth research, and driving a privacy legislation in India. As part of this work, we drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill, 2013. This is the latest version with changes based on feedback from the Privacy Round Table held on August 24.

Event Reports

A Privacy Meeting with the Federal Trade Commission (co-organised by CIS and the Federal Trade Commission, Imperial Hotel, Janpath, New Delhi, September 20, 2013). Elonnai Hickok participated in this meeting.
The National Privacy Roundtable Meetings (by Bhairav Acharya, September 19, 2013). Bhairav provides an analysis of the six round table meetings held in the cities of New Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, and Kolkata.

Interview

An Interview with Suresh Ramasubramanian (by Elonnai Hickok, September 6, 2013): Suresh Ramasubramanian from IBM speaks about cyber security and issues in the cloud.

Articles and Blog Entries

India: Privacy in Peril (by Bhairav Acharya, Frontline, July 12, 2013). The article was published in Frontline in July but was mirrored only recently on our website.
Privacy Law Must Fit the Bill (by Sunil Abraham, Deccan Chronicle, September 9, 2013).
Transparency Reports — A Glance on What Google and Facebook Tell about Government Data Requests (by Prachi Arya, September 12, 2013).
The National Cyber Security Policy: Not a Real Policy (by Bhairav Acharya, Observer Research Foundation's Cyber Security Monitor Vol. I, Issue.1, August 2013).
The Central Monitoring System: Some Questions to be Raised in Parliament (by Bhairav Acharya, September 19, 2013).
CIS and International Coalition Calls upon Governments to Protect Privacy (by Elonnai Hickok, September 25, 2013).
An Analysis of the Cases Filed under Section 46 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 for Adjudication in the State of Maharashtra (by Bhairav Acharya, September 30, 2013): This is a brief review of some of the cases related to privacy filed under section 46 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 seeking adjudication for alleged contraventions of the Act in the State of Maharashtra.

Media Coverage

Gmail ban looms for Indian gov't workers (by Beatrice Thomas, Arabian Business.com, September 1, 2013): The article says that government would ban Gmail for official communication in light of cyber spying by the US. Sunil Abraham agrees with the ban.
Indien: Regierung will Nutzung von US-Mailprovidern in Verwaltungen verbieten (Netzpolitik, September 3, 2013). Sunil Abraham was quoted in this German newspaper.
A dangerous trend: social media adds fire to Muzaffarnagar clashes (by Zia Haq, The Hindustan Times, September 9, 2013). The article speaks about censorship in wake of publication of malicious content. In such cases the government has a legitimate reason to censor speech, says Sunil Abraham.
Three Years Later, IPaidABribe.com Pays Off (by Jessica McKenzie, TechPresident, September 23, 2013): The article talks about IPaidABribe.com, an online portal focusing on civic engagement and improving governance. But the real problem in India is “high ticket bribes...at the top of the pyramid,” Sunil Abraham was quoted as having said.
Indian biometric ID plan faces court hurdle (by John Ribeiro, Computer World, September 25, 2013): The article talks about Aadhar (India’s biometric system). The Aadhaar number now allows different agencies including private organizations to collect and exchange data between them, says Pranesh Prakash.

Upcoming Event

Privacy Round Table, New Delhi (co-organised by FICCI, DSCI and CIS, FICCI Federation House, Tansen Marg, New Delhi, October 19, 2013).

Event Organised

Public Law and Jurisprudential Issues of Privacy (CIS, Bangalore, September 27, 2013): Abhayraj Naik, a graduate from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, and the Yale Law School gave a talk on public law and jurisprudential issues related to privacy.

Events Participated In

Young Scholar Tutorials (organised by Communication Policy Research South, September 3-4, 2013). Nehaa Chaudhari participated in this event.
Privacy and Surveillance in India (organised by the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, September 18, 2013). Sunil Abraham gave a talk.
Syllabus: “Policy and regulation conducive to rapid ICT sector growth in Myanmar: An introductory course” (organised by LIRNEasia in collaboration with Myanmar ICT Development Organization, and with support from the Open Society Foundation and the International Development Research Centre of Canada, September 28 – October 5, 2013). Sunil Abraham is supporting Prof. Samarajiva on the last optional day of this course in Yangon.
Congress on Privacy and Surveillance (organised by Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, September 30, 2013). Maria Xynou participated in this event.

Cyber Security Project
Video Interview

Part 10: Interview with Lawrence Liang (September 10, 2013): In the ecology of online communication it is crucial for us to look at right to privacy and right to free speech as inseparable.

Forthcoming Events

11th India Knowledge Summit 2013 (organised by ASSOCHAM India, Hotel Shangri-La, New Delhi, October 14-15, 2013). CIS is one of the organisations supporting this event.
CYFY 2013: India Conference on Cyber Security and Cyber Governance (organised by Observer Research Foundation and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Oberoi Hotel, New Delhi, October 14-15, 2013). Sunil Abraham will participate in this event as a speaker.

Knowledge Repository on Internet Access
CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project to create a knowledge repository on Internet and society. This repository will comprise content targeted primarily at civil society with a view to enabling their informed participation in the Indian Internet and ICT policy space. The repository is available at www.internet-institute.in.

Modules

International Telecommunication Union (by Snehashish Ghosh and Anirudh Sridhar, September 30, 2013).
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) (by Snehashish Ghosh and Anirudh Sridhar, September 30, 2013).

Telecom

Shyam Ponappa, a Distinguished Fellow at CIS is a regular columnist with the Business Standard. The articles published on his blog Organizing India Blogspot is mirrored on our website:

Newspaper Column

Regrouping for Growth - Interest Rates – III (originally published in the Business Standard on September 4, 2013 and mirrored in Organizing India Blogspot on September 6, 2013).

Digital Natives

Digital Natives with a Cause? examines the changing landscape of social change and political participation in light of the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who critically engage with discourse on youth, technology and social change, and look at alternative practices and ideas in the Global South:
Event Report

Bangalore + Sustainability Summit (organized by Ashoka India, Green Lungi and IDEX, September 21, 2013, CIS, Bangalore): Denisse Albornoz has summarised the happenings in this report.

Media Coverage

Youths brainstorm at social summit (The Times of India, September 21, 2013): A coverage of the Bangalore + Sustainability Summit hosted at CIS.

Blog Entry + Video

Revealing Protesters on the Fringe: Crucifixion Protest in Paraguay (by Denisse Albornoz, September 20, 2013): Denisse provides an analysis of the crucifix protest in Paraguay in the light of Nishant Shah’s piece: Whose Change is it Anyway?.

Digital Humanities

Interview

Thinking Digital Beyond Tools: Interview with Dr. Nishant Shah (by Noopur Raval, HASTAC, September 10, 2013): Nishant speaks about his interest in digital studies, the future of humanities, and his HASTAC experience.

Event Participated In

Reclaim Open Learning Symposium (organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, University of California Humanities Research Institute, UC Irvine, September 26-27, 2013): Nishant Shah participated in this event as a panelist.

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