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WSIS+10 High Level Event: A Bird's Eye Report
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/wsis-10-high-level-event-a-birds-eye-report
<b>The WSIS+10 High Level was organised by the ITU and collaborative UN entities on June 9-13, 2014. It aimed to evaluate the progress on implementation of WSIS Outcomes from Geneva 2003 and Tunis 2005, and to envision a post-2015 Development Agenda. Geetha Hariharan attended the event on CIS' behalf.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>The World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) +10 </span><a href="http://www.itu.int/wsis/implementation/2014/forum/">High Level Event</a><span> (HLE) was hosted at the ITU Headquarters in Geneva, from June 9-13, 2014. The HLE aimed to review the implementation and progress made on information and communication technology (ICT) across the globe, in light of WSIS outcomes (</span><a href="http://www.itu.int/wsis/index-p1.html">Geneva 2003</a><span> and </span><a href="http://www.itu.int/wsis/index-p2.html">Tunis 2005</a><span>). Organised in three parallel tracks, the HLE sought to take stock of progress in ICTs in the last decade (High Level track), initiate High Level Dialogues to formulate the post-2015 development agenda, as well as host thematic workshops for participants (Forum track).</span><span> </span></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">The High Level Track:</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img src="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/copy2_of_HighLevelTrack.jpg/@@images/be5f993c-3553-4d63-bb66-7cd16f8407dc.jpeg" alt="High Level Track" class="image-inline" title="High Level Track" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Opening Ceremony, WSIS+10 High Level Event </i>(<a class="external-link" href="https://twitter.com/ITU/status/334587247556960256/photo/1">Source</a>)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The High Level track opened officially on June 10, 2014, and culminated with the endorsement by acclamation (as is ITU tradition) of two <a href="http://www.itu.int/wsis/implementation/2014/forum/inc/doc/outcome/362828V2E.pdf">Outcome Documents</a>. These were: (1) WSIS+10 Statement on the Implementation of WSIS Outcomes, taking stock of ICT developments since the WSIS summits, (2) WSIS+10 Vision for WSIS Beyond 2015, aiming to develop a vision for the post-2015 global information society. These documents were the result of the WSIS+10 <a href="http://www.itu.int/wsis/review/mpp/">Multi-stakeholder Preparatory Platform</a> (MPP), which involved WSIS stakeholders (governments, private sector, civil society, international organizations and relevant regional organizations).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The <strong>MPP</strong> met in six phases, convened as an open, inclusive consultation among WSIS stakeholders. It was not without its misadventures. While ITU Secretary General Dr. Hamadoun I. Touré consistently lauded the multi-stakeholder process, and Ambassador Janis Karklins urged all parties, especially governments, to “<i>let the UN General Assembly know that the multi-stakeholder model works for Internet governance at all levels</i>”, participants in the process shared stories of discomfort, disagreement and discord amongst stakeholders on various IG issues, not least human rights on the Internet, surveillance and privacy, and multi-stakeholderism. Richard Hill of the Association for Proper Internet Governance (<a href="http://www.apig.ch/">APIG</a>) and the Just Net Coalition writes that like NETmundial, the MPP was rich in a diversity of views and knowledge exchange, but stakeholders <a href="http://www.ip-watch.org/2014/06/16/what-questions-did-the-wsis10-high-level-event-answer/">failed to reach consensus</a> on crucial issues. Indeed, Prof. Vlamidir Minkin, Chairman of the MPP, expressed his dismay at the lack of consensus over action line C9. A compromise was agreed upon in relation to C9 later.<span> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Some members of civil society expressed their satisfaction with the extensive references to human rights and rights-centred development in the Outcome Documents. While governmental opposition was seen as frustrating, they felt that the <strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">MPP had sought and achieved a common understanding</span></strong>, a sentiment <a href="https://twitter.com/covertlight/status/476748168051580928">echoed</a> by the ITU Secretary General. Indeed, even Iran, a state that had expressed major reservations during the MPP and felt itself unable to agree with the text, <a href="https://twitter.com/covertlight/status/476748723750711297">agreed</a> that the MPP had worked hard to draft a document beneficial to all.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Concerns around the MPP did not affect the <strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">review of ICT developments</span></strong> over the last decade. High Level Panels with Ministers of ICT from states such as Uganda, Bangladesh, Sweden, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and others, heads of the UN Development Programme, UNCTAD, Food and Agriculture Organisation, UN-WOMEN and others spoke at length of rapid advances in ICTs. The focus was largely on ICT access and affordability in developing states. John E. Davies of Intel repeatedly drew attention to innovative uses of ICTs in Africa and Asia, which have helped bridge divides of affordability, gender, education and capacity-building. Public-private partnerships were the best solution, he said, to affordability and access. At a ceremony evaluating implementation of WSIS action-lines, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), India, <a href="https://twitter.com/covertlight/status/476748723750711297">won an award</a> for its e-health application MOTHER.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>The Outcome Documents themselves shall be analysed in a separate post. But in sum, the dialogue around Internet governance at the HLE centred around the success of the MPP. Most participants on panels and in the audience felt this was a crucial achievement within the realm of the UN, where the Tunis Summit had delineated strict roles for stakeholders in paragraph 35 of the </span><a href="http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs2/tunis/off/6rev1.html">Tunis Agenda</a><span>. Indeed, there was palpable relief in Conference Room 1 at the </span><a href="http://www.cicg.ch/en/">CICG</a><span>, Geneva, when on June 11, Dr. Touré announced that the Outcome Documents would be adopted without a vote, in keeping with ITU tradition, even if consensus was achieved by compromise.</span></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">The High Level Dialogues:</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img src="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/HighLevelDialogues.jpg/@@images/3c30d94f-7a65-4912-bb42-2ccd3b85a18d.jpeg" alt="High Level Dialogues" class="image-inline" title="High Level Dialogues" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Prof. Vladimir Minkin delivers a statement.</i> (<a class="external-link" href="https://twitter.com/JaroslawPONDER/status/476288845013843968/photo/1">Source</a>)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The High Level Dialogues on developing a post-2015 Development Agenda, based on WSIS action lines, were active on June 12. Introducing the Dialogue, Dr. Touré lamented the Millennium Development Goals as a “<i>lost opportunity</i>”, emphasizing the need to alert the UN General Assembly and its committees as to the importance of ICTs for development.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As on previous panels, there was <strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">intense focus on access, affordability and reach in developing countries</span></strong>, with Rwanda and Bangladesh expounding upon their successes in implementing ICT innovations domestically. The world is more connected than it was in 2005, and the ITU in 2014 is no longer what it was in 2003, said speakers. But we lack data on ICT deployment across the globe, said Minister Knutssen of Sweden, recalling the gathering to the need to engage all stakeholders in this task. Speakers on multiple panels, including the Rwandan Minister for CIT, Marilyn Cade of ICANN and Petra Lantz of the UNDP, emphasized the need for ‘smart engagement’ and capacity-building for ICT development and deployment.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A crucial session on cybersecurity saw Dr. Touré envision a global peace treaty accommodating multiple stakeholders. On the panel were Minister Omobola Johnson of Nigeria, Prof. Udo Helmbrecht of the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA), Prof. A.A. Wahab of Cybersecurity Malaysia and Simon Muller of Facebook. The focus was primarily on building laws and regulations for secure communication and business, while child protection was equally considered.<span> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The lack of laws/regulations for cybersecurity (child pornography and jurisdictional issues, for instance), or other legal protections (privacy, data protection, freedom of speech) in rapidly connecting developing states was noted. But the <strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">question of cross-border surveillance and wanton violations of privacy went unaddressed</span></strong> except for the customary, unavoidable mention. This was expected. Debates in Internet governance have, in the past year, been silently and invisibly driven by the Snowden revelations. So too, at WSIS+10 Cybersecurity, speakers emphasized open data, information exchange, data ownership and control (the <a href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/ecj-rules-internet-search-engine-operator-responsible-for-processing-personal-data-published-by-third-parties">right to be forgotten</a>), but did not openly address surveillance. Indeed, Simon Muller of Facebook called upon governments to publish their own transparency reports: A laudable suggestion, even accounting for Facebook’s own undetailed and truncated reports.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In a nutshell, the post-2015 Development Agenda dialogues repeatedly emphasized the importance of ICTs in global connectivity, and their impact on GDP growth and socio-cultural change and progress. The focus was on taking this message to the UN General Assembly, engaging all stakeholders and creating an achievable set of action lines post-2015.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">The Forum Track:</h3>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/copy_of_ForumTrack.jpg/@@images/dfcce68a-18d7-4f1e-897b-7208bb60abc9.jpeg" alt="Forum Track" class="image-inline" title="Forum Track" /></p>
<p><i>Participants at the UNESCO session on its Comprehensive Study on Internet-related Issues</i> (<a class="external-link" href="https://twitter.com/leakaspar/status/476690921644646400/photo/1">Source</a>)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The HLE was organized as an extended version of the WSIS Forum, which hosts thematic workshops and networking opportunities, much like any other conference. Running in parallel sessions over 5 days, the WSIS Forum hosted sessions by the ITU, UNESCO, UNDP, ICANN, ISOC, APIG, etc., on issues as diverse as the WSIS Action Lines, the future of Internet governance, the successes and failures of <a href="http://www.internetgovernance.org/2012/12/18/itu-phobia-why-wcit-was-derailed/">WCIT-2012</a>, UNESCO’s <a href="http://www.unesco.org/new/internetstudy">Comprehensive Study on Internet-related Issues</a>, spam and a taxonomy of Internet governance.<span> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Detailed explanation of each session I attended is beyond the scope of this report, so I will limit myself to the interesting issues raised.<span> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">At ICANN’s session on its own future (June 9), Ms. Marilyn Cade emphasized the <strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">importance of national and regional IGFs</span></strong> for both issue-awareness and capacity-building. Mr. Nigel Hickson spoke of engagement at multiple Internet governance fora: “<i>Internet governance is not shaped by individual events</i>”. In light of <a href="http://www.internetgovernance.org/2014/04/16/icann-anything-that-doesnt-give-iana-to-me-is-out-of-scope/">criticism</a> of ICANN’s apparent monopoly over IANA stewardship transition, this has been ICANN’s continual <a href="https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/process-next-steps-2014-06-06-en">response</a> (often repeated at the HLE itself). Also widely discussed was the <strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">role of stakeholders in Internet governance</span></strong>, given the delineation of roles and responsibilities in the Tunis Agenda, and governments’ preference for policy-monopoly (At WSIS+10, Indian Ambassador Dilip Sinha seemed wistful that multilateralism is a “<i>distant dream</i>”).<span> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This discussion bore greater fruit in a session on Internet governance ‘taxonomy’. The session saw <a href="https://www.icann.org/profiles/george-sadowsky">Mr. George Sadowsky</a>, <a href="http://www.diplomacy.edu/courses/faculty/kurbalija">Dr. Jovan Kurbalija</a>, <a href="http://www.williamdrake.org/">Mr. William Drake</a> and <a href="http://www.itu.int/wsis/implementation/2014/forum/agenda/session_docs/170/ThoughtsOnIG.pdf">Mr. Eliot Lear</a> (there is surprisingly no official profile-page on Mr. Lear) expound on dense structures of Internet governance, involving multiple methods of classification of Internet infrastructure, CIRs, public policy issues, etc. across a spectrum of ‘baskets’ – socio-cultural, economic, legal, technical. Such studies, though each attempting clarity in Internet governance studies, indicate that the closer you get to IG, the more diverse and interconnected the eco-system gets. David Souter’s diagrams almost capture the flux of dynamic debate in this area (please see pages 9 and 22 of <a href="http://www.internetsociety.org/sites/default/files/ISOC%20framework%20for%20IG%20assessments%20-%20D%20Souter%20-%20final_0.pdf">this ISOC study</a>).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There were, for most part, insightful interventions from session participants. Mr. Sadowsky questioned the effectiveness of the Tunis Agenda delineation of stakeholder-roles, while Mr. Lear pleaded that techies be let to do their jobs without interference. <a href="http://internetdemocracy.in/">Ms. Anja Kovacs</a> raised pertinent concerns about <strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">including voiceless minorities in a ‘rough consensus’ model</span></strong>. Across sessions, <strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">questions of mass surveillance, privacy and data ownership rose</span></strong> from participants. The protection of human rights on the Internet – especially freedom of expression and privacy – made continual appearance, across issues like spam (<a href="http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/CDS/sg/rgqlist.asp?lg=1&sp=2010&rgq=D10-RGQ22.1.1&stg=1">Question 22-1/1</a> of ITU-D Study Group 1) and cybersecurity.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Conclusion:</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The HLE was widely attended by participants across WSIS stakeholder-groups. At the event, a great many relevant questions such as the future of ICTs, inclusions in the post-2015 Development Agenda, the value of muti-stakeholder models, and human rights such as free speech and privacy were raised across the board. Not only were these raised, but cognizance was taken of them by Ministers, members of the ITU and other collaborative UN bodies, private sector entities such as ICANN, technical community such as the ISOC and IETF, as well as (obviously) civil society.<span> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Substantively, the HLE did not address mass surveillance and privacy, nor of expanding roles of WSIS stakeholders and beyond. Processually, the MPP failed to reach consensus on several issues comfortably, and a compromise had to be brokered.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>But perhaps a big change at the HLE was the positive attitude to multi-stakeholder models from many quarters, not least the ITU Secretary General Dr. Hamadoun Touré. His repeated calls for acceptance of multi-stakeholderism left many members of civil society surprised and tentatively pleased. Going forward, it will be interesting to track the ITU and the rest of UN’s (and of course, member states’) stances on multi-stakeholderism at the ITU Plenipot, the WSIS+10 Review and the UN General Assembly session, at the least.</span></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/wsis-10-high-level-event-a-birds-eye-report'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/wsis-10-high-level-event-a-birds-eye-report</a>
</p>
No publishergeethaWSIS+10PrivacyCybersecurityHuman Rights OnlineSurveillanceFreedom of Speech and ExpressionInternet GovernanceFacebookData ProtectionMulti-stakeholderICANNInternet AccessITUInternet StudiesE-GovernanceICT2014-06-20T15:57:32ZBlog EntryWorld Summit on Information Society (WSIS)
https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/world-summit-on-information-society
<b>The United States had the control over internet resources and its administration was controlled by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. This was the principle agency in the US dealing with telecommunication and information policy and the ICANN managed the internet domain names and IP addresses. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ICANN and indirectly the US government having control over the domain name system and the internet registry was an issue of concern for the rest of the world as well international organizations. The proposal for the WSIS by the United Nations was the reaction to such a concern.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Origins of the WSIS</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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. The UN General Assembly approved the Summit in 2001<a href="#fn1" name="fr1">[1]</a> which was to be held in two phases. The first phase was held in Geneva from December 10-12, 2003 and the second phase was held in Tunis from November 16-18, 2005. The main aim of the Geneva Summit was to lay down a road map to building an information society accessible to everyone. The Tunis Agenda was more on the lines of developing a mechanism or framework which would be effective in dealing with management of the internet public policy issues.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Main Goals of the WSIS</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">At the beginning the main objective of the WSIS was to discuss issues on building better telecommunication and information infrastructure in the developing nations to bridge the digital divide. The self adopted purpose of the WSIS was, "to harness the potential of knowledge and technology to promote the development goals of the Millennium Declaration."<a href="#fn2" name="fr2">[2] </a>However, during the meetings the focus of the WSIS was broadened and it covered not only issues related information infrastructure but also various issues related to communication and other public policy issues such as freedom of speech, privacy, etc.</p>
<h3>Geneva Summit</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Geneva Summit saw overwhelming participation from the government, civil society, industry, international organizations and media. Nearly 11000 participants attended the Summit. The Geneva Summit of WSIS was supposed to mainly focus on principles and the Tunis Summit was envisioned to deal with implementation of principles and follow-up mechanisms. Though the Geneva Summit failed in reaching a consensus on the issue of the future of internet governance, there were two major outcomes of the Summit; the Geneva Declaration of Principles and Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG).</p>
<h3>Geneva Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Plan of Action focused on information and communication infrastructure and recognized it as the essential foundation of the information society. It also emphasized on the importance of access to knowledge, capacity building and building of an enabling environment. It was also cognizant of cultural diversity and identity, linguistic diversity and development of local content.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">One of the key features of the Geneva Summits was that it recognized the principles of multi-stakeholderism. The Geneva Declaration of Principles while recognizing the principles of multi-stakeholderism stated,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"Governments, as well as private sector, civil society and the United Nations and other international organizations have an important role and responsibility in the development of the Information Society and, as appropriate, in decision-making processes. Building a people-centered Information Society is a joint effort which requires cooperation and partnership among all stakeholders."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Geneva Declaration of Principles also laid down principles related to role of ICT in development, access, human rights and international and regional cooperation.</p>
<h3>WGIG</h3>
<p>The main functions of the WGIG included:</p>
<ul>
<li>To “develop a working definition of Internet Governance</li>
<li>Identify the public policy issues that are relevant to Internet Governance</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Develop a common understanding of the respective roles and responsibilities of governments, existing international organizations and other forums, as well as the private sector and civil society in both developing and developed countries.” </li>
</ul>
<p><br />The final report of the WGIG divided issues related to Internet Governance in four sections:</p>
<ul>
<li>Infrastructure </li>
<li>Privacy, security and safety on the internet</li>
<li>Intellectual property and international trade</li>
<li>Development</li>
</ul>
<h3>Tunis Summit</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Tunis Summit resulted in the agreement on the Tunis Commitment, Tunis Agenda for the Information Society and the birth of the Internet Governance Forum. The Tunis Agenda and Tunis Commitment were the consensus statements at the Tunis Phase of WSIS whereas the Internet Governance Forum was created as a multi-stakeholder platform for policy dialogue on internet related public policy matters.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Tunis Commitment confirmed the agreement on Declaration of Principles among the stakeholders as well as reaffirmed the Plan of Action.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Tunis Agenda</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Tunis Agenda recognized the need to, "move from principles to action, considering the work already being done in implementing the Geneva Plan of Action and identifying those areas where progress has been made, is being made, or has not taken place."<a href="#fn4" name="fr4">[4]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It also reaffirmed the, "commitments made in Geneva and build on them in Tunis by focusing on financial mechanisms for bridging the digital divide, on internet governance and related issues, as well as on implementation and follow-up of the Geneva and Tunis decisions."<a href="#fn5" name="fr5">[5]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The two other important parts of the Tunis Agenda were sections on:</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Financial mechanisms for meeting the challenges of ICT for development<br />This part of the Tunis Agenda generally focussed financing infrastructure and equipment for providing better access to the internet in the developing areas.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Internet Governance<br />The section on Internet Governance dealt with management of the internet in a multilateral, transparent and democratic process with full involvement of governments, the private sector, civil society and international organizations.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Article 35<a href="#fn6" name="fr6">[6]</a> of the Tunis Agenda reaffirmed that the management of the internet shall take place in an inclusive and consultative process.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The third and the most important outcome of the Tunis Summit was the creation of the Internet Governance Forum. It was set up under Article 72 of the Tunis Agenda. The next section will deal with the Internet Governance Forum.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr1" name="fn1">1</a>]. UN General Assembly Resolution 56/183 (December 21, 2001) available at <a class="external-link" href="http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/background/resolutions/56_183_unga_2002.pdf">http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/background/resolutions/56_183_unga_2002.pdf</a></p>
<p>[<a href="#fr2" name="fn2">2</a>]. See more at <a class="external-link" href="http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/wsis-themes/UNMDG/index.html">http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/wsis-themes/UNMDG/index.html</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr3" name="fn3">3</a>]. Château de Bossey, Report of the Working Group on Internet Governance at pp. 3 available at <a class="external-link" href="http://www.wgig.org/docs/WGIGREPORT.pdf">http://www.wgig.org/docs/WGIGREPORT.pdf</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr4" name="fn4">4</a>]. Introduction, Tunis Agenda for the Information Society, WSIS-05/TUNIS/DOC/6(Rev. 1)-E, November 18, 2005 available at <a class="external-link" href="http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs2/tunis/off/6rev1.html">http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs2/tunis/off/6rev1.html</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr5" name="fn5">5</a>]. "Policy authority for Internet-related public policy issues is the sovereign right of States. They have rights and responsibilities for international Internet-related public policy issues. The private sector has had, and should continue to have, an important role in the development of the Internet, both in the technical and economic fields. Civil society has also played an important role on Internet matters, especially at community level, and should continue to play such a role. Intergovernmental organizations have had, and should continue to have, a facilitating role in the coordination of Internet-related public policy issues. International organizations have also had and should continue to have an important role in the development of Internet-related technical standards and relevant policies."</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/world-summit-on-information-society'>https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/world-summit-on-information-society</a>
</p>
No publisheranirudhInternet Studies2013-12-01T03:12:27ZPageWorld Intellectual Property Organisation
https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/wipo
<b>The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations which deals with issues related to intellectual property rights throughout the world.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Under Article 3 of the convention establishing WIPO, the United Nation agency seeks to "promote the protection of intellectual property throughout the world through cooperation among states..."<a href="#fn1" name="fr1">[1]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">With the proliferation of the internet, issues related to copyright have become more and more prominent. Internet has made sharing of content easy and efficient. It has also opened up avenues for e-commerce, sale and purchase of music, movies, e-books and other related content. In India, special music services and video services are made available to mobile users by the telecom service providers as value added services through internet technologies such as wireless access protocol (WAP) and general packet radio service (GPRS). Moreover, business models such as iTunes and Flyte allow consumers to download MP3 music for a fee. In this context, digital copyright has become an important topic of discussion.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Copyright law has faced difficulties coping up with digital technologies, especially the Internet. Enforcing copyright has been a tough task, given that protected works can be easily shared and transferred through the internet. In order to adjust the legal system to be in consonance with the latest technological developments the WIPO has laid down two treaties which are known as internet treaties. They are the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT). These two treaties are considered to be the updates and supplements to the Berne Convention for the protection of the literary and artistic material.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"The WIPO Internet Treaties are designed to update and supplement the existing international treaties on copyright and related rights, namely, the Berne Convention and the Rome Convention. They respond to the challenges posed by the digital technologies and, in particular, the dissemination of protected material over the global networks that make up the Internet. The contents of the Internet Treaties can be divided into three parts: (1) incorporation of certain provisions of the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPS) not previously included explicitly in WIPO treaties (e.g., protection of computer programs and original databases as literary works under copyright law); (2) updates not specific to digital technologies (e.g., the generalized right of communication to the public); and (3) provisions that specifically address the impact of digital technologies." <a href="#fn2" name="fr2">[2]</a></p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Treaties</h2>
<h3>Berne Convention</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Berne Convention <a href="#fn3" name="fr3">[3] </a>was first accepted in 1986. It was an international agreement that sought to govern copyrights. Its basic purpose was to make the signatories recognize the copyrights of the works of authors of other signatory countries at the same level as copyrights in their own countries. The Three Step Test is a test contained in different forms in a few international treaties on copyright law. It provides a limit on the exceptions and limitations that a treaty member can provide under its domestic law. However, the Three Step Test was first laid down in Article 9 of the Berne Convention and it states:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It shall be a matter for legislation in the countries of the Union to permit the reproduction of such works in certain special cases, provided that such reproduction does not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work and does not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the author.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There are two divergent views on the limitations to copyright. Civil law sees copyright as a natural law right, meaning that an author already has the right to his work, and the law merely recognises it. Hence, civil law limitations to rights tend to be narrow. Common law adopts a utilitarian approach and advocates use of common law principles to spur creation of socially valuable works. In pursuance of such socially beneficial measures, Common law limitations are open ended.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">When the Three Step Test was first conceived, it was to reconcile these divergent views of copyright limitations. So, at its core was the aim to allow national legislations sufficient latitude with regard to limitations. The effects of this treaty are enormous in that it affects the accessibility of almost every book or movie online for the average internet user.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) was set up in 1998-1999 in order to examine issues of substantive law or harmonization in the field of copyright and rights related to copyright. The committee is comprised of all the member states of WIPO. However, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations only have observer status.<a href="#fn4" name="fr4">[4]</a></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT), 1996</h3>
<p>The WPPT <a href="#fn5" name="fr5">[5]</a> benefits primarily two different kinds of people:</p>
<ol>
<li>Performers (actors, singers, musicians, etc.), and</li>
<li>Producers of phonograms (the persons or legal entities who or which take the initiative and have the responsibility for the fixation of the sounds).</li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The purpose of the Treaty was to protect the rights of performers and producers of phonograms in the most effective and uniform manner possible without making void contractual obligations that pre-date the treaty. The Treaty grants performers four different kinds of economic rights in their performances fixed in phonograms:</p>
<ol>
<li>The right of reproduction,</li>
<li>The right of distribution, </li>
<li>The right of rental, and </li>
<li>The right of making available.</li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The term of protection has been agreed for at least 50 years. The Treaty also constituted an Assembly that has the power to decide whether intergovernmental organizations can become party to the treaty.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">WIPO Copyright Treaty</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The WCT was adopted in 1996 by 89 countries.<a href="#fn6" name="fr6">[6] </a>After many advances were made in information technology since the formation of previous copyright treaties, this treaty attempted to add protections for copyrights. Mainly it ensures that computer programs were protected as literary works (Article 4) and also that the arrangement and selection of material in databases is protected (Article 5). It bolsters the protection further by providing authors with control over the rental and distribution of their work according to Article 6 to 8 which wasn’t directly prevalent in the Berne Convention. Many theorists feel that it is far too broad and offers too much protection to the copyright holder. For example, the circumvention of technical protection measures in pursuit of legal and fair use rights can be prevented because it is prohibited in this treaty. It also applies a uniform standard to all the signatory countries even though they are all at different stages of economic development and knowledge industry.</p>
<h3>Protection of Broadcasts and Broadcasting Organizations Treaty</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In 2006, the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) made a basic proposal to develop protection rights for all broadcasting organizations. This treaty would allow broadcasting organizations like media broadcasters to protect the content of their transmissions. They basically will have the right to protect their transmissions from reproduction, retransmission and even from public communication and will retain the copyright protection for 50 years. The problem with this treaty is that it adds a layer protection to the copyright that already exists on the material that is being broadcasted. This would allow broadcasters to restrict access to works that are currently available in the creative commons just because they happened to transmit it. This means that the citizens were unable to access works that they could previously access. The easier and fair way of solving the problem that broadcasters face, which the piracy of broadcast signals would have been to criminalize the piracy at an international level, many NGO’s are currently arguing.</p>
<h3>Treaty Proposal on Copyright Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The International Federation of Library Association (IFLA) is currently working closely with the member states of WIPO in order to draft a binding international instrument for copyright limitations and exceptions. These exceptions and limitations are necessary for the libraries to preserve their collection, lend materials and facilitate/ support education and research. This treaty proposal is mainly being drafted by NGO’s and civil society actors in partnership with librarians and intellectual property experts. IFLA has collaborated with the International Council on Archives (ICA), Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) and Corporación Innovarte to produce the Treaty Proposal on Copyright Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives.<a href="#fn7" name="fr7">[7]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Some of the things that the treaty proposes are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Parallel importation (i.e. buying books from abroad)</li>
<li>Cross-border uses of works and materials reproduced under a limitation and exception</li>
<li>Library lending</li>
<li>Library document supply</li>
<li>Preservation of library and archival materials</li>
<li>Use of works and other material under related rights for the benefit of persons with disabilities</li>
<li>Use of works for education, research and private study</li>
<li>Use of works for personal and private purposes</li>
<li>Access to retracted and withdrawn works </li>
<li>Orphan works<a href="#fn8" name="fr8">[8]</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Education</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There is another treaty being discussed currently on copyright exceptions for education and research. The main issue is deciding the order in which these treaties will be negotiated and which matter is most pressing or urgent to address presently. Developing countries are in favour of both exceptions for libraries and archives as well as for education while developed countries are of the mind that exceptions for these things already exist in the current framework of international treaties and conventions. The US is expressly opposed to more discussions on more copyright exceptions and wants to move forward on the broadcast treaty discussions.<a href="#fn9" name="fr9">[9]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Electronic Frontier Foundation, Knowledge Ecology International, Public Knowledge along with other civil society groups formed a joint statement for the copyright exceptions for education in the digital age:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"(...) Education should be accessible for all without barriers of space, time, or cost. Digital technologies, from the portable computer to mobile phones to tablets, are being introduced as crucial educational tools in countries ranging from South Korea to Nigeria, from Brazil to the USA. Educational materials and, therefore, its market, is increasingly becoming digital and policymakers must consider this trend when drafting copyright exceptions and limitations in a way that is appropriate for future generations and the digital age.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The increasing adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the classroom and in libraries and archives has proven that teachers, learners, researchers, librarians and archivists need rights to access, use, remix, text-mine, exchange, and collaborate on educational materials. Similar rights must be ensured beyond the classroom and library or archive, taking into account the growing importance of e-learning, online communication, and the increasing practice of exchanging educational and other information content across geographical and institutional borders.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The international copyright system has recognized the need for exceptions and limitations from its earliest days. Without these, the copyright system would not be able to achieve its fundamental purpose of encouraging creation and innovation for the benefit of all humankind. (...)"<a href="#fn10" name="fr10">[10]</a></p>
<h3>WIPO Case Study</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In June 2013, 186 member states of the WIPO adopted a landmark treaty known as the Treaty for the Visually Impaired (Formally known as: <b>“Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled.”</b>) <a href="#fn11" name="fr11">[11]</a> The purpose of the treaty was to increase the access to books for blind, visually impaired and print disabled people across the globe.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Aspects of the Treaty:</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">It required an exception in domestic copyright law for people with print disabilities and the visually impaired.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">It allowed for the import and export of accessible versions of books without the permission of the copyright holder.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">However, only “authorised entities” such as blind people’s organizations can avail this provision under the treaty’s terms.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Article 2 of the Treaty states that accessible books changing hands under its provisions should be solely for the use of “beneficiary persons”. It also states that “authorised entities” take “due care” when handling these books, and that they discourage the reproduction and distribution of copies that are unauthorized.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This treaty has the potential to change the way in which access to information is experienced by the visually impaired. This shows that civil society actors can take an active part in the drafting of important legislation as such a landmark treaty was originally proposed by the World Blind Union and Knowledge Ecology International after a meeting that was convened in 2008.<a href="#fn12" name="fr12">[12] </a>There was input sought from NGO’s throughout the process as well.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">After the adoption of the treaty, however, the function of NGOs just increases. There are many steps required in order to ensure the effective implementation of the provisions of the treaty on the ground. Saksham Trust is one such NGO that works towards empowering marginalized sections of society by working on things like this. The following is an interview with Dipendra Manocha of Saksham Trust.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">What kind of work in accessibility does your organization do?<br />Daisy Forum of India is a network of organisations that produce and distribute books in accessible formats to persons with print disabilities. These organisations produce digital e-text and digital talking books. The organisation works in the area of policy, capacity building, awareness, technology and mainstreaming accessibility in the area of books for persons with print disabilities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">What are the main impediments to ensuring accessibility on the ground?</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Our policies and laws do not make it mandatory to use standards for digital content. Standards such as Unicode, accessible digital formats, etc., are not followed in production of digital content. Due to this we are forced to re-publish everything that gets published in India.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Books that are available as accessible content in other countries cannot be brought in India. We also cannot send books in accessible formats to other countries with common languages.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Enough resources are not allocated to produce accessible books for persons with print disabilities.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">There are several technology gaps such as non-availability of text-to-speech (TTS) or OCR in Indian languages due to which production and reading options of accessible books is very expensive. The only option of reading in many languages is hard copy Braille or human voice recorded talking books. Both these are much more expensive than reading of digital e-text with the help of TTS technology.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Organisations and individuals in large parts of the country are not aware of the latest developments and methods of getting accessible content from common catalogue or online libraries, etc.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Reading technology has not reached the end users of the country in a large scale.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Main stream publishing industry is producing digital books but these are produced in a way that they are not usable by persons with print disabilities.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">How important do you think treaties are?<br />These are extremely important as it takes best practice model of accessible books all over the world. Various stakeholders came together thinking and working together to find the best possible solution that takes care of the interests of all stakeholders.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Not even 2% of the blind individuals worldwide have sufficient access now. Countries like Namibia don’t even have a basic infrastructure to implement what the Treaty for the Visually Impaired offers. Therefore, in these places, what are the subsequent steps that an organization like yours has to do after the treaty enables?</p>
<ul>
<li>Allocate resources to establish infrastructure for distribution providing sufficient protection to content to enable developing countries to participate in international exchange programme.</li>
<li>Develop mechanisms for international exchange of content.</li>
<li>Address technology gaps so that local language content can be produced and read by persons with print disabilities.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The developed world will act according to its commercial interests. Most of the knowledge is produced in the developed countries and most of the disabled are in developing countries. What are ways to make this equation seem more lucrative?</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">South-south cooperation</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Even relatively smaller subscriptions and remunerations for already developed content will be additional resource of funds even for companies or organisations of developed countries if they begin distribution of their content in developing countries.</li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Technological Protection Measures and Rights Management Information (TPMs/RMI)</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In order to ensure that unauthorized copying of a protected material can be prevented or detected, the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) included new provisions dealing with TPMs and RMI.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">TPMs are technological safeguards which are put in place which prevents the copying of a protected work in digital format to be copied multiple times. This includes limiting the number of devices on which a song can be copied, using software which does not allow the consumer to copy the protected works from an optical disc.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">RMI are generally put on the protected work to ensure that the label of the owner of the work is always embedded in the work. For example, in case of a movie, the film studio may use an RMI which would be positioned as the logo in the movie. It can be also stored as metadata along the video or the protected work.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Article 11 of the WCT and Article 18 of the Wipo Performances and Phonograms Treaty, 1996, (WPPT) states that the states must provide legal protection for TPMs and RMI apart from making provisions for legal remedy in case of circumvention of the technological protection measures. It is interesting to note that India is not a signatory to both the treaties that is WPPT and WCT. This could be because of the strict copyright provisions in the treaties which undermine many goals of accessibility currently being pursued by India.</p>
<hr />
<p>[<a href="#fr1" name="fn1">1</a>]. Article 3 – Objectives of the Organization, Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization available at <a href="http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/convention/trtdocs_wo029.html">http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/convention/trtdocs_wo029.html</a></p>
<p>[<a href="#fr2" name="fn2">2</a>]. <a href="http://www.wipo.int/copyright/en/ecommerce/ip_survey/chap3.html#3a">www.wipo.int/copyright/en/ecommerce/ip_survey/chap3.html#3a</a></p>
<p>[<a href="#fr3" name="fn3">3</a>]. See more at <a href="http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs_wo001.html">http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs_wo001.html</a></p>
<p>[<a href="#fr4" name="fn4">4</a>]. See more at <a href="http://www.wipo.int/policy/en/sccr/">http://www.wipo.int/policy/en/sccr/</a></p>
<p>[<a href="#fr5" name="fn5">5</a>]. See more at <a href="http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/wppt/summary_wppt.html">http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/wppt/summary_wppt.html</a></p>
<p>[<a href="#fr6" name="fn6">6</a>]. See more at <a href="http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/wct/trtdocs_wo033.html">http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/wct/trtdocs_wo033.html</a></p>
<p>[<a href="#fr7" name="fn7">7</a>]. See more at <a href="http://www.ifla.org/files/assets/hq/topics/exceptions-limitations/documents/TLIB_v4.3_050712.pdf">http://www.ifla.org/files/assets/hq/topics/exceptions-limitations/documents/TLIB_v4.3_050712.pdf</a></p>
<p>[<a href="#fr8" name="fn8">8</a>]. See more at <a href="http://www.ifla.org/node/5856">http://www.ifla.org/node/5856</a></p>
<p>[<a href="#fr9" name="fn9">9</a>]. See more at <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/07/wipo-possible-international-treaty-copyright-exceptions-limitations">https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/07/wipo-possible-international-treaty-copyright-exceptions-limitations</a></p>
<p>[<a href="#fr10" name="fn10">10</a>]. See full document at <a href="https://www.eff.org/file/35218#page/1/mode/1up">https://www.eff.org/file/35218#page/1/mode/1up</a></p>
<p>[<a href="#fr11" name="fn11">11</a>]. See more at <a href="http://www.wipo.int/meetings/en/doc_details.jsp?doc_id=245323">http://www.wipo.int/meetings/en/doc_details.jsp?doc_id=245323</a></p>
<p>[<a href="#fr12" name="fn12">12</a>]. See more at <a href="http://keionline.org/content/view/210/1">http://keionline.org/content/view/210/1</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/wipo'>https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/wipo</a>
</p>
No publisherAnirudh Sridhar and Snehashish GhoshInternet Studies2013-12-03T06:56:10ZPageWelcome to r@w blog!
https://cis-india.org/raw/welcome-to-raw-blog
<b>We from the researchers@work programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) are delighted to announce the launch of our new blog, hosted on Medium. It will feature works by researchers and practitioners working in India and elsewhere at the intersections of internet, digital media, and society; and highlights and materials from ongoing research and events at the researchers@work programme.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>r@w blog: <a href="https://medium.com/rawblog" target="_blank">Visit</a> (Medium)</h4>
<hr />
<h3>A space for reflections on internet and society, r@w blog is also an attempt to facilitate conversations around contemporary debates and foster creative engagement with research and practice through text, images, sounds, videos, code, and other media forms offered by the internet.<br /><br /></h3>
<h3>r@w blog opens with an essay on ‘<a href="https://medium.com/rawblog/information-offline-labour-surveillance-and-activism-in-the-indian-it-ites-industry-903c71567d1a" target="_blank">Information Offline: Labour, Surveillance, and Activism in the Indian IT & ITES Industry</a>’ by Rianka Roy - as part of an <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/call-for-essays-offline" target="_blank">essay series</a> exploring social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, and aesthetic dimensions of the "offline" - and audio recording from a session titled <a href="https://medium.com/rawblog/iloveyou-167665a5145a" target="_blank">#ILoveYou</a> by Dhiren Borisa and Dhrubo Jyoti, which was part of the <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc18" target="_blank">Internet Researchers’ Conference 2018 - #Offline</a>.<br /><br /></h3>
<h3>We will publish our (including commissioned/supported) writings and works on this blog, as well as submitted and compiled materials. Please write to raw[at]cis-india[dot]org to submit your works to be considered for publication. Copyright to all material published on this blog are owned by CIS and author(s) concerned, and they are shared under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.</h3>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/welcome-to-raw-blog'>https://cis-india.org/raw/welcome-to-raw-blog</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppHomepageRAW BlogResearchers at WorkFeaturedInternet Studies2019-01-02T11:48:04ZBlog EntryUsers and the Internet
https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_users-and-the-internet
<b>This post by Purbasha Auddy is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Purbasha is a SYLFF PhD fellow at the School of Cultural Texts and Records (SCTR), Jadavpur University, with more than eight years of work experience in digital archiving. She has also been teaching for the last two years in the newly-started post-graduate diploma course in Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics offered by the SCTR. In this essay, Purbasha explores the constructions of the ideas of the Indian Internet users through the advertisements that talk about data packages, mobile phones or apps.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/rg37kafMsWk?rel=0" frameborder="0" height="360" width="640"></iframe></p>
<p>A baby [1] is refusing to be born as (as we learn later, ‘his’) parents cannot afford high-speed internet for smartphones but wi-fi plans offered by an internet service provider satisfy the baby as if the baby is being born for the internet.</p>
<p>The baby [2] comes out of the womb, searches the net on a smartphone, cuts his own umbilical cord, takes a selfie with the nurse, opens every possible social media- account, takes his blue baby boy balloons and finds his own way out of the building leaving behind dumbstruck parents.</p>
<p>The two unreal situations that are described above are the two storylines of two advertisements of the same company trying to sell an internet connection. No, this article will not talk about the aesthetic appeal of these ads, but will look into such creative ways to locate the explanation of the internet and its users instead; to be precise internet and its Indian users.</p>
<p>The two ads described at the beginning do not show any Indian-ness but makes the viewer wonder about how far this ‘born for the internet’ baby can travel with an internet-enabled smartphone. Are these two ads trying to define the internet as a smart product or are they trying to classify the users of the internet rather as smart? Moreover how does one define the internet? It means more than a conglomeration of networks. At this point as I am trying to coin a definition of the internet on my own, my thought-process is occupied with the activities I do on the net but I fail to define it.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>A personal note…</h2>
<p>In 1995, when VSNL launched the internet in India, I was 10, and engrossed in story books and comics. As I was growing up, I was discovering the world around through books, television, radio and newspapers. I was totally unaware of the practicality of the internet and it remained a fact of general knowledge. Not only me! Not a single friend of mine happened to use the internet or discussed keenly about it. My school did not offer a computer course either. After my +10 board exam, I requested (read demanded) my parents to enroll me in a computer training center which was near my house and had a government affiliation. I learnt basics of computer applications, the programming language Foxpro and basics of the internet. I even got to know how to create a basic webpage. Only when I was required to write a dissertation for my graduation, did I start going to a cyber café to type my dissertation and surf the internet. My parents were really apprehensive about what I was doing in a cyber café which was costing 30 rupees per hour!</p>
<p>Though my parents are still uneasy with the fact that ‘my generation’ remains glued to the internet most of the time, they are amazed on the other hand; how we do net banking, shop online, study, Facebook, exchange email, call a cab or order pizza etc. from the internet. They are happy to remain on the other side of the digital divide.</p>
<p>It has been twenty years that the Indian society has seen the ‘wrong side’ of the internet like hacking, phishing and other grave matters related to social networks. India is a complex society and so is the internet. But India, being the one of the largest potential markets, various services related to the internet are encouraging the probable consumers. Through the advertisements and publicity measures, they are trying to cleanse away the negative notions. They are capturing stories and characters that one can relate herself or himself to, very promptly. Even the ideas of Indian-ness, national integrity and the dreams of aspiring Indians are getting linked with the internet as mobile internet is penetrating very fast to balance the digital divide. Various events of online forgery, hacking and getting access to dicey websites (read pornography) and those matters which came as some sort of a cultural shock, made people less confident to use the internet.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Overcoming the fear…</h2>
<p>Recently, these notions have been countered by commercials by an antivirus company. The commercial shows a mother [3] who is no longer anxious to let her son surf the internet because now the antivirus allows her to enable parental control. It is helping the mother as she no longer has to keep constant vigil on the internet-related activities of her son. Other commercial shows a retired old man [4] is not sceptical anymore that his son sends money using online banking. His son and the man use the antivirus which offers safe online banking.</p>
<p>There are two more advertisements I want to describe; the first one features a young man [5] shopping online and updating the viewers that an antivirus protection means safe online transactions. In the second ad, a fashion designer [6] is not bothered to use pendrives as the antivirus scan will protect her computer. These four commercials attempt to confront the fear that pesters the minds of the potential consumers. No beautiful models, male or female, no beyond the world creativity, but simple and set with regular characters discussing vital issues were chosen to reach out to these potential customers.</p>
<p>The next commercial I would like to refer to is about an antivirus for smart phones. The ad creates a euphoria that portrays a bunch of college goers [7] who have the power to protect themselves from spyware and malware and can download various applications seamlessly. Thus the point of overcoming the ‘fear’ of the unknown and the uncontrollable is very important. Maybe the two ads featuring the ‘born for the internet’ baby I begun with, find relevance here. And the question should be asked here again: that how far can one travel along the path of life by means of a smartphone with an internet connection? The adverts suggest a very intelligent and exciting life for those who can access to internet. Everything is sorted if you can stay online. A lonely individual [8] can be a Twitter celebrity. Someone can showcase her or his talent [9] through social media; like one ad shows a girl becoming an online singing sensation by garnering lots of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’.</p>
<p>As mobile phones remains with us most of the time, accessing the internet from it is easier (compared to a computer) and a mobile phone is thus able to furnish prompt services. There are quite a few service providers that woo us with different approaches. Compared to selling internet connections, it is perhaps far less complicated to produce campaigns for fast moving consumer goods. At least in the case of FMCG it is easier to explain the product which is within range of our four senses. But it is quiet a troublesome project to explain the internet given the social back drop in a country like India. This article will not take names of any of the service providers. Instead it will point out the strategies they are adopting to touch an emotional chord for the probable consumers keeping the existing ones. Furthermore, it would like to find out the nature and meaning of the internet and outlook of its users in the Indian scenario.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Power redefined…</h2>
<p>The internet providers proclaim through the advertisements that an internet connection on one’s mobile is a ‘power’ for her or him. The power that has the ability to bring all the nuances that is available around. Only the burning questions are:</p>
<ul>
<li>How to use the power? Whether to play online games, immerse oneself in social networking, and use a search engine to search for the unknown or perhaps read an academic article from Jstor? There are immense possibilities to the power.</li>
<li>How long can the power be used (read limited or unlimited connection)?</li>
<li>How much time does it take to get the result of the power (read the speed of the connection)? </li>
<li>And lastly and very importantly how much does this power cost?</li></ul>
<p>These uncertainties are answered by adverts with creativity and almost 20% of the Indian population tries to grab this power. But of course a large segment is still to be included (inclusion may be harder due to various socio-economic conditions that are deep-rooted within the Indian scenario) in the benefit-circle of this power called the internet. The following storyline of another television commercial shows the power called the internet which can allow pictures or videos to be exchanged instantaneously. An ad shows that the internet is a great help for a mother as she sends a picture of her wailing son after a hair-cut, to her husband. As soon as the mother reaches home with her sad boy, the father having got the same hair-cut also returns and is ready to soothe the boy.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Confidence building apparatus…</h2>
<p>Thus, through creative commercials, internet service providers are trying to tell that one should keep an internet connection handy to be confident so that Indians cannot be fooled by anybody anywhere. Several adverts are showcasing the following events that will not occur if one has a mobile internet connection. Such events are quite common and thus one can easily associate oneself with them.</p>
<ul>
<li>Not a single person on earth can fool you [10].</li>
<li>A corrupt political leader cannot go way without fulfilling the promises s/he made [11].</li>
<li>Baseless prediction of religious leaders can be countered [12].</li>
<li>And one of the ads went even further ahead to suggest that the population of India can be controlled if married couples spend time doing various activities that the internet has to offer [13]!</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2>Self-learning tool…</h2>
<p>The ads promote that one of the activities could be self-learning. There is an enormous package of everything available and it is a flexible way to learn. A slow learner [14] in school may not be given special attention in order to overcome learning difficulties but the internet is very patient and it will not complain. Learn how to write poems [15], how to cook, how to make a drone [16], learn French [17]. Furthermore these ads suggest that an internet user is a self-sufficient human being who can find her or his own way using a Google map! Just like two friends learning culinary skills from internet and opening up a restaurant.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>An institution…</h2>
<p>At this point, the creative pursuit of the commercials take a leap and declare the internet (or the internet connection the particular company is providing) as an institution which is very much inclusive in nature. Those who are barred from getting admission in schools, colleges or universities, are welcome to learn through the institution called the internet and can establish themselves in mainstream society or can learn for the sake of learning. In this case, these ads have pointed out girls are not allowed [18] to go to school, a eunuch [19] is refused everywhere. But they are learning from the internet and compete with the more privileged in mainstream society. Other cases show a mother could not complete [20] her study in law, and her daughter is encouraging her to complete it through the internet. Lastly, these ads try to convince that the institution of the internet is cheaper than regular institutions.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Utility…</h2>
<p>Besides the ambitions of the internet stated above, the internet influences human minds in several other aspects. For example, generation gap can be healed if the society takes the bridge of the internet. About two years ago a commercial was produced with the one-liner: ‘Made for the young’ [21]. This ad shows an old man who parties with young boys, has a social network account, plays online games late at night, does video chat. These activities of the elderly character, who has a very optimistic approach towards life, are set in a mundane surrounding. Here it seems, the internet is bridging the generation gap by bringing into its fold and into the mainstream those people who might not have thought of using the internet in real life.</p>
<p>The notion of a huge expense that is incurred in maintaining an internet connection was busted when some service providers brought out ads which said that it was letting people watch a video for only one rupee. Very precisely, this one rupee campaign enacted the frequent quarrels [22] between a taxi-driver and his passenger over loose change and the taxi driver somehow not returning one rupee but instead showing a popular video to the passenger from his phone in lieu of that one rupee. The basic point of all the campaigns is to intensify the market and push the consumers to pay for it anyhow as an internet connection can bring magic to the consumers’ lives as the service providers claim. But who will pay for the internet connection? So they bring out campaign such as a family plan campaign [23] in which the earning member of the family is being encouraged to pay the cost for the internet packs of the other mobile connections in the family which are also provided by the same mobile service operator. These adverts show a family consisting of a super-lazy boy, an ever-angry father, a protective mother and a sweet, little sister needing the internet more than any other services like roaming, calls, or SMS [24].</p>
<p>Service provides are also trying to entice the consumers by providing some utilitarian services which are needed in day to day life. The following are examples of the storylines of a few other advertisements that help its service-takers to transfer money without even going to the banks. The service provider keeps the notion of flexibility of the internet, which can be used according to the need of the people of every segment of the society: a taxi driver [25] from the city sends money to his father in the village; a husband sends money to his pregnant wife [26], a college-going boy [27] requesting his elder brother to send money for mending his scooter. These characters are common and can be found in our everyday surroundings but such characters may be afraid to use such an online service for transferring money. The soothing and caring tone of theses adverts try to assure people to use the service.</p>
<p>As some of the adverts aim to clear the dilemma among prospective consumers, another set of ads celebrate friendship and urge consumers to go back to their roots. In this regard, a storyline of another commercial can be taken into consideration. It tells a story about some school friends [28] who become successful in their own vocations and who remain connected with the help of smartphones and internet connections. One of them locates an old ice-cream vendor in front of the school they used to study in. They came together to meet that vendor from whom they used to buy ice-cream to help him in his business. Here the online activities result in something meaningful.</p>
<p>This article tried to weave one narrative out of many narratives created by several internet service providers. The main intention of the article was to find out how the internet has been defined in the Indian context and how the users are being defined in the commercials. It is found that the internet may seem super-real (if we are not aware of the technical aspects, it is a real wonder!) at first glance but the commercials through the dramatizing efforts are trying to prove its usefulness in many ways. Just like when a young woman [29] finds out someone is retiring from her office, she starts sending photos of the man to their colleagues and instantly it creates a chain of forwarded messages and then everybody gathers to arrange a surprise farewell party. A happy picture indeed!</p>
<p>However something not bright and prosperous also needs to be mentioned. The internet service providers have been offering high speed internet and portray a happy smart life of Indians irrespective of social background and vocation but almost 80% of India remains untouched and are yet to receive the benefits of an internet connection.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Endnotes</h2>
<p>[1] MTS India. 2014. "MTS Internet Baby Full Version." YouTube. February 24. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg37kafMsWk">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg37kafMsWk</a>.</p>
<p>[2] Premium Adverts. 2015. "Baby - MTS TV Commercial Ad." YouTube. February 18. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3krdHUji8A">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3krdHUji8A</a>.</p>
<p>[3] Mukherjee, Pamela. 2014. "Quick Heal - TVC (Hin) Mother’s VO." YouTube. November 4. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so-bjUuErBQ">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so-bjUuErBQ</a>.</p>
<p>[4] Thoughtshop Advertising & Film Productions Pvt. Ltd. 2014. "QUICK HEAL 'OLD MAN.'" YouTube. July 16. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1kOcz_1Ra8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1kOcz_1Ra8</a>.</p>
<p>[5] Thoughtshop Advertising & Film Productions Pvt. Ltd. 2014. "QUICK HEAL 'COOL DUDE.'" YouTube. July 16. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2ot0J4ps4A">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2ot0J4ps4A</a>.</p>
<p>[6] Subarna Enterprise. 2014. "Stay protected from virus infected pendrives with Quick Heal Total Security." YouTube. April 10. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rLh0ng70Lc">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rLh0ng70Lc</a>.</p>
<p>[7] Quick Heal. 2013. "Quick Heal Mobile Security TVC (Hindi)." YouTube. March 3. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWiomVUHVHk">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWiomVUHVHk</a>.</p>
<p>[8] MTS India. 2012. "MTS MBLAZE ‘Always On’ LATEST TVC - Anupam Mukerji." YouTube. July 24. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWfyHMbKtsg"">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWfyHMbKtsg</a>.</p>
<p>[9] afaqs. 2012. "MTS MBLAZE TVC - Shraddha Sharma." YouTube. July 17. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsaJtPYTUF8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsaJtPYTUF8</a>.</p>
<p>[10] Idea. 2014. "Idea ‘No Ullu Banaoing’ Anthem TVC." YouTube. August 8. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZhXSnJ8sXY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZhXSnJ8sXY</a>.</p>
<p>[11] Idea. 2014. "Idea ‘No Ullu Banaoing’ Politician TVC." YouTube. March 13. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OahDrQDU24k">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OahDrQDU24k</a>.</p>
<p>[12] Idea. 2014. "Idea ‘No Ullu Banaoing’ Baba TVC." YouTube. May 11. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf2hYaHtBF4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf2hYaHtBF4</a>.</p>
<p>[13] Celeburbia Entertainment Media. 2011. "Idea 3G Funny Ad Campaign - India Over Population - Abhishek Bachchan Sir Ji Ad Series." YouTube. July 23. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqtB-IaeEo8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqtB-IaeEo8</a>.</p>
<p>[14] Idea. 2015. "Idea Internet Network (IIN) Slow Learner 25 sec TVC." YouTube. May 4. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXFk4VL9rWM">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXFk4VL9rWM</a>.</p>
<p>[15] Idea. 2015. "Idea Internet Network (IIN) Military 25 sec TVC." YouTube. May 4. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwAP6PmGzRs">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwAP6PmGzRs</a>.</p>
<p>[16] Neela, Pradeep. 2015. "Idea Internet Network IIN TV Ad - Drone wala." YouTube. January 11. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPTC945gsDo">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPTC945gsDo</a>.</p>
<p>[17] Idea. 2015. "Idea Internet Network IIN Guide 20 sec TVC." YouTube. May 5. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkQma9Tyt8E">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkQma9Tyt8E</a>.</p>
<p>[18] Falguni, Vineet. 2015. "Idea Internet Network IIN Haryanvi 25 sec TVC." YouTube. January 20. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdVRGxw4ROI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdVRGxw4ROI</a>.</p>
<p>[19] iDiotube. 2015. "Idea Internet Network IIN Eunuch 25 second TVC HD." YouTube. April 26. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIZS_-Qm5Ro">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIZS_-Qm5Ro</a>.</p>
<p>[20] Idea. 2015. "Idea Internet Network IIN Mother Daughter 20 sec TVC." YouTube. May 5. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBHtLU7QGbE">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBHtLU7QGbE</a>.</p>
<p>[21] Indian Tv Commercials. 2013. "Vodafone Commercial(Sep 2013)-Network(Latest Indian TV Ad)." YouTube. September 28. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6ULTFCWBQw">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6ULTFCWBQw</a>.</p>
<p>[22] Airtel India. 2013. "airtel Re 1 Mobile Video - Taxi Ad (TVC)." YouTube. May 22. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hpi2sOOfeIw">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hpi2sOOfeIw</a>.</p>
<p>[23] Airtel India. 2015. "Airtel my plan Coffee TVC." YouTube. February 5. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ElCIhsobXc">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ElCIhsobXc</a>.</p>
<p>[24] Airtel India. 2014. "airtel money TVC - Pay Electricity Bills." YouTube. January 19. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFHurfXS9uI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFHurfXS9uI</a>.</p>
<p>[25] Vodafone India. 2015. "Vodafone m-pesa™– Babuji – HD." YouTube. March 16. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktgDPTlFxsU">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktgDPTlFxsU</a>.</p>
<p>[26] Vodafone India. 2014. "Vodafone m-pesa™ - Cable TV – HD." YouTube. June 12. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIMYZDzyHeM">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIMYZDzyHeM</a>.</p>
<p>[27] Vodafone India. 2014. "Vodafone m-pesa™ - Scooter – HD." YouTube. June 2. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQAtnQktHLI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQAtnQktHLI</a>.</p>
<p>[28] Advartisement. 2015. "Uncle’s Ice Cream Airtel Network In India." YouTube. March 27. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFsG1G7Ombo">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFsG1G7Ombo</a>.</p>
<p>[29] Nirvana Films. 2015. "VODAFONE – Farewell." YouTube. March 19. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqZVO815MiM">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqZVO815MiM</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>The post is published under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International</a> license, and copyright is retained by the author.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
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No publisherPurbasha AuddyResearchers at WorkInternet StudiesRAW Blog2015-07-10T04:20:54ZBlog EntryTweets with "IGF13"
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/20131021T090102_igf13
<b>Tweets with "IGF13".</b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/20131021T090102_igf13'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/20131021T090102_igf13</a>
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No publisherpraneshInternet Governance ForumInternet StudiesInternet Governance2013-10-28T06:29:42ZFileThe Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar
https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-many-lives-and-sites-of-internet-in-bhubaneswar
<b>This post by Sailen Routray is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Sailen is a researcher, writer, editor and translator who lives and works in Bhubaneswar. In this essay, he takes a preliminary step towards capturing some of the experiences of running and using internet cafes, experiences that lie at the interstices of (digital) objects and spaces, that are at the same time a history of the internet as well as a personal history of the city.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Cybercafé in Bhubaneswar: A Very Personal Introduction</h2>
<p>Till about ten years back perhaps, mustard-yellow coloured STD booths were as common a part of the Indian urban ecosystem as the common crow. But, as of the middle of 2015, the apparently ever ubiquitous STD booth seems to have gone the way of the sparrow, not yet extinct, but rare enough to evoke a visceral pang of nostalgia whenever one comes across a straggling specimen. But nostalgia is perhaps the wrong word to describe the emotion of ‘missing’ a STD booth in a city like Bhubaneswar.</p>
<p>The emotion that such urban change evokes in one is perhaps better described by the Odia word moha-maya (which is a combination of two words – maya and moha) which can connote everything from pity to longing to irrational attachment that causes pain. For this writer, more than the STD booth, what causes the most serious pang of moha-maya are the rapidly disappearing cybercafes, although the latter have not quite evaporated so completely as the STD booth.</p>
<p>This might not sound like too much of a loss for those on the right side of thirty. But to some of us (belonging to what Palash Krishna Mehrotra categorised as ‘The Butterfly Generation’ in the eponymous book) inching towards our first hiccups of an early middle age, this will be just another wry reminder of mortality; all things will fade away, including yours truly.</p>
<p>I do not remember the first day I accessed the internet. Perhaps the experience was not very startling; I like many others in my generation, I lie between the two Indian extremes to technological innovations – the blind fascination welded with incompetence that characterises so much of the generation of the midnight’s children, and the blind acceptance of all technological innovations by the generation born in the 1990s and 2000s. I, for example, also do not remember the first time I used a telephone. But I do remember for sure, that it was at our Sailashree Vihar home (in Bhubaneswar), to which we shifted in October 1992; because, one remembers for sure that one did not have a telephone connection before then.</p>
<p>Similarly, I remember where I accessed the internet for the first time, although the details of that first interface escape me now. It was a place called PAN-NET (or was it PLANNET? I can’t be sure; my memory, unfortunately, is like a bamboo sieve; it holds things, but not too much and not for very long) on the edge of the IMFA park in Shahid Nagar. Within a year of this, at least three cybercafés had opened shop near my house in Sailashree Vihar in the Chandrasekharpur area in North Bhubaneswar.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Semi-Public Internet</h2>
<p>Thus, my first experience of accessing the internet, like the majority of Indians of my generation perhaps, was at a ‘public’ place, a cybercafé. What happened as a result, was that the idea of accessing the internet, and not only its usage, as a communal exercise, got embedded deeply inside one’s mind; one saw the internet as a public utility and its usage as public/semi-public acts.</p>
<p>Sasikanta Bose (name changed), a student of philosophy, feels in a similar way. He learnt to use computers and the internet in cybercafés in the Jagamohan Nagar area, near his college in Bhubaneswar. As a regular writer for webzines earlier, he could not have functioned without these. Although now he accesses the internet through a cable connection and a laptop at home, he still uses cybercafés for taking printouts and for scanning. Over the last few years, Facebook is an additional reason for him to be on the World Wide Web, and he is more comfortable accessing Facebook at home, rather than in a cybercafé. But his primary reason for accessing the net remains to access webzines and reading material on the internet, and he feels this is done much more efficiently at a cybercafé since there is an immediate monetary pressure to get the most returns on the money that one is spending. The cybercafé that he uses the most is EXCEL in Sailashree Vihar.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Case of ‘EXCEL’</h2>
<p>EXCEL is a cybercafé established in the year 2001. Mr. Susant Kumar Behera and Mr. Sukant Kumar Behera (two brothers) are the proprietors. It is located on the ground floor of a house in the sixth phase of Sailashree Vihar. It must be mentioned here in passing that Sailashree Vihar is a strange new locality in Bhubaneswar initially planned and constructed by the Odisha State Housing Board; strange, like a lot of other things that came into being in the 1980s. It has only two ‘phases’, phase six and phase seven; I do not think even the Housing Board knows where the other five phases have meandered off to.</p>
<p>EXCEL is located on a service road parallel to the main arterial road of Sailashree Vihar that divides the sixth and the seventh phases. When Excel opened, it was opened primarily as a communication center with the cybercafé and the STD-PCO booth as the mainstays of the family concern. The STD booth reached its peak in 2004 and was almost dead by 2006-2007; the increasingly ubiquitous mobile phone effectively killed the PCO business. A coin-operated system was operational till very recently; it was discontinued in 2013. With the death of the PCO booth, EXCEL moved into the mobile voucher business for pre-paid mobiles; but with only two percent commission being offered by most service providers, this is a high-turnover but low-profit business for the shop, and has not been able to replace the revenues and profits of the PCO business.</p>
<p>Mr. Susant Behera (Bunu bhai to most of his customers and to me as well; and he also happens to be a close friend of one my closest schoolmate’s family friend), says that when they started the cybercafé business, they were very anxious to be a ‘different’ kind of player. Most cybercafés in Bhubaneswar, then offered primarily the illicit joys of pornography as their primary attraction. This was reflected in the very design of the cybercafés; most cybercafés were designed in the form of small cabins with often curtains on their small doors, and the computer screens faced the wall. Therefore, when EXCEL opened shop, I remember it being a refreshingly new kind of cybercafé. All the monitors were placed on reverse ‘U’ shaped tables with the backs of the monitors facing the wall, and the monitor screens facing out towards everyone; there was thus, no privacy. But this completely removed the sleaze that was then associated with cybercafés and the internet, and made the cybercafé popular with new social groups using the internet, such as single young women. EXCEL was and still remains popular with young women as a node for accessing the internet.</p>
<p>Now EXCEL is a very different kind of space from the time I remember it from my college days (1999-2002). It was, even then, popular with the young. But now it is much more of a safe hang-out place for college going young adults and those who have newly joined the work force, with fast moving snacks items such as puffs (called ‘patties’ in Bhubaneswar) and rolls, and ice cream being sold at the shop. It is much more of tuck shop now, with national and international brands of packaged food such as Haldiram and Nestle fighting for rack space. This transformation started in 2003 itself, two years into the opening the business; but whereas earlier EXCEL was primarily a PCO booth and cybercafé where one could get something to eat, it is primary a tuck shop these days. The shop also functions as a travel agent now, and books all kinds of bus, train and flight tickets.</p>
<p>The cybercafé still remains important for this family business and contributes around 20% of its total profits; but this is down from an all-time high of 50-60% in 2006-07 and from 30% when the business started in 2001. In the last ten years, the capacity of the café has come down by ten computers, and now it operates with only six systems; till 2010, the café had 20 systems, and by 2012, the number had decreased to 14. A large part of the revenue is now from the ancillary services provided by the cybercafé, such as scanning and printing; data does not drive the business any longer. Even the six systems now operational in EXCEL stay unused for some parts of the day; it operates at full capacity only in the evenings. During the day, often half of the systems lie idle and unused. But the cybercafé in EXCEL has other roles in the family business; it often provides an entry into other services such as ticketing that are offered; often a customer who steps into the shop to take printouts in the cybercafé, ends up buying a recharge voucher for her pre-paid mobile connection, or picks up a family pack of ice-cream for her home.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Imagining a World without Cybercafés</h2>
<p>Ajay Kumar Puhan (28, from Jajpur district), who works at EXCEL, feels that cybercafés in their present form will survive only for another three to four years. After that period of time they just might survive as glorified ‘printout and scanning’ cafes. He has worked for around nine years at Excel, across the last ten years, since he was 18 years old. Now he is simultaneously studying and is in the final stages of finishing his diploma in mechanical engineering. According to him, the customer profile has drastically changed over the last ten years; only those who cannot and/or do not access the internet through mobile devices come to the cybercafé for their browsing needs. Students also drive demand for the café with their needs for filling up forms. He feels that the situation is very similar in his village as well, with almost everyone who can afford a smart phone has one with an internet pack.</p>
<p>This decline in the cybercafé component of the family business in EXCEL is reflective of a larger churning in the business. Ten years back there were around ten cybercafés in the greater Sailashree Vihar area. Now only three survive, of which EXCEL is one. Elsewhere in Bhubaneswar, the story is a similar one; often cybercafés have added additional services such as photocopiers or have transformed into gaming stations to survive as businesses. This change has been driven by fundamental transformations in the ways in which the internet is accessed in the country and in the city. Mobile phones have become the dominant device for accessing the internet in Bhubaneswar (and in India), and this has had significant effects on cybercafés in the city. The gentrification of many parts of the city and the consequently increasing rents for commercial property, and increases in wages of attendants at the cafes, are the other reasons why cybercafés are increasingly going the way of PCO-STD booths in the city.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Now, the Semi-Private Internet</h2>
<p>Rahul (name changed) uses EXCEL very infrequently. But when he was a student in a big engineering college four years back, he used to sometimes go to the bunch of cyber cafes dotting the area surrounding his college in South-west Bhubaneswar. His visits were infrequent; he would go to a cyber café for some project related work, to quickly check his Facebook account, or to get his fix of porn. Even when internet was available at home, the cybercafés offered a sense of freedom because of the anonymity of the interface.</p>
<p>There was very little regulation of the cybercafés a few years back, and one could get a cabin and access the net without any identity proof. One could have anonymous chats, browse for pornography and watch it in the semi-privacy of a cubicle, or get one’s dose of social networking sites (sometimes registered in a fake name) without the usual fears when one does these from one’s private connecting devices.</p>
<p>But his accessing the internet through the cybercafés was more often than not a very hesitant activity. Quite a few times there would be people making out in the next cabin; more often than not, these would be seniors or batch-mates from his college. In those days cybercafés were infamous for being places where girls and boys, often college students, with no other place to hang out in, would indulge in some heavy duty necking and petting. The owners of the cafes were aware of what was happening. But they would not interfere, as that would mean turning away customers. Raul did not have a problem with people making out in a cabin that shared the same partition as his cubicle; but, he would feel odd and get a nagging feeling as if he was intruding.</p>
<p>For Rahul. The semi-publicity of the cyber-café was manifested by its obverse – semi-privacy. He sometimes misses the hothouse atmosphere of the cybercafés of yore, when you could slice the sexual charge in their atmosphere with a scythe, and reap private moments in ‘public’ places. He has not searched for a cybercafé with any urgency in a long time, because he does not need them for his project work; and his smart phone answers his social networking needs. But he feels a certain moha-maya for the semi-privacies of the internet that existed outside the fully private smartphone and the laptop.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>Moha in sankrit means everything from infatuation, delusion, lack of discrimination, ignorance and falling into error, that are captured in the Odia word as well. The word maya also captures all these meanings in both English and Odia. And moha is a vice, for both Shankara and Buddha. It is a vice for Odia saints such as Achyutananda Das and Arakkhita Das as well, spanning the whole pre-modern experience from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Moha-maya is a feeling, a condition that one has to overcome to arrive at true knowledge – knowledge that simultaneously provides insights into the self and the world. Hence, to be free from moha-maya one needs to stay in the moment; any moha-maya for the past therefore, is supposed to be spiritually debilitating. Therefore, the Odia relationship with the past is a complicated one. One has to honour tradition; yet, one has to be free of moha-maya of the particular, peculiar, material manifestations of the tradition, of the past. This applies as much to dead relatives, as to disappearing socio-technological forms such as the STD booth and the cyber-cafes.</p>
<p>With the attack on the cybercafé continuing in all these various fronts, it is highly unlikely that it will survive into the third decade of the twenty-first century. But like other attacks on communally shared, semi-public/semi-private social spaces, these attacks of ‘inevitable’ forces of technology and market need to be resisted. But there are no easy answers as to how to go about doing it. As for me, even though I have a laptop and a couple of data cards (one personal, and the other official) through which I access the internet, even when I do not have the need to scan or print, I pay a routine weekly visit to the neighbourhood cybercafé. Token gesture, I know; but when one is fighting forces that are infinitely larger than oneself, one perhaps has to resort to all kinds instruments of resistance, including the token, ‘weapons of the weak’. One cannot eliminate death, but one can definitely prolong life. Especially, when the final moha-maya is for life itself.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>The post is published under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International</a> license, and copyright is retained by the author.</em></p>
<p> </p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-many-lives-and-sites-of-internet-in-bhubaneswar'>https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-many-lives-and-sites-of-internet-in-bhubaneswar</a>
</p>
No publisherSailen RoutrayCityInternet StudiesRAW BlogResearchers at Work2015-09-21T05:36:18ZBlog EntryThe Leap of Rhodes or, How India Dealt with the Last Mile Problem - An Inquiry into Technology and Governance: Call for Review
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/last-mile-problem
<b>Re-thinking the Last Mile Problem research project by Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. The ‘last mile’ is a communications term which has a specific Indian variant, where technology has been mapped onto developmentalist–democratic priorities which have propelled communications technologies since at least the invention of radio in the 1940s. For at least 50 years now, the ‘last mile’ has become a mode of a techno-democracy, where connectivity has been directly translated into democratic citizenship. It has provided rationale for successive technological developments, and produced an assumption that the final frontier was just around the corner and that Internet technologies now carry the same burden of breaching that last major barrier to produce a techno-nation. The project has fed into many different activities in teaching, in examining processes of governance and in looking at user behaviour.
</b>
<p>The Researchers At Work Programme, at the Centre for Internet and Society, advocates an Open and transparent process of knowledge production. We recognise peer review as an essential and an extremely important part of original research, and invite you, with the greatest of pleasures, to participate in our research, and help us in making our arguments and methods stronger.</p>
<p>Laying out a theoretical review of the history of technologies of archiving in the country, the project aims at building case studies of public and private archives in the country and the needs for a local capacity building network of historians, archivists, technologists and state bodies which exploits the digital and Internet technologies for building new archives of Indian material.</p>
<p>The monograph has emerged out of the "Rethinking the Last Mile Problem" project that was initiated in September 2008. The first draft of the monograph is now available for public review and feedback.Please click on the links below to choose your own format for accessing the document:</p>
<ol>
<li> <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/leap-of-rhodes" class="internal-link" title="Last Mile Problem">PDF</a></li>
<li><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rethinking-last" class="internal-link" title="Rethinking Last">Word</a></li></ol>
<p>We appreciate your time, engagement and feedback that will help us to bring out the monograph in a published form. Please send all comments or feedback by 30 December 2010 to nishant@cis-india.org or you can use your Open ID to login to the website and leave comments to this post.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/last-mile-problem'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/last-mile-problem</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaResearchers at WorkHistories of InternetInternet Studies2015-04-03T10:55:07ZBlog EntryThe Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination
https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-internet-in-the-indian-judicial-imagination
<b>This post by Divij Joshi is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Divij is a final year student at the National Law
School of India University, Bangalore and is a keen observer and researcher on issues of law, policy and technology. In this essay, he traces the history of the Internet in India through the lens of judicial trends, and looks at how the judiciary has defined its own role in relation to the Internet.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>On the 14th of August, 1995, the eve of the 48th anniversary of Indian Independence, India began a new, and wholly unanticipated tryst with destiny - Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) launched India's first full Internet service for public access [1]. In 1998, just a few years after VSNL introduced dial-up Internet, around 0.5% of India’s population had regular Internet access. By 2013, the latest estimate, 15% of the country was connected to the Internet, and the number is growing exponentially [2]. As the influence of the Internet grew, the law and the courts began to take notice. In 1998, there were four mentions of the Internet in the higher judiciary (the High Courts in States and the Supreme Court of India), by 2015, it was referred to in hundreds of judgements and orders of the higher judiciary [3].</p>
<p>The revolutionary capacity of the Internet cannot be understated. It has played a critical part in displacing, creating and enhancing social structures and institutions – from the market, to ideas of community – and its potential still remains unexplored. The Internet has also unsettled legal systems around the world, because of its massive potential to create very new forms of social and legal relationships and paradigms which extant law was unequipped for. The dynamism of the Internet means that legislation and statutory law, being static and rigid, is inherently ill suited for the governance of the Internet, and much of this role is ultimately ceded to the judiciary. In a widely unregulated policy background, the role played by this institution in identifying and dealing with the peculiar nature of regulatory issues on the Internet – such as the central role of intermediaries, the challenges of intellectual property rights concerns, the conflicts of law between different jurisdictions, and the courts’ own role in being a regulator – is tremendously important. In this article, an attempt is made to weave a thread through judicial decisions as well as judicial <em>obiter</em> (or peripheral text) regarding the Internet, to explain how the judiciary has captured and defined the Internet and its capacities, potentials and actors, and what effects this has on the Internet and on society. Inter alia, this article examines how judicial disputes have shaped internet policy in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Internet and the Role of the Courts</h2>
<p>The relationship between the law and technology is reminiscent of the famous paradox posed by the greek philosopher Zeno – Achilles and a tortoise agree to race. The tortoise has a head start, and, by the logic of the paradox, Achilles is never able to catch up to him. Every time Achilles covers the distance between himself and the tortoise at any point, the tortoise has moved ahead some distance, which need to be covered once again. As Achilles covers that distance, the tortoise has once again moved a distance away, and so on, to infinite progression, proving that Achilles can never catch up to the tortoise [4].</p>
<p>The legal regulation of the Internet follows a similar path. The Internet was not an immediate concern for law and policy, which meant that its evolution was largely determined in a space free from centralized governmental regulation. By the time parliaments and courts began to understand the implications of Internet regulation, it was apparent that such regulation would be constrained by the very features of the Internet. The core feature of the Internet is decentralization of control, which is necessarily antithetical to creating a centralized legal regulation with. Moreover, the constant mutation in the function and use of the technology renders statutory law incredibly ineffective in being an adequate regulator. Even where legislatures determined a need to step in and draw special regulations for the Internet, they need to be either so broad or vague that they cede much of the regulatory space to interpreters – the courts – or be so specific that much of the regulation quickly becomes obsolete. Most importantly, the final authority to determine matters of constitutional import such as the content and scope of fundamental rights rests with the higher judiciary. In this scenario, the courts become the <em>de facto</em> policy makers for regulating technology. In light of our current political and social context, where the level of legislative debate on issues of public importance and constitutional import is negligible, the judiciary’s analysis of Internet regulation becomes even more important [5].</p>
<p>The judiciary is thus in a unique position to decide Internet policy and governance. The preliminary question is whether there is even a need to talk about the Internet as a special system with distinct policy concerns. The regulation of the Internet is certainly fundamental to the development of knowledge and education in societies, but do its unique features merit a departure from traditional law? The second and connected question is whether the law can actually play a role in determining how the Internet is shaped, i.e. how does technology respond to the law? The architecture of the system that defines the functionality of the Internet – like the TCP/IP protocol – has embodied certain values such as decentralization, autonomy, openness and privacy [6], which have to a large extent underlined the social and ethical implications of the Internet – the way it is used, the way it functions and the way it grows. These were the values explicitly introduced into the systems we use today to communicate and interact on the Internet [7]. However, there is no <em>a priori</em>, fixed nature of the Internet. The form the technologies that make up the Internet take, depend upon its architecture and its design, which are malleable, and to which laws contribute by incentivizing certain values and encumbering others. The legal regulation of the Internet, therefore critically affects the architecture of the system, and promotes and secures certain values.</p>
<p>Recognizing the effect of law upon the architecture of the Internet is critical to any balancing exercise that the judiciary has to conduct when it decides disputes about the Internet. The Internet is a unique public resource, in that its participants are (mostly) private actors pursuing a vareity of goals and interests. The values outlined above emerged in this context, where control was decetnralized and regulation depended to a large extent upon how these disparate parties act. However, the same values also disturb existing structures to control information for legitimate causes - such as protecting intellectual property rights or preventing hate speech. Adjudicating these values, often in the absence of any explicit social or political moral framework (with respect to lack of legislative or constitutional guidance on these values), the judicial responses end up as policy directions that shape the Internet. Seen outside a broader, progressive social context, which takes into account the impact of shaping technologies to reflect values, interests on the Internet are generally adjudicated and enforced as proprietary rights between private actors, which ultimately results in changing the dynamics and relative distribution of control over the technologies that make up the Internet. This proprietory conception of interests on the Internet is highly insular, and tends to undermine the intersts of the public as a stakeholder in the regulation of the Internet. This can play out in many ways – from regulation being overwhelmingly determined according to private interests like restricting new technologies in order to protect intellectual property; or with private actors imputed as the focal point of regulation, and therefore given massive control over the Internet. However, the courts can take a different approach to regulating the Internet. The judiciary, especially the Indian Supreme Court, has a generally activist trend, especially in environmental matters [8]. One of the most elegant principles invoked by the courts for the protection of the common environment, has been the public trust doctrine, which postulates that certain (environmental) resources exist for the public benefit and can only be eroded upon to ensure that they develop in the most beneficial way for the common resources [9]. A commons approach to the Internet would require a comprehensive evaluation of the roles played by different actors across different layers of the Internet and how to regulate them [10], but would be principally similar, in that rules of private property would be constrained by potential spillover effects on intellectual information resources.</p>
<p>As a prelude to examining the judicial analysis of the Internet, it is interesting to examine the judiciary’s own perception of its role in Internet regulation. Courts are constrained in their exercise of power by rules of jurisdiction, which become incredibly convoluted on the Internet. A broad assertion of state power over the net can potentially fragment it, which is an obvious problem. At the same time, state sovereignty and protection of the interests of its citizens and laws has to be balanced with the above concerns [11]. The judiciary in India first attempted to grapple with the problem by exercising ‘universal jurisdiction’ over all actions on the Internet, which allowed the Court to claim jurisdiction over a defendant as long as the website or service could be accessed from within its jurisdiction [12]. This broad-reaching standard was antithetical to the development of a harmonized, unfragmented Internet and created problems of jurisdictional and sovereign conflict. As the implications of such a direction became clear, the court evolved different standards for jurisdiction which were based on whether the Internet service had some connection with the territorial jurisdiction of the court in question. The judiciary began to develop caution in its approach towards exercising personal jurisdiction in Internet cases, first applying the ‘interactivity test’ and then the ‘specific targeting’ standards for questions of jurisdiction [13]. However, the judiciary continues to adhere to a ‘long-arm’ standard for copyright and trademark violations, which allows it to extend its jurisdiction extra-territorially under those laws, through rather specious analogies with pre-internet technologies. For example, in <em>WWE v Reshma</em> [14], the Court explicitly analogized sale of services or goods on the Internet with contracts concluded over the telephone. Although analogies provide a comfortable framework for analysis, they also shield important distinctions between technologies from legal analysis. Problems arising from Internet cases – where many actors across many jurisdictions are involved in varying degrees – are unique to Internet technologies and such analogies ignore these important distinctions. Morever, in all the above cases, the judiciary’s assertions of power over the Internet seems to be restricted only by pragmatic regulatory concerns (such as whether personal obedience of the defendant can be secured) and its evolving understanding of questions of jurisdiction are explicitly linked to changes in the use and perception of the Internet and an understanding of interactivity and communication on the Internet.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Early Internet and Judicial Perceptions</h2>
<p>The Internet crept into the judicial vocabulary in 1996; a year after public access was made available, when the Supreme Court first took cognizance of ‘Internet’ as a means of interlinking countries and gathering information instantaneously [15]. Several other cases in the High Courts also spoke of the ‘Information Highway’ [16] and the various services that companies were offering, which could be availed by individuals on the Internet [17]. This corresponded with the popular understanding of the ‘first wave’ of the Internet, mostly relating to business providing services and information to users on the World Wide Web or as a space for limited personal interaction (such as through email) [18].</p>
<p>Some of the earliest cases where the Courts had the opportunity to examine the nature of the Internet were related to Intellectual Property on the Internet, specifically trademark and copyright in the online world. The Domain Name System, which serve to identify devices accessible on the Internet, was one of the first regulatory challenges on the Internet. Domain name disputes were unprecedented in the analog world of intellectual property, since domain names were uniquely scarce goods due to the limitations of the DNS technology. In India, the Delhi High Court in the case of <em>Yahoo v Akash Arora</em> first took cognizance of regulatory challenges of the DNS system on the Internet, a space which it conceptualized as a large public network of computers, and held that domain names serve the same functions on the Internet as trademarks. This case saw the recognition of the Internet as a separate, regulable space, which the Court defined as <em>“a global collection of computer networks linking millions of public and private computers around the world.”</em> The Court recognized some of the core, democratic features of the Internet: <em>“The Internet is now recognized as an international system, a communication medium that allows anyone from any part of the lobe with access to the Internet to freely exchange information and share data.”</em> In this case, the Court upheld traditional trademark rights in the case of use of domain names. The Court’s first recognition of trademark on the Internet heralded the imputation of proprietary interests on the decentralized, shared network that was the Internet, and was a precursor to the many such cases, which mostly focused on private commercial concerns. Even as the Court understood the importance of the Internet commons, i.e. the information and architecture that makes up the Internet, it chose to ignore concerns of public interest in the openness of those commons, in its balancing of proprietary rights for trademark cases. The commercial significance of the Internet was echoed in the <em>Rediff</em> case, where the Bombay High Court opined that <em>“Undoubtedly the Internet is one of the important features of the Information Revolution. It is increasingly used by commercial organisations to promote themselves and their product and in some cases to buy and sell”</em> [19]. Moreover, in these early cases, the law of the analog age was applied wholesale to the Internet, without examining in-depth the possible differences in principle and approach, providing no precedent for the development of an ‘internet law’ [20]. Overly focussed on the proprietary nature of Internet interests, the conception of the Internet as a non-commercial space for collaboration at a decentralized or an individual level is absent from the judicial vocabulary at this stage.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Private Actors and Public Interest</h2>
<p>The Internet permits decentralization in the hands of several private actors, which makes control of information over it so difficult. However, the information and technology that makes up the Internet are also highly centralized at certain nodal points, such as the services which provide the physical infrastructure of the Internet (like ISPs) or intermediaries which create platforms for distribution of information. Since the Internet has no centralized architecture to enable governmental control, these private intermediaries fall squarely in the crosshairs of regulatory concerns, specifically concerning their liability as facilitators of offensive or illegal content and actions. Facebook, Ebay, Twitter, Myspace, YouTube and Google are examples of private actors that have emerged as dominant service providers that host, index or otherwise facilitate access to user-generated content. Other forms of intermediaries, such as software like Napster or torrent databases like The Pirate Bay, are responsible for driving the growth of Internet-based technologies, like new modes of information sharing and communication. These services have emerged as the most important platform for sharing of information and free speech on the Internet. Most of the interaction and communication on the Internet takes place through these intermediaries and therefore they are in a position to control much of the speech that takes place online. The implications of regulating such actors are quite enormous, and its context is unique to the Internet. These private actors now control the bulk of the information that is shared online, and many of them have almost monopolistic control over certain unique forms of information sharing – think Google in the case of search engines. Developing an adequate regulatory mechanism for them is therefore critical to the future of the net. If the laws do not adequately protect their ability to host content without being liable for the same, it is likely that these actors will lean towards collateral censorship of speech beyond that which is prohibited by law, simply to protect against liability. Secondly, such liability would tend to disincentivise the creation of new platforms and services that increase access to knowledge, which have been integral to innovation on the Internet [21]. The issue of intermediary liability at this scale is unique to the Internet. The court has to adequately frame policy considerations which strike at the fundamental nature of the Internet, such as intellectual property and access to information. At the same time, concerns about legal accountability need to also be addressed. The approach that courts have taken towards the role of intermediaries is therefore critical towards any examination of Internet regulation [22].</p>
<p>In India, the first court to explicitly examine the public importance in issues of online intermediary liability was in the context of regulation of pornography, specifically child pornography, which has been a mainstay of regulatory concerns on the Internet. The case prompted legislative action in the form of creating rules to secure intermediary immunity. In this case the Court imputed liability for the listings of certain offensive content upon the owners of the website, Bazzee.com. Hard cases make bad law, and the same was true of this case. Referring to the challenges of regulating content on the Internet, due to the <em>inability</em> of methods to screen and filter such content, the Court held that intermediaries must be strictly liable for all offensive content on their site. The Court held that:</p>
<blockquote>The proliferation of the internet and the possibility of a widespread use through instant transmission of pornographic material, calls for a strict standard having to be insisted upon. Owners or operators of websites that offer space for listings might have to employ content filters if they want to prove that they did not knowingly permit the use of their website for sale of pornographic material…even if for some reason the filters fail, the presumption that the owner of the website had the knowledge that the product being offered for sale was obscene would get attracted.</blockquote>
<p>Intermediaries, therefore, were imputed with the liability of controlling ‘obscene’ speech – a vague and over-broad standard which did not account for the realities of online speech [23]. The above analysis reflects the judiciary’s refusal to take into account the technical concerns on the Internet which ultimately shape its architecture – and the limitations of the judiciary in reflecting upon their own role in policy making on the internet. Ultimately, the decision was overturned by a legislative act, which invoked different standards of liability for intermediaries.</p>
<p>In <em>Consim Info Pvt. Ltd vs Google India Pvt. Ltd</em> [24], the Madras High Court considered “Keyword Advertising” and the liability of search engines and competitors for ‘meta-tags’ that resulted in search engine results which may divert a trademark holder’s traffic. Google’s AdWord programme, which allows purchase of certain ‘keywords’ for the search engine results, and can potentially enable certain forms of trademark infringement, was at issue [25]. Trademarks as AdWords or search terms fulfil and important social utility of information access [26]. However, the Court’s reasoning was conspicuously missing an analysis of the public interest in protecting and promoting search engines, which were important concerns taken into account when these issues were deliberated in other forums [27]. The Court saw this dispute only taking into account private property interests and not public interest considerations, such as the general public benefit of technology which enables new forms of searching and indexing. In fact, an argument by the defendant based on the fundamental right to free (commercial) speech was raised and ignored by the court. The Court therefore ignored the public importance of search engines in favour of protecting proprietary interests which arose in a different context.</p>
<p>Copyright law also has tremendous implications on the Internet. As the Internet became the primary mode for the distribution of different kinds of information and creative content, the very ease of sharing that contributed to its popularity made it prone to violations of copyright, and this created a conflict between the interests of traditional rights holders and the development of the Internet as a means of better sharing of information and knowledge. The problem of holding intermediaries liable for conduct has been compounded in cases where the Court ordered ex-parte ‘John Doe’ orders against unknown defendants likely to be infringing copyright, and imputed the liability for removal of such content on the intermediaries or ISP’s, effectively issuing wide blocking orders without considering their implications or even providing a fair hearing [28]. In <em>RK Productions</em> [29], for instance, when holding that ISPs could be liable for failure to follow blocking orders against infringing content, the Madras High Court described the role of ISPs, such as Airtel and VSNL, as <em>“vessels for others to use their services to infringe third party works.”</em> Once again, the court took a particularly pessimistic view of the Internet’s capabilities, limiting its analysis to the ISP’s function in facilitating infringement and holding that <em>“Without the ISPs, no person would be in a position to access the pirated contents nor would the unknown persons be in a position to upload the pirated version of the film.”</em> In <em>Myspace</em>, the Delhi High Court held that no different standard for secondary infringement (by intermediaries) applied on the Internet, and imputed the same standard as in the 1957 Copyright Act. (In fact, it explicitly compared Myspace to brick and mortar shops selling infringing DVD’s or CD’s) [30]. The Court held that the principles of immunity under the IT Act were overridden by the provisions of the Copyright Act, and then went on to impute a strict standard for intermediaries seeking safe harbor for infringing material, including, inexplicably, that provision of some means to tackle infringement would be sufficient proof of knowledge of actual infringement, and therefore implicating mere passive platforms as infringers. Further, the Court expressly rejected a post-hoc solution for the same, and held that the intermediaries must ensure prior restraint of infringing works to escape liability. The claims that arise in cases of infringement of intellectual property on the Internet, specifically in the liability of intermediaries, are unique, and have unique implications. The inability or refusal of the judiciary to identify claims of freedom of speech and freedom of information of the larger public within the internet commons, in response to broad censorship orders for preventing infringement means that implicitly, policy takes a direction that favours private interests.</p>
<p>An analysis of the above cases shows that important implications of intermediary liability such as the effect on the public’s access to information and the freedom of speech in the context of the Internet did not play a role in the Courts decisions. In particular, the examination of cases above shows that private disputes are now at the forefront of issues of public importance. The Courts have unfortunately taken an insular view of these disputes, adjudicating them as inter-party, without considering the public function that private players on the Internet provide, and how their decisions should factor in these considerations.</p>
<p>However, the recent case of <em>Shreya Singhal v Union of India</em> [31], decided by the Supreme Court this March, hopefully announces a departure from this insular examination of the Internet towards a constitutional analysis, where framing an appropriate public policy for the Internet is at the forefront of the Court’s analysis.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Shreya Singhal and Constitutionalizing the Internet</h2>
<p>In March, 2015, the Supreme Court of India struck down the notoriously abused Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, which criminalized certain classes of speech, and hopefully heralded a new phase of Internet jurisprudence in India, which imports constitutionalism into matters of cyberspace. Section 66A, premised on the pervasiveness of the Internet, criminalized online speech on vague grounds such as ‘grossly offensive’ or ‘menacing’. The Court’s examination of the nature of the Internet is particularly important. While dismissing a challenge that speech on the Internet should not be treated as distinct from other speech, the Supreme Court opined that <em>“the internet gives any individual a platform which requires very little or no payment through which to air his views”</em>, and by this reasoning concluded that to a limited extent, specific offences could be drawn for online speech. However, this understanding of the features of the Internet – the democratization of knowledge sharing by making it cheap and expansive, was implicit throughout the Court’s judgement, which upheld the idea of the Internet as a ‘marketplace of ideas’ and a space for free and democratic exchange, and struck down the impugned restrictive provisions as unconstitutional, in part because of their vagueness and likelihood to censor legitimate speech, bearing no relation to the constitutional restrictions on free speech under Article 19(2). Moreover, the Court understood the importance of collateral censorship and intermediary safe harbor, although only briefly examined, and read down expansive intermediary liability terms under the IT Rules to include prior judicial review of takedown notices [32].</p>
<p>Hopefully, the Shreya Singhal judgement marks the beginning of constitutional engagement of the judiciary with the Internet. At this moment itself, the Supreme Court is grappling with questions of limitations of online pornography [33]; search engine liability for hate speech [34]; intermediary liability for defamation [35]; and liability for mass surveillance. How the Supreme Court takes cognizance of these cases, how they ultimately proceed, and how they take into account the principles sounded by the <em>Shreya Singhal</em> court, will have a tremendous impact on the internet and society in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>This article was an attempt to study the Internet in India, and look at the relationship between the judiciary and the Internet. But ‘the Internet’ is not some fixed, immutable space, and any study has to take this into account. The function of the Internet depends upon the values built in to it. These values can be in favor of free speech, or enable censorship. They can protect privacy, or enable mass surveillance. The growth of the Internet as a medium of free speech and expression has been fuelled to a large extent in the spaces free of legal regulation, but the law is perhaps the most important regulator of the Internet, in its ability to use state power to create incentives for certain values, and to change the nature of the Internet. This study, therefore, charted the dynamic relationship between judicial law and other factors responsible for the regulation of the Internet.</p>
<p>For a technology which is so pervasive in our daily lives, and growing in importance day by day, it is surprising that the Supreme Court of India has only recently taken cognizance of constitutional issues on the Internet. While important internet-specific issues have arisen in disputes before the judiciary, judicial examination has generally ignored technical nuances of the new technology, and furthermore ignored the wider implications of framing Internet policy by applying rules that applied in other contexts, such as for copyright or trademark. Without a clear articulation of political and moral bases to guide Internet policy, a clear policy-driven approach to the Internet remains absent, and the regulatory space has been captured by fragmented interest groups without an assessment of larger interests in maintaining the Internet commons, such as allowing peer-based production and sharing of information.</p>
<p>There is, however, reason to be optimistic about the courts and the Internet. The Supreme Courts reaffirmation and identification of the freedom of speech on the Internet in <em>Shreya Singhal</em>, will, hopefully, resonate in the policy decisions of both the courts and legislators, and the internet can be reformulated as a space deserving constitutional scrutiny and protection.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>[1] VSNL Starts India's First Internet Service Today, The Indian Technomist, (14th August, 1995), available at <a href="http://dxm.org/techonomist/news/vsnlnow.html">http://dxm.org/techonomist/news/vsnlnow.html</a>.</p>
<p>[2] Internet Statistics by Country, International Telecommunication Union, available at <a>http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/stat/default.aspx</a>.</p>
<p>[3] Source: <a href="http://manupatra.com/">http://manupatra.com/</a>.</p>
<p>[4] Nick Huggett, Zeno's Paradoxes, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), available at <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/paradox-zeno/">http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/paradox-zeno/</a>.</p>
<p>[5] See: <a href="http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/a-little-reminder-no-one-in-house-debated-section-66a-congress-brought-it-and-bjp-backed-it/">http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/a-little-reminder-no-one-in-house-debated-section-66a-congress-brought-it-and-bjp-backed-it/</a>; Publicly available records of Lok Sabha debates also show no mention of this controversial law.</p>
<p>[6] I take values to mean certain desirable goals and methods, which could be both intrinsically good to pursue and whose pursuit allows other instrumental goods to be achieved. See Michael J. Zimmerman, Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), available at <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/value-intrinsic-extrinsic/">http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/value-intrinsic-extrinsic/</a>.</p>
<p>[7] Hellen Nissenbaum, How Computer Systems Embody Values, Computer Magazine, 118, (March 2001), available at <a href="https://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/embodyvalues.pdf">https://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/embodyvalues.pdf</a>.</p>
<p>[8] S.P. Sathe, Judicial Activism: The Indian Experience, 6 Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, 29, (2001).</p>
<p>[9] M.C. Mehta v. Kamal Nath and Ors., 2000(5) SCALE 69.</p>
<p>[10] Yochai Benkler, From Consumers to Users: Shifting the Deeper Structures of Regulation Toward Sustainable Commons and User Access, 52(3) Federal Communications Law Journal, 561, (2000).</p>
<p>[11] Thomas Shultz, Carving up the Internet: Jurisdiction, Legal Orders, and the Private/Public International Law Interface, 19(4) European Journal Of International Law, 799, (2008); Wendy A. Adams, Intellectual Property Infringement in Global Networks: The Implications of Protection Ahead of the Curve, 10 Int’l J.L. & Info. Tech, 71, (2002).</p>
<p>[12] Casio India Co. Limited v. Ashita Tele Systems Pvt. Limited, 2003 (27) P.T.C. 265 (Del.) (India).</p>
<p>[13] Banyan Tree Holding (P) Ltd. v. A. Murali Krishna Reddy & Anr., CS(OS) 894/2008.</p>
<p>[14] World Wrestling Entertainment v. Reshma Collection (FAO (OS) 506/2013 (Delhi).</p>
<p>[15] Dr. Ashok v. Union of India and Ors., AIR 1997 SC 2298.</p>
<p>[16] Rajan Johnsonbhai Christy vs State Of Gujarat, (1997) 2 GLR 1077.</p>
<p>[17] Union Of India And Ors. Vs. Motion Picture Association And Ors, 1999 (3) SCR 875; Yahoo!, Inc. vs Akash Arora & Anr., 1999 IIAD Delhi 229 – “The Internet provides information about various corporations, products as also on various subjects like educational, entertainment, commercial, government activities and services.”</p>
<p>[18] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks.</p>
<p>[19] Rediff Communication Limited vs Cyberbooth & Another, 1999 (4) Bom CR 278.</p>
<p>[20] Even when the Supreme Court finally recognized these concerns a few years later, when the Internet had morphed into a massive commercial platform and an important forum for free speech, in the Satyam Infotech case (2004(3)AWC 2366 SC), it discussed the unique problem of domain name identifiers and scarcity of domain names, yet went on to hold that an even higher standard of passing off for trademarks should apply in domain names, disregarding the prior standard of an ‘honest concurrent user’.</p>
<p>[21] Jack Balkin, The Future of Free Expression in a Digital Age, 36 Pepperdine Law Review, (2008)</p>
<p>[22] Id.</p>
<p>[23] Avnish Bajaj v. State (NCT of Delhi), 3 Comp. L.J. 364 (2005).</p>
<p>[24] 2013 (54) PTC 578 (Mad)</p>
<p>[25] The judgement also reveals the predominance of Google’s search engine service. The Court defines the operation of “search engines” as synonymous with Google’s particular service – including adding elements like the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ option as defining elements of search engines.</p>
<p>[26] David J. Franklyn & David A. Hyman, Trademarks As Search Engine Keywords: Much Ado About Something?, 26(2) Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, 540, (2013).</p>
<p>[27] Id.</p>
<p>[28] Reliance Big Entertainment v. Multivision Network and Ors, Delhi High Court, available at <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/john-doe-order-reliance-entertainment-v-multivision-network-and-ors.-movie-singham">http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/john-doe-order-reliance-entertainment-v-multivision-network-and-ors.-movie-singham</a>; Sagarika Music Pvt. Ltd. v. Dishnet Wireless Ltd., C.S. No. 23/2012, G.A. No. 187/2012 (Calcutta High Court Jan. 27, 2012) (order); See Generally, Ananth Padmanabhan, Give Me My Space and Take Down His, 9 Indian Journal of Law and Technology, (2013).</p>
<p>[29] R.K. Productions v. BSNL Ltd and Ors. O.A.No.230 of 2012, Madras High Court.</p>
<p>[30] Super Cassetes Industries Ltd. v. Myspace Inc. and Anr., 2011 (47) P.T.C. 49 (Del.)</p>
<p>[31] Shreya Singhal and Ors. V Union of India and Ors., W.P.(Crl).No. 167 of 2012, Supreme Court, (2015).</p>
<p>[32] The courts refusal to address important questions of intermediary responsibility has also been criticized, see Jyoti Pandey, The Supreme Court Judgment in Shreya Singhal and What It Does for Intermediary Liability in India?, Centre for Internet and Society, available at <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/sc-judgment-in-shreya-singhal-what-it-means-for-intermediary-liability">http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/sc-judgment-in-shreya-singhal-what-it-means-for-intermediary-liability</a>.</p>
<p>[33] See: <a href="http://sflc.in/kamlesh-vaswani-v-uoi-w-p-c-no-177-of-2103/">http://sflc.in/kamlesh-vaswani-v-uoi-w-p-c-no-177-of-2103/</a>.</p>
<p>[34] See: <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/search-engine-and-prenatal-sex-determination">http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/search-engine-and-prenatal-sex-determination</a>.</p>
<p>[35] See: <a href="https://indiancaselaws.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/google-india-pvt-ltd-vs-visaka-industries-limited/">https://indiancaselaws.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/google-india-pvt-ltd-vs-visaka-industries-limited/</a>.</p>
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<em>The post is published under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International</a> license, and copyright is retained by the author.</em>
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No publisherDivij JoshiInternet StudiesInternet LawJudiciaryRAW BlogResearchers at Work2015-09-09T05:26:50ZBlog EntryThe Curious Incidents on Matrimonial Websites in India
https://cis-india.org/raw/the-curious-incidents-on-matrimonial-websites-in-india
<b>This essay by Abhimanyu Roy is part of the 'Studying Internet in India' series. The author explores how the curious interplays between the arranged marriage market in India the rise of matrimonial sites such as Jeevansathi.com and Shaadi.com. The gravity of the impact that such web-based services have on the lives of users is substantially greater than most other everyday web-enabled transactions, such as an Uber ride or a Foodpanda order. From outright fraud to online harassment, newspaper back pages are filled with nightmare stories that begin on a matrimonial website. So much so that the Indian government has set up a panel to regulate matrimonial sites. The essay analyses the role of matrimonial websites in modern day India, and the challenges this awkward amalgamation of the internet and love gives rise to.</b>
<p> </p>
<blockquote><em>A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.</em><br />— Mignon McLaughlin <strong>[1]</strong></blockquote>
<blockquote><em>People say ours is an arranged marriage. In a way, our meeting was arranged by our parents but eventually it was the two of us who decided on the marriage. We met and went out together for a few times. We dated for a while and then agreed to marry...</em><br />— Madhuri Dixit <strong>[2]</strong></blockquote>
<p>Mignon McLaughlin was a pioneer American journalist. Madhuri Dixit is one of the most popular Indian film actresses in recent memory. They are both women who have led very public lives and they have also had long and happy marriages. Yet, their quotes offer an insight into the very different ways in which they began their marital lives. Unlike the West, love is not inextricably linked to marriage in India. A number of factors such as class, race, caste and financial considerations come into the picture in matrimony – it is not far-fetched to think Ms. Dixit’s parents would not have introduced her to her future groom if he did not fulfill certain criteria.</p>
<p>This makes internet-enabled disruption extremely complex. Any system that aims to disrupt needs to take into consideration systemic elements. E.g. Uber needs to consider fuel prices, regulations, economic fluctuations and real-time demand while setting their prices. However, when unpredictable emotions, sociology and psychological states of not just the individuals involved in the union but also others such as their families come into the picture, things become incredibly complicated. This gives rise to a number of unwanted situations from fraud to blackmail. At the same time, websites such as Jeevansathi.com and Shaadi.com continue to gain more users – an indication that a lot of people have found their life partners on these platforms. To gain an understanding of this situation, let us first ask a question – who is the modern Indian?</p>
<h3>Identity Crash</h3>
<p>In their contribution to the 2002 book <em>Building Virtual Communities</em>, Dorian Wiszniewski and Richard Coyne first put forth the concept of the mask in the context of online interactions. The authors stated that idiosyncrasies of internet interactions – lack of physical presence, relative anonymity etc. – allowed individuals to reveal more about self-identity than conventional social interactions <strong>[3]</strong>. In particular, the authors point out that the choices that online contributors make regarding their profiles, style of writing and topics that they follow represent an ideal version of themselves as opposed to their offline social identity which depends more on the perceptions of others about the individual.</p>
<p>Perhaps no-where is this more evident than the modern online media landscape in India. A look at some of the most popular content on the Indian sub-sections of Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and YouTube presents a revealing picture of modern young India that runs counter to the conventional notion of family-centricity and social conservatism. Channels such as Being Indian on YouTube that has videos asking Bengaluru citizens about penis sizes and Mumbaikars on office romances, content produced by popular Buzzfeed authors such as Rega Jha and Sahil Rizwan and hard-hitting editorials from outlets such as Quartz and Huffington Post regarding love, marriage, sexuality and abuse reflect an undercurrent of social liberalism that is unseen in conventional social circles.</p>
<p>But for all that online liberalism, a 2013 survey commissioned by the Taj Group of Hotels and carried out by market research agency IPSOS revealed that 75% of Indians in the age group of 18 to 35 preferred arranged marriages <strong>[4]</strong>. What explains this apparent cognitive dissonance? A possible answer comes from a study commissioned by the UK government in 2013. The study called ‘What is the relationship between identities that people construct, express and consume online and those offline?’ posits that it is easier to deconstruct online identities compared to offline ones – upload pictures, share content, post status updates. The offline identity, on the other hand, has a sense of permanence associated with it and more difficult to rebuild. In clash between a malleable identity and a permanent one, the permanent one wins out <strong>[5]</strong>.</p>
<p>This gives rise to an interesting conundrum – is it possible for one to take a decision for their offline identity based on information provided by someone who is representing their online self?</p>
<h3>Shaadi</h3>
<p>Anupam Mittal was working in a business intelligence firm in America during the dot com boom. Every year he used to visit his family back in India. On one of these visits in 1997, he had a chance meeting with a match-maker. After wriggling his way out of the encounter (there were many uncomfortable personal questions for his liking), he came up with an idea for a portal where prospective brides and grooms would be able to upload their profiles and cut out the middleman in India’s marriage ecosystem. This idea led to sagaai.com, which would eventually become shaadi.com <strong>[6]</strong>.</p>
<p>By 2008, Shaadi.com was one of India’s five most popular websites. It had over 300 million page views each month and 6000 profiles were added every day <strong>[7]</strong>. Since then, the online matrimony market has become more segmented and numerous clones have cropped up – most notably, Jeevansaathi.com and BharatMatrimony.com. While this has somewhat taken the sheen off from Shaadi’s dominance, the portal still remains the market leader in India.</p>
<p>In the numerous interviews that Mittal has given since the launch of Shaadi, he always attributes the success of the portal to one attribute – it makes the process of marriage easier <strong>[8]</strong>. This statement, however simple it may seem on the surface, actually encompasses a number of factors – a wider pool of prospective spouses, circumventing match-makers, objective representation, and testimonials of satisfied clients. However, collating a large number of prospective brides and grooms and facilitating the union is not a new phenomenon. It has been around for years in India – centuries in fact.</p>
<p>For a very long time, parents who wanted their children to be wedded in India would contact a marriage broker. This individual (or in some cases, agency) would keep on record the details of a large number of prospective life partners. Thereafter, much like a recruitment agency, they would match the details to the request of their clients and arrange a meeting. As news media began to grow in prominence in the nation, matrimony-seekers started to find a way around marriage brokers. This led to the emergence of matrimonial ads in newspapers <strong>[9]</strong>. The main advantage that matrimonial ads had was that they allowed people access to a huge number of prospective spouses – a much larger pool than those of marriage brokers <strong>[10]</strong>.</p>
<p>To understand why matrimonial websites supplanted both brokers and newspaper advertisements one has to look at the deficiencies in both systems. Brokers while primarily only facilitating introductions actually impact every facet of the wedding <strong>[11]</strong>. They would make the wedding arrangements, find the purohit (priest), fix the guest list, determine astrological suitability and (in the past) even negotiate the dowry. In each of these transactions, the broker has a profit motive, which is what makes brokers a very troubling medium – they have an incentive to do what is best for them and not for their clients. At its best, this might involve getting more expensive flowers for the ceremony. At its worst, they may knowingly push a bride into a marriage they know is unsuitable but would yield them greater profits.</p>
<p>Of course, if one wanted to not get into this system, they could always put out a matrimony ad in the newspaper. Except, the greatest advantage of matrimonial ads is also their greatest weakness. While it’s true that putting out an ad in a newspaper opened up a large number of choices for a man or woman, it also opened them up to the general public <strong>[12]</strong>. Instead of having a broker narrow down their options to a few people, the advertisers would now have to sift through a plethora of propositions – many of which they would never even consider. Shaadi was a game-changer in both these aspects. Customizability allowed users to pick and choose who was able to view their profiles on the website – thus eliminating solicitors who did not meet their criteria for a spouse <strong>[13]</strong>. At the same time, Shaadi’s revenue model limited its operations to only facilitating a meeting between the two parties. This kept in check the profit incentive that was inherent to brokers <strong>[14]</strong>. By identifying weak points in both models and catalyzing a beneficial change for the user, Shaadi.com (and other matrimonial websites) were able to gain a foothold in India’s marriage industry.</p>
<p>With over 2 million unions that were initiated online since the inception of Shaadi.com, it would seem as though online matrimony is a success <strong>[15]</strong>. However, there is a dark side to this phenomenon – a 2012 report by the Economic Times found that almost half the divorces in metros were by couples who met through a matrimony website. Unsurprisingly, the main reason for this was misrepresentation of details on online profiles <strong>[16]</strong>.</p>
<p>While the increasing acceptance of online matrimony points to its popularity and the success of decision-making based on the representation of the self-identity of individuals, the high number of divorces suggests that there are clear gaps in the system that can lead to some very uncomfortable situations. An examination of the decision-making process for internet-based tractions is required to understand why online matrimony-seekers make the decisions that they do and the consequences of those choices when it comes to marriage.</p>
<h3>Choices</h3>
<p>Economic theory bases decision-making on the principle of utility maximization <strong>[17]</strong>. Fundamentally, given a set of choices we would pick the option that gives us the greatest benefit for the lowest cost. Individuals weigh benefits on a set of criteria that are subjective in nature and differ from person to person – Akash may like 2 chocolates and 1 ice cream for Rs. 10 but Megha might prefer 2 ice creams and 1 chocolate for Rs. 10 instead.</p>
<p>The basic assumption in this model is that the choices are well-defined, i.e. there is no hidden information that might change the decision-maker’s opinion. Any hidden information changes the context within which the decision is taken – Megha certainly would not prefer to have ice creams if it was very cold that day. This has serious implications for a medium where decision-making is governed by trust on the parties furnishing the decision-maker with the facts upon which to make their choice.</p>
<p>Although there are many factors upon which an online suitor would base their decision to pursue a potential spouse, evidence from the operation of matrimonial websites has found that there are actually six criterions that matter the most – education, religion, age, height, work area and caste.[18] Evidence about misrepresentation among these six factors in Indian matrimony is sparse. However, research into western dating websites suggests that most of the fudging tends to occur for height, age and weight <strong>[19]</strong>. It should come as no surprise that these are the hardest factors to verify – a bride’s family may ask to see proof of the groom’s employment and education but would think twice before asking to measure his height or test his age.</p>
<p>Ensuring honesty on a matrimonial website is a difficult proposition. The profile creators are governed by the same economic theory of decision-making that was laid out earlier. If a prospective suitor thinks he would get a better spouse by increasing their height by a couple of inches or decreasing their age by a few years, why wouldn’t they lie? On the operators’ end, verifying the truth behind any of the claims is also problematic – how do you gauge the veracity of someone’s age by a picture? The problem on the operators’ end goes much deeper though and this is where the situation starts to get murky.</p>
<p>While physical characteristics are the easiest ones to be deceptive about one can also lie about their educational and employment credentials. The mandate of matrimonial websites is to connect brides and grooms. The onus of verifying the truth behind the claims made by either party lies on the opposite group and not on the operators of the medium <strong>[20]</strong>. Besides, verifying whether someone went to a particular university or not or is employed in the same capacity as their claims requires resources that matrimonial websites do not possess. This gives rise to the most troubling aspect of such websites – fraud.</p>
<h3>Deception</h3>
<p>In 2014, a Mumbai-based woman met a man named Michael Williams who claimed to be based in the United Kingdom on BharatMatrimony.com. After some weeks of courtship, Williams had swept her off her feet. In late July of that year, he informed her that he would be visiting India but upon his arrival, he informed her that he had been detained by the customs department for carrying excessive foreign currency and would require an ‘anti-terrorist certificate’ in order to be allowed in the country. He asked her for some money – the customs department required Indian currency – and she obliged. However, after receiving her assistance she did not hear from him again. Williams had duped her out of 2.93 lakhs.</p>
<p>Upon contacting BharatMatrimony.com, the portal informed her that they had suspended Williams’ profile and the responsibility of verifying his claims lay with her. After a protracted legal case, the Mumbai High Court ruled that the portal was not liable for fraud <strong>[21]</strong>.</p>
<p>This is not a unique case. Several cases of fraud, sexual abuse and harassment have occurred on matrimony websites <strong>[22]</strong>. Users have tried several mechanisms to verify the details that they are provided with on these sites. From asking probing questions to discern any possible duplicity to even hiring detectives to find the truth about their possible spouses and (more recently) checking social media profiles, men and women on matrimonial sites go to extreme lengths to determine the veracity of the information that they have been provided with <strong>[23]</strong>. However, not everyone is as vigilant and quite a few times terrible experiences ranging from theft to sexual assault have begun through a meeting on a matrimonial website <strong>[24]</strong> <strong>[25]</strong> <strong>[26]</strong>.</p>
<p>The lack of clear regulation and policy coupled with India’s lax laws governing online transactions make it difficult to draw a line where the responsibility of the websites end and that of the users begin. Fortunately, this situation is changing.</p>
<h3>Oversight</h3>
<p>Governments in most countries have an unusually significant role to play in an institution that is supposed to be between two people. From inheritance laws to prohibition of certain types of unions – most prominently and controversially the Defense of Marriage Act in the United States – governments straddle a complicated middle ground between having too much influence in marital affairs to having too little.</p>
<p>Even so, the Indian government’s involvement in marriage in especially extensive. From anti-dowry legislation to prohibition of child marriage, the government has always had a vital role to play.</p>
<p>In November 2015, the Indian government decided to set up a panel that would make recommendations for the regulation of matrimonial websites in order to check abuse <strong>[27]</strong>. The initiative is an undertaking of the Women and Child Development (WCD) ministry. The panel consists of members from the WCD ministry, Home ministry and Department of Electronics and Information Technology along with representatives from matrimonial websites such as Shaadi.com and Jeevansathi.com. Ministry officials pointed out that the growing number of cases of fraud and abuse occurring on such websites was the prevailing reason for the formation of the panel.</p>
<p>In June 2016, the panel made its recommendations. It was now mandatory for websites to keep track of the IP addresses of its users. Documentation from users would now also be solicited to verify their identity and curb instances of fraud. Matrimonial websites are also required to now explicitly spell out that they are for matrimony and not for dating <strong>[28]</strong>.</p>
<p>While the government has cited that these regulations are to protect users of these websites, the operators of these websites have so far declined to comment on the guidelines (at the time of writing of this essay, the full list of guidelines has not yet been made public and have not formally been presented to the operators of matrimonial websites) <strong>[29]</strong>. However, any protestations from operators notwithstanding, regulation will be an integral part of the future of matrimonial websites in India. This brings us to an important question – what indeed is the future of these websites? Will they withstand the crime that occurs on them or will they become an irreplaceable part of life in India?</p>
<h3>Future</h3>
<p>The online matrimony industry in India is estimated to be worth $225 million by 2017 <strong>[30]</strong>. In 2013 over 50 million new subscribers registered across these websites <strong>[31]</strong>. Despite, the stories of fraud and abuse that start on these portals and end in courts, matrimonial websites are growing and are here to stay.</p>
<p>Operators of these websites are undertaking various market development exercises to bring in new customers. The most visible of these is the segmentation of the market – BharatMatrimony and Shaadi, have launched a number of targeted community driven portals such as PunjabiMatrimony.com, EliteMatrimony.com, Bengalishaadi.com among others <strong>[32]</strong>.</p>
<p>In an interview of February 2015, Gourav Rakshit Chief Operating Officer of Shaadi.com laid out operational changes that the market leader is contemplating implementing. To prevent deceptive information provided by users, stricter guidelines regarding the upload of photographs on the website are being implemented as well as the implementation of a screening procedure for profiles and the development of a stronger relationship with the cyber-crime branch of law enforcement agencies <strong>[33]</strong>.</p>
<p>The final cog in the future of matrimony websites is technology. Mobile and real-time engagement strategies are being actively considered by these websites in their quest to drive up their user base and find new streams of revenue <strong>[34]</strong>.</p>
<p>But this not where the journey of matrimony websites ends. As with every great voyage, its conclusion is the beginning of another great expedition. Just as Shaadi.com and others had rode the early wave of disruption in the Indian wedding industry, so too are a number of new and upcoming internet-based services. Companies such as 7Vachan, Big Indian Wedding and ShaadiMagic offer a host of options for banquet halls, priests, makeup artists, photographers etc. These startups simplify the long process that is planning an Indian wedding. Would-be brides and grooms or their families can easily connect with vendors, make their final choices and organize every aspect of the wedding in a pristine manner instead of the general chaos that ensues while planning a wedding. As these companies prove, the disruption of the wedding industry that was started by matrimonial websites will continue in the foreseeable future <strong>[35]</strong>.</p>
<h3>Conclusion</h3>
<p>In the March 2005 issue of New York magazine, a New York-based author of Indian-origin chronicles her and her family’s trysts with arranged marriage <strong>[36]</strong>. The article titled ‘Is Arranged Marriage any worse than Craigslist?’ is an examination of the experiences of the Indian diaspora with an institution that is deeply ingrained in their identity. In it, the author recalls an experience from her childhood wherein she had fallen out of the window of their home as a baby and had broken her arm. According to her father, the primary concern of her mother was that they should never mention this incident to anyone as it would greatly increase the dowry her family would have to pay her husband. Aside from being an event that shows the contradictions that Indian expats face in a western countries, it also shows how deeply the institution of marriage is rooted in Indians’ identity.</p>
<p>According to UNICEF, 90% of marriages in India are arranged <strong>[37]</strong>. Parents center their children’s lives on the event right from the outset. To industrialize an environment that has such deep emotional connections within it is fraught with dangers and the online matrimony business has had to deal with fraud and abuse. But along the way, they have permanently disrupted the way Indians get married. The growing popularity of these websites are a testament not just to their efficacy but also to the spirit of a new India. Government intervention and the oversight of website operators is bringing about greater improvements in fraud detection and abuse prevention on these websites. As the market continues to evolve, bring in more users and cater to new audiences, online matrimony will continue to thrive in India for a very long time to come.</p>
<h3>Endnotes</h3>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> Anonymous. (n.d.). Mignon McLaughlin. In Wikipedia. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mignon_McLaughlin.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> Anonymous. (n.d.). Madhuri Dixit Quotes. In BollyNook. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.bollynook.com/en/madhuri-dixit-quotes.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> Renninger, K. A., & Shumar, W. (2002). Building virtual communities: Learning and change in cyberspace. Cambridge University Press.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> IANS. (March 20, 2013). Indians swear by Arranged Marriage. In India Today. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/indians-swear-by-arranged-marriages/1/252496.html.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> Miller, D. (2012). What is the relationship between identities that people construct, express and consume online and those offline?.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> Anonymous. (May 11, 2012). Shaadi.com’s Anupam Mittal: A Bachelor Finds Success as an Online Matchmaker. In Knowledge@Wharton. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/shaadi-coms-anupam-mittal-a-bachelor-finds-success-as-an-online-matchmaker/.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> Challapalli, S. (October 2, 2008). Online matrimonial services open new tech fronts. In The Hindu Business Line. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/todays-paper/online-matrimonial-services-open-new-tech-fronts/article1638067.ece.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> Pratap, R. (April 18, 2014). Right Click. In The Hindu Business Line. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/work/right-click/article5925468.ece.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> Anonymous. (March 2015). History of Matrimonial Sites. In HatkeShaadi. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from www.hatkeshaadi.com/blog/2015/03/history-of-matrimonial-sites/.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> Anonymous. (May 17, 2016). Are you contemplating Marriage? If Yes, Then Find A Soul-Mate via Amar Ujala. In myAdvtCorner.com. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from http://blog.myadvtcorner.com/matrimonial-newspaper-advertisement/are-you-contemplating-marriage-if-yes-then-find-a-soul-mate-via-amar-ujala/.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> Anonymous. (April 14, 2014). Matrimonial India sites are better than marriage brokers. In Bharat Bhasha. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from http://www.bharatbhasha.com/marriage.php/440432.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> Ahmed, A. (March 19, 2012). Online Matrimonial Sites versus Conventional Matrimonial Methods. In Bharat Bhasha. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from http://www.bharatbhasha.com/marriage.php/356114.</p>
<p><strong>[13]</strong> Anonymous. (n.d.). Understand SimplyMarry Better. In SimplyMarry.com. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from http://www.simplymarry.com/matrimonial/faq.</p>
<p><strong>[14]</strong> Anonymous. (April 14, 2014). Matrimonial India sites are better than marriage brokers. In Bharat Bhasha. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from http://www.bharatbhasha.com/marriage.php/440432.</p>
<p><strong>[15]</strong> Albright, J. M., & Simmens, E. (2014). Flirting, Cheating, Dating, and Mating. The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality, 284.</p>
<p><strong>[16]</strong> Julka, H. and Vishwanath, A. (June 26, 2013). Matrimony portals making serious efforts to counter rising tide of divorces, ensure lasting unions. In Economic Times. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-26/news/40206906_1_portals-online-bharatmatrimony-com.</p>
<p><strong>[17]</strong> Margalit, L. (July 4, 2014). The Rational Model and Online Decision Making. In Psychology Today. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/behind-online-behavior/201407/the-rational-model-and-online-decision-making.</p>
<p><strong>[18]</strong> Anonymous. (May 11, 2012). Shaadi.com’s Anupam Mittal: A Bachelor Finds Success as an Online Matchmaker. In Knowledge@Wharton. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/shaadi-coms-anupam-mittal-a-bachelor-finds-success-as-an-online-matchmaker/.</p>
<p><strong>[19]</strong> Hodge, G. (December 10, 2012). The Ugly Truth of Online Dating: Top 10 Lies Told by Internet Daters. In Huffington Post. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/online-dating-lies_b_1930053.</p>
<p><strong>[20]</strong> Dhawan, H. (February 2, 2016). ID proof may become mandatory for registering on Shaadi websites. In Times of India. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/ID-proof-may-become-mandatory-for-registering-on-Shaadi-websites/articleshow/50814355.cms.</p>
<p><strong>[21]</strong> Khan, A. (March 29, 2015). HC quashes FIR filed by ‘duped’ woman against matrimonial site. In The Indian Express. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/hc-quashes-fir-filed-by-duped-woman-against-matrimonial-site/.</p>
<p><strong>[22]</strong> Nair, S. (November 19, 2015). Government panel to check fraud on matrimonial websites. In The Indian Express. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/govt-panel-to-check-fraud-on-matrimonial-websites/.</p>
<p><strong>[23]</strong> Hema. (September 15, 2012). Tips for assessing genuineness of a matrimonial profile. In Matrimonial Blog. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from http://matrimonialblog.com/general/2012/tips-for-assessing-genuineness-of-a-matrimonial-profile-stop-fraud/.</p>
<p><strong>[24]</strong> Praveen, P. (July 11, 2015). The web of deceit. In Deccan Chronicle. Retrieved August 28, 2016, from http://www.deccanchronicle.com/150710/lifestyle-relationship/article/web-deceit.</p>
<p><strong>[25]</strong> Aman, S. (November 24, 2014). Fraud and Cheats Rule Matrimonial Sites. In The New Indian Express. Retrieved August 28, 2016, from http://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/hyderabad/2014/11/24/Fraud-and-Cheats-Rule-Matrimonial-Sites/article2537595.ece.</p>
<p><strong>[26]</strong> Ameer, T. (August 12, 2015). Matrimonial portals set to face the music over dubious profiles. In Millenium Post. Retrieved August 28, 2016, from http://millenniumpost.in/NewsContent.aspx?NID=145048.</p>
<p><strong>[27]</strong> Philip, S. (June 3, 2016). No casual hookups on matrimonial sites as govt lays down rules. In Live Mint. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.livemint.com/Politics/1PFh6Uakl1mhEaQTxzGZuK/No-casual-hookups-on-matrimonial-sites-as-government-lays-do.html.</p>
<p><strong>[28]</strong> Philip, S. (June 3, 2016). No casual hookups on matrimonial sites as govt lays down rules. In Live Mint. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.livemint.com/Politics/1PFh6Uakl1mhEaQTxzGZuK/No-casual-hookups-on-matrimonial-sites-as-government-lays-do.html.</p>
<p><strong>[29]</strong> Philip, S. (June 3, 2016). No casual hookups on matrimonial sites as govt lays down rules. In Live Mint. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.livemint.com/Politics/1PFh6Uakl1mhEaQTxzGZuK/No-casual-hookups-on-matrimonial-sites-as-government-lays-do.html.</p>
<p><strong>[30]</strong> PTI. (December 17, 2013). Online matrimony business likely to touch Rs. 1,500 cr by 2017. In The Hindu Business Line. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/online-matrimony-business-likely-to-touch-rs-1500-cr-by-2017/article5470871.ece.</p>
<p><strong>[31]</strong> Ganapathy, N. (June 15, 2016). More fraud cases as India embraces marriage sites. In Straits Times. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/more-fraud-cases-as-india-embraces-marriage-sites.</p>
<p><strong>[32]</strong> afaqs! News Bureau. (September 9, 2009). Bharatmatrimony.com unveils 250 community based matrimonial sites. In afaqs!. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.afaqs.com/news/story/24904_Bharatmatrimonycom-unveils-250-community-based-matrimonial-sites.</p>
<p><strong>[33]</strong> Nair, S. (February 16, 2015). Mobile will disrupt matrimonial space in India, says Gourav Rakshit of Shaadi.com. In First Post. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.firstpost.com/business/corporate-business/mobile-will-disrupt-matrimonial-space-in-india-says-gourav-rakshit-of-shaadi-com-2097637.html.</p>
<p><strong>[34]</strong> Nair, S. (February 16, 2015). Mobile will disrupt matrimonial space in India, says Gourav Rakshit of Shaadi.com. In First Post. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.firstpost.com/business/corporate-business/mobile-will-disrupt-matrimonial-space-in-india-says-gourav-rakshit-of-shaadi-com-2097637.html.</p>
<p><strong>[35]</strong> Soni, S. (September 19, 2015). The great Indian wedding is now an online affair . In Entrepreneur India. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/250863.</p>
<p><strong>[36]</strong> Jain, A. (March 2005). Is Arranged Marriage Really Any Worse Than Craigslist?. In New York Magazine. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/11621/index1.html.</p>
<p><strong>[37]</strong> Lai, J. (June 1, 2012). Arranged Marriage: CNN Examines The Age-Old Practice In India. In Huffington Post. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/arranged-marriage_n_1560049.</p>
<h3>Author's Profile</h3>
<p>Abhimanyu Roy is a researcher who specializes in the social applications of emerging technologies for the urban poor. His work has been featured at conferences at MIT and the World Bank and in publications by Harvard University.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/the-curious-incidents-on-matrimonial-websites-in-india'>https://cis-india.org/raw/the-curious-incidents-on-matrimonial-websites-in-india</a>
</p>
No publisherAbhimanyu RoyResearchers at WorkInternet StudiesRAW Blog2016-08-30T10:52:50ZBlog EntryTech Anthropology Today: Collaborate, Rather than Fetishize from Afar
https://cis-india.org/raw/tech-anthropology-today-collaborate-rather-than-fetishize-from-afar
<b>"That is why the 'offline' if you will is so critical to understanding the 'online'—because they do not exist in isolation and what we have constructed is an illusory binary between the two." In this interview, Geert Lovink discusses with Ramesh Srinivasan: “how can we embrace the realities of communities too-often relegated to the margins?”</b>
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<p><em>Cross-posted from <a href="https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1705/msg00001.html">nettime.org</a>.</em></p>
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<p><strong>“How can we embrace the realities of communities too-often relegated to the margins?”</strong></p>
<p>In <em>Whose Global Village?</em> (NYUPress, 2017) UCLA scholar Ramesh Srinivasan travels the globe in order to find out much techno-autonomy there’s still left. Now that more than half of the world has moved to urban centres, the rural population is literary a minority and is kindly asked to adjust accordingly. This makes Srinivasan’s work even more urgent when he asks “what the internet, mobile phone or social media platforms may look like when considered from the perspectives of diverse cultures.”</p>
<p>The communities Ramesh Srinivasan visits are on the defensive, in a process of fragmentation. “There is a disconnection not just from one another,” he writes, “but also from the common threads of their history and culture. The tribes and villages experience “placelessness, fragmentation of identity, and dissolution of social bonds.” Throughout the study, which took place between 2004-2013, Srinivasan reports from the rising gap between the proposed technologies (such as videos, websites, databases) and the ‘techno-solutionism’ (as described by Morozov) that he wants to prevent. Ramesh is so honest to present this dilemma as an inner struggle of today’s anthropologist with a technology background. Computers and smart phones are an integral part of the everyday life—no matter where we go—and can no longer be presented as liberating tools. This put the ‘ICT for development’ researcher is an awkward position. Post-colonial theories have widely been read and their influence (from Fanon, Said to Spivak) is having an inevitable impact. This in turn leads to a new attitude that I would describe as ‘radical modesty’ (if not ‘vital pessimism’).</p>
<p>While studying the impact of the Tribal Peace system that he and others installed to connect the different Navajo tribes in San Diego County, Srinivasan realises that he has to work with rather than ignore the networks that exist. “It was neither the technology nor institutions that connected the people I had met. Instead, the very few threads of kinship I noted were related to revered individuals, regarded by most with collective respect and as a source of inspiration.” It is with and through the elders that he starts to draw up information architectures (or ‘ontologies’), listing topics, themes, and values across the native reservations. How can ‘lateral networks’ be supported in a a process of what James Carey calls ‘ritual communication’?</p>
<p>Needless to say this approach takes us light years away from Facebook and other social media. This is only in part a question of translating interfaces to local indigenous languages. The proposed systems require the design of its own visual metaphors, reminding us of 1990s multi-media navigation screens, meant to represent digital storytelling. This is dealt with in closed, or semi-open networks, paying respect to the different experiences of time and space. These ideas are put to the test in the last part of the book that describes the encounter with the Zuni tribe (Arizona/New Mexico), where Ramesh Srinivasan worked together with Robin Boast. It is amongst the Zuni peoples that the researchers encounter the distrust against anthropologists. “Our Zuni friends voiced feelings of misrepresentation and anger at their objectification. They explained that social scientists would visit their community, exoticize their traditions and customs, and extract what they could to benefit their own agendas rather than those of the community.”</p>
<p>The gained detachment aims to put the researcher “at the service of our friends and partners.” Important is no longer the one-way transfer of knowledge but the art of listening. Towards the end of his study Ramesh asks: “What would it mean to step away from top-down understandings of the internet and instead ‘splinter’ the way we think about technologies and the communities they may support?” As an activist in Egypt explained: “We do not need another NGO or a new dialogue.com to solve our problems—we just need you to listen, support our voices, an pay attention to what we we do.” <em>Whose Global Village?</em> adequately describes the moral and methodological crisis in the ‘ICT for Development’ field. The wide condemnation of Facebook’s neo-colonial internet.org balloon campaign to bring access (to Facebook) to hundreds of millions of rural poor in India clearly marks a paradigm shift. Access is no longer a benevolent project. It’s clear that ICT for Development as such does not contribute to a redistribution of wealth and makes global inequality only worse. So much for internet charity.</p>
<p><strong>Ramesh admits:</strong> “Trained as a designer and engineer, I recognize my innate tendency to valorize my power to come up with a set of solutions for any challenge at hand. Yet every project I have described illustrates the valuable insights gained when I put aside my own agenda and bias as much as possible to open myself to experiences that could not have been predicted from afar.” This modesty sounds like a new starting point. But is it also resulting into new concepts and narratives? This might be too much to ask of a single publication (in fact, the first book publication of this author). The ‘tactical distance’, created out of respect for the communities-in-defence, results into rather sparse information about the places we visit. There are no interview fragments included in the book, and the few local leaders that we encounter do not speak to the reader in a direct manner. The chosen way to report creates a vague cloud of secrecy around the research itself. What happens when we listen but do not acknowledge the Other? Were more detailed research results published elsewhere or only accessible for donors (a common practice in NGO land)? What happens when we listen but do not acknowledge the Other? Is it too risky to give them a voice? Might their opinions and desires be too ordinary, too radical, or simply not what we want to hear? What if they do not fit our Western expectations? The Others are humans, after all, and, like us, tend not to live up to expectations. These, and more, are some of the questions we encounter once we give up on the development rhetoric.</p>
<p><strong>Geert Lovink:</strong> You’ve been in a lucky, privileged position to travel so often and witness events and encounter communities in diverse places such as Cairo during the 2011 uprising, with the Zapatistas Chiapas, doing research in the land of your ancestors, South India and on reservations in the South-West of the United States. The offline encounter in-real-life seems to be constitutional for your theory. In the past scholars travelled through the library and many these days do not leave their screens while processing their ‘big data’. Digital ethnography, on the other hand, seems to require direct exchanges with the Other. This assumption pops in all chapters. Is travelling the new luxury? Or should we say that it is rather dedicated time? Once you arrive elsewhere there is suddenly another time regime.</p>
<p><strong>Ramesh Srinivasan:</strong> Indeed, I think all of us as researchers and teachers are nothing if not 'lucky' or 'privileged'. And you're certainly on point to recognize that the root of my scholarship and activism locates technologies within an assemblage of other factors - peoples, places, infrastructures, and environments. Yet it is essential that I do not collaborate with (rather than ‘study of’) any community unless I am invited to do so and where our efforts are focused on initiatives that live and are owned by that group itself.</p>
<p>That is why the 'offline' if you will is so critical to understanding the 'online'—because they do not exist in isolation and what we have constructed is an illusory binary between the two. If we want to be of service and understand the complex relationships between technologies, politics, and cultures—as I attempt to do via the multiple case studies discussed in the book, we need to put our bodies and hearts in places rather than our distant gaze. It's critical for me to not step foot anywhere where I am not invited first, and to critically think about my role and power as I enter different environments. Indeed, the book is full of ethnographies of attempting to listen more than make, and how I eschew the 'study of' any community and instead write about what we create and work on together. My goal is to collaborate rather than study, rather than fetishize from afar.</p>
<p><strong>GL:</strong> <em>Whose Global Village?</em> has an unusual time span of 10-14 years. First research goes back to 2003-2004. Some case study closed in 2005 while most literature dates from 2012-2013. In between, the 2008 global financial crisis occurred, the smart phone was launched and apps became mainstream. How did you deal with these constant changes? Are you proposing a ‘longue durée’ in media studies and internet criticism’? What are the benefits of this approach? How do you see ‘grassroots storytelling’ dealing with the relentless changes of platforms, interfaces and protocols? Do remote communities have a different approach to the latest fashion and the famous ‘fear of missing out’?</p>
<p><strong>RS:</strong> There are some dynamics that don't change no matter what app, gadget or platform has captured the popular imagination. That is—the realities of power over how technologies are designed, owned, and politically or economically appropriated. The book starts with the simple but surprisingly ignored sociotechnical truism - People and societies shape and are shaped by technologies. Yet such a small percentage of Internet users have any power over the design process let alone any sovereignty over what occurs with their data and identities as they are refracted onto digital networks. Those issues are timeless and all the more urgent today. I focus on the political and cultural flashpoints where by users and communities can reign in their blind trust of new digital platforms and instead take power over these in relation to their local concerns and agendas.</p>
<p><strong>GL:</strong> As a media activist you have a background in engineering. However, at UCLA you work inside library science (called ‘information studies’). However, you seem to relate most to the role of anthropologist, in that you deeply desire not make past mistakes in encounters with ‘the Other’. In this context you work with Mary Louise Pratt’s theory of the contact zones and apply this to the design of ‘multiple ontologies’. I never hear IT engineers talking about contact zones. How do you want to carry your insights into the tech world? After all, you live in California. Who else is going to do this? What could be a good strategy? How do you look at the Bay Area and the global geek class they still dominate in terms of its global imaginary?</p>
<p><strong>RS:</strong> I see myself as a scholar who can contribute to fields that tend to remain mostly distinct in the academy—design, engineering, cultural studies, media studies are but a few. If I was ever an IT ‘geek’ that was decades ago!</p>
<p>To engage in the charge of the book, of locating our understandings of digital networks and systems in relation to diverse cultures and users worldwide, all of these fields are useful to invoke and bring into dialogue with one another. I'm fortunate to be in a department that supports this interdisciplinarity and indeed as you stated, coming from California and trained in engineering here, I believe it is all the more important to question the black boxes not just of Silicon Valley hardware and software platform design but to push these incredibly powerful technologies to open up to an engaged, conversational social contract with diverse publics.</p>
<p><strong>GL:</strong> Over the past 10-15 years we’ve seen the closing down of the possibility space of the Web and the rise of the ‘easy to use’ template culture of social media. The technologies that you’ve proposed and built seem to move away from the consumer culture. In South India you’re spread video cameras, elsewhere you’ve developed a dedicated Tribal Peace system interface (as part of a stand-alone website) while for the Zuni communities you’ve utilized the FileMaker Pro Advanced database software. Not Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube (and no wikis either). Can you elaborate on this?</p>
<p><strong>RS:</strong> It's important to not assume that naively putting content online is somehow empowering. Indeed, that which we ‘share’ (eg; sharing economy) asymmetrically builds power and value for the platform holder and all those that can monetize it. As a result, we increasingly know that corporate proprietary platforms such as Facebook or Google are hardly designed to directly support a user's sovereignty or agency. The interest, across each of the book's chapters, is to instead think about how the communities with which I collaborate can have their interests served via technologies either that we design together or appropriate/subvert in various ways. Far too often we see examples where such 'participation' actually does little to shape any cultural or political cause from the grassroots. So we think agnostically and critically about the systems, networks and infrastructures we use in relation to our collaborations.</p>
<p><strong>GL:</strong> Can you tell us what you’ve been doing over the past few years? Did you continue to work in the same direction? The book indicates that your collaboration with Robin Boast and the work with the Zuni Native American Reservation seems to continue.</p>
<p><strong>RS:</strong> My interests lie in that important space between understanding how technologies may aid and support grassroots political movements and diverse user communities. The Zuni collaboration, described in chapter 4, is interested in that cause in relation to the political and cultural sovereignty of a tribe that was not just historically colonized but still faces the objectification and misrepresentation of new forms of coloniality online.</p>
<p>The cases in the book look at both political movements as well as diverse cultures and communities. Currently, I am collaborating with activists and indigenous Zapotec and Mixtec communities in the Oaxaca Mexico region, one of the most biodiverse and culturally/linguistically diverse parts of our world. In this work, I am writing about the Rhizomatica project (invoking Deleuze/Guarttari's rhizome) where these communities are designing their own collectively-owned cell phone networks in cloud forests all around the region. This has massive political and economic effects. What we see here is a rhizome in the making, a set of networks, systems, and infrastructures shaped and produced from the grassroots, by communities and for communities, and not for the major corporations of our world that tend to on the surface exploit and monitor the activities of these people. More on this amazing project, including some videos at www.rhizomatica.org . I believe that as we start to think about this new effort, that Lisa Parks and I describe as 'network sovereignty', we can start to embark on a path I describe in detail in chapter 5 of the book, of getting back the social contract and communitarian potential of technology to serve democratic agendas located in people's politics and cultures.</p>
<p>I am hopeful we can start that conversation now. I attempt to continue it via my soon to be released second book, After the Internet (with Adam Fish, Polity, end 2017) which looks at examples ranging from Iceland’s Pirate Party, hacktivism, the Silk Road, the Arab Spring, and other activist movements that re-imagine new technologies in relation to grassroots power and voice.</p>
<h4>Reference</h4>
<p>Ramesh Srinivasan, <em>Whose Global Village? Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World</em>, New York University Press, New York, 2017.</p>
<h4>Profiles</h4>
<p><strong>Ramesh Srinivasan</strong> is Associate Professor of Information Studies with a courtesy appointment in Design|Media Arts. Srinivasan, who holds M.S and Doctoral degrees, from the MIT Media Laboratory and Harvard's Design School respectively, has focused his research globally on the development of information systems within the context of culturally-differentiated communities. He is interested in how an information system can function as a cultural artifact, as a repository of knowledge that is commensurable with the ontologies of a community. As a complement, he is also interested in how an information system can engage and re-question the notion of diaspora and how ethnicity and culture function across distance. This research allows one to uncover mechanisms by which indigenously-articulated forms of development can begin to occur, as relating to his current work in pastoral and tribal communities in Southern India. His research therefore involves engaging communities to serve as the designers, authors, and librarians/archivists of their own information systems. His research has spanned such bounds as Native Americans, Somali refugees, Indian villages, Aboriginal Australia, and Maori New Zealand.</p>
<p><strong>Geert Lovink</strong> is a media theorist, internet critic and author of Dark Fiber (2002), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012) and Social Media Abyss (2016). Since 2004 he is researcher in the Faculty of Digital Media and Creative Industries at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) where he is the founder of the Institute of Network Cultures. His centre recently organized conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (the politics and aesthetics of online video), Unlike Us (alternatives in social media), Critical Point of View (Wikipedia), Society of the Query (the culture of search), MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts) and a project on the future of art criticism. From 2004-2013 he was also associate prof. at Mediastudies (new media), University of Amsterdam. Since 2009 he is professor at the European Graduate School (Saas-Fee/Malta) where he supervises PhD students.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/tech-anthropology-today-collaborate-rather-than-fetishize-from-afar'>https://cis-india.org/raw/tech-anthropology-today-collaborate-rather-than-fetishize-from-afar</a>
</p>
No publisherGeert Lovink and Ramesh SrinivasanInternet StudiesRAW BlogEthnographyOfflineResearchers at Work2017-05-16T14:51:09ZBlog EntryStudying the Internet Discourse in India through the Prism of Human Rights
https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_studying-the-internet-discourse-in-india-through-the-prism-of-human-rights
<b>This post by Deva Prasad M is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Deva Prasad is Assistant Professor at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore. In this essay, he analyses key public discussions around Internet related issues from the human rights angle, and explores how this angle may contribute to understanding the features of the Internet discourse in India.</b>
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<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>The significance of Internet as an important element and tool in day-to-day life of mankind is an established experiential fact. The intrinsic value that Internet brings to our lives has transformed the access to Internet as a necessity. Internet’s intrinsic value acts an enabling tool for information, communication and commerce to be effectively and expeditiously carried forward. It is to due to this enormous intrinsic value attached with Internet that there is an emerging trend of exploring Internet from the perspective of human rights. Moreover, Internet as a medium also helps in furtherance of human rights [1]. Social movements have attained a new lease of life with the digital activism over Internet. Arab spring is an epitome of this phenomenon.</p>
<p>There is an emerging positive trend of linking established norms of human rights with Internet. The Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression has vividly explained the possibility and feasibility of extending and extrapolating the right of freedom of opinion and expression to Internet medium (Article 19 of the UDHR and the ICCPR) [2]. The Special Rapporteur also highlights the need to have access to Internet for effective enjoyment of right to freedom of opinion and expression in the digital sphere. The UN High Commissioner on Human Right’s report on‘The Right To Privacy In The Digital Age’ also explicitly highlights the significance of protecting the right to privacy in the internet medium in light of extensive “surveillance and the interception of digital communications and the collection of personal data” [3]. The extensive interception and blocking of the online communication is also a pertinent reason, which calls for human right protection to be extended to Internet.</p>
<p>The WSIS Declaration for Building of Information Society [4] and the Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet [5] also have played a significant role in furthering the inter-linkage between human rights and Internet.</p>
<p>The Internet and human rights policy developments have gathered significant relevance in international human rights law and Internet policy fora. But it is interesting to note that the Indian government and state institutional mechanisms have not yet pro-actively accepted relevance of applying human rights norm to the Internet medium in India.</p>
<p>As an essay in the Studying Internet series, it is important to highlight how human rights acts as underlying factors in many socio-political issues pertaining to Internet in India. Analysis of these issues helps us to understand that, even though the Indian state turns a blind eye to the human rights element in the various socio-political issues relating to Internet, the digitally conscious Indian’s have realized their rights and even fought their own battle for exercising their rights.</p>
<p>In recent years, the Internet discourse in India has witnessed many socio-political concerns. This essay would be exploring the pertinent socio-political issues in Indian context and the underlying link to human rights thread. Globally, exploring Internet from the perspective of human rights brings out multitude of issues, which requires application of established human rights norms of right to privacy, freedom of expression, access. The story in India is no different. In this regard, three socio-political issues relating to Internet, which gained much attention in India roughly in last one year, are being analyzed. Interestingly, all three issues have an underlying thread of human right perspective connecting them and need pertinent deliberation from human rights perspective.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Section 66A and Freedom of Speech and Expression</h2>
<p>The lack of freedom of expression on Internet and Section 66A of Information Technology Act, 2000 is an interesting case study. Indian government used Section 66A as a tool for extensive surveillance and had taken criminal legal action against the Internet and social media users for posting the offensive comments and posts. But Section 66A was badly drafted allowing the government to initiate criminal legal action in an arbitrary and whimsical manner. Thus such a provision could be misused by the state for curbing the freedom of expression in the Internet sphere. The rampant usage of the Indian state machinery of Section 66A had led to sharp reaction amongst the Internet and social media users in India. The vagueness in language and unconstitutionality of Section 66A were criticized by legal experts. The action of state machinery in arresting a cartoonist, a professor and two girls in Maharashtra [6] (and many others) for comments and post on social media against politicians, had made it evident the lack of respect for freedom for speech and expression on Internet by the Indian state machinery (Most of these incidents took place during the year 2012). These incidents led to wide spread protest for violation of human right to freedom of speech and expression by the digital media users. When the Public Interest Litigation [7] filed by Shreya Singhal led to the Supreme Court striking down the Section 66A on 24th March, 2015 for lack of due process being followed, it was a water shed moment for internet discourse in India. The significance of human rights (especially the freedom of speech and expression) in the Internet medium got asserted.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Net Neutrality and Internet Access Issue</h2>
<p>The recent net neutrality debate in India has also evoked deliberation about the right of equal access to Internet and the need to maintain Internet as a democratic space. The net neutrality debate on keeping Internet a democratic space that is equally accessible to everyone has got much vogue in India. An important point that needs to be emphasized in the debate regarding net neutrality in India is the equal access question being raised. The equal access question is more a product of the lack of regulatory clarity regarding TRAI’s (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) capacity to regulate the Over-the top (OTT) services; coupled with the lack of well stipulated right to internet access in the Indian context.</p>
<p>The net neutrality rides on the premise that the entire data available on the Internet should be equally accessible to everyone. No discrimination should be allowed regarding access to a particular website or any particular content on the Internet. Tim Wu, a renowned scholar in Internet and communication law has mentioned in his seminal work, <em>Network Neutrality and Broadband Discrimination</em>, that network neutrality signifies “an Internet that does not favor one application” [8].</p>
<p>In this regard, there has been a constructive dialogue between the Federal Communication Commission in United States and the various stakeholders. An interesting development was a proposition, which attempted to classify broadband internet service access as a public utility [9]. There is much relevance for such debates in the Indian context. India also needs public participation (especially strong voices from internet user’s perspective) to highlight these access concerns regarding Internet. Human right’s concerns regarding Internet should be pro-actively brought to the attention of regulatory institutions such as TRAI. There is need to balance the economic and for-profit interest of service providers with the larger public interest based on equal access.</p>
<p>The pressure created by public opinion through online activism upon the TRAI’s proposal to regulate the OTT services helps in understanding the power of public participation in the pertinent human rights issues relating to Internet [10]. The broader design in which the principle of human rights in the context of Internet medium would have to be asserted in India is also vividly seen in the case of protest against OTT regulation.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Right to be Forgotten in EU and Repercussions in India</h2>
<p>The repercussions of ‘Right to be Forgotten’ judgment of European Union also had led to debate of similar rights in Indian context. The Google v. AEPD and Mario Cosjeta [11] is an interesting case decided by the Court of Justice of European Union, where the court held that based on the right to privacy and data protection, persons could ask databases (this case was against the search engine Google) on Internet medium to curtail from referring to certain aspects of their personal information [12]. This is basically referred to as ‘right to be forgotten’.</p>
<p>Viktor Mayor Schonberg in his book <em>Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in Digital Age</em> has elaborated the problem of how the digital age coupled with the Internet has led to store, disseminate and track information in a substantially easy way and advocates for the more informational privacy rights [13]. In this judgment, the Court of Justice of European Union has furthered the information privacy rights in the European Union with the ‘right to be forgotten’.</p>
<p>In the Indian context, it is important to note that information privacy rights are yet to evolve to the extent that of European Union with definite privacy and data protection law. But interestingly, there was a request made to a media news website by a person attempting to enforce the right to be forgotten [14]. Even though the application of right to be forgotten is not directly applicable in the Indian context, this event throws light to the fact that Internet users in India are becoming conscious of their rights in the Internet space. The way Indian news media gave relevance to the right to be forgotten ruling also is an example of how there is an implicit recognition of the interlink between human rights and Internet that is slowly seeping into the Indian milieu.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Internet Discourse in India and Human Rights</h2>
<p>Discussion of the three issues mentioned above points out to an important fact that human rights are not pro-actively applied to the Internet medium by the Indian state machinery. Even though the international human rights law and various Internet policy organizations are pushing the Internet and human rights agenda, the same is yet to gain momentum in India.</p>
<p>But at the same time, an interesting development that could be witnessed from the above discussion is the manner in which the Internet users are asserting their rights over the Internet and slowly paving the path for an enriching view towards applying the human rights perspective to Internet. In the first instance, the freedom of speech and expression was not pro-actively applied to the digital space and Internet. This has happened when Article 19 of Constitution of India has clearly provided for freedom of speech and expression. The second instance of net neutrality has thrown wide open the lack of clear policy regarding Internet access in Indian context. The public opinion has pointed out to the fact that there is a public interest demand to ensure that there is no discrimination in the case of Internet access. The third instance of looking at ‘right to be forgotten’ in Indian perspective, provides the understanding that the users of Internet are becoming conscious of their individual rights in the digital space in a more affirmative manner.</p>
<p>Further, the operationalization of human rights in these three instances also needs to be critically looked into. The assertion of the freedom of speech and expression in the Internet medium could be made possible effectively due to the fact that Article 19 of the Constitution of India, 1950, protects freedom of speech and expression. The vast amount of precedence existing in the field of freedom of speech and expression relating to constitutional litigation and allied jurisprudence has helped in crafting the extension of the right of freedom of expression to the digital medium of Internet. Further, using the social action tool of Public Interest Litigation, the unconstitutionality of Article 19 of the Constitution of India, 1950 could be brought before the Supreme Court.</p>
<p>But interestingly, the net neutrality issue, which is concerning the access to Internet in a non-discriminatory manner, is yet to be perceived in Indian context from a strong human rights perspective. Internet access as a public utility concept is yet to be evolved and articulated in concrete manner in the Indian context. Further, the Indian network neutrality discourse attempts to operationalize through the free market approach. In the free market approach the entire non-discriminatory access has to be ensured by the market competition with the necessary regulatory bodies. In this sense, the human rights angle of access to Internet will have to be ensured by effective competition in the market along with the proper oversight of regulatory bodies such as TRAI and Competition Commission of India. It is important for the regulatory bodies to have broad goals for furthering public interest by ensuring non-discriminatory access to Internet. Further, with the financial and infrastructure led limitations of government’s capability of ensuring access to Internet for all, the market-led model with sufficient regulation might be the right way forward.</p>
<p>Looking at the issue of the right to be forgotten, it could be easily perceived that the Indian milieu is yet to articulate privacy rights to that high standard. Even though the right to privacy is being understood in the constitutional law context through effective interpretation by the judiciary, the concept of digital privacy has not yet evolved in India. There is no collective understanding, till now, that has emerged regarding right to be forgotten in India. Even though individual attempts to assert the right was witnessed, there is much room for an evolved collective understanding in Indian context. Civil society organizations would have a crucial role to play in this regard.</p>
<p>There is an emerging consciousness amongst a set of Internet users in India, who values and gives importance to the Internet being a democratic space, without unwanted restriction from the government machinery or even the private entities. Hence looking at the Internet discourse of India from the perspective of human rights, there is an implicit way in which the human rights are being applied to the Internet space. The lack of a state’s pro-active approach in asserting human rights to Internet space is highlighted by the assertions being made by the Internet users in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Way Forward</h2>
<p>For Internet to remain as a democratic space, there is need for pro-active application of these human rights norms and clear understanding in Internet governance. At present, the state of affairs in India regarding application of human rights to Internet is far from satisfactory.</p>
<p>This essay which is part of the ‘Studying Internet in India’ series, has till now done a stock taking analysis of emerging dimension of human rights and Internet in India. Lack of interest from government and state machinery to further the human rights and Internet dimension need to be seriously reconsidered. Attempting to intervene in Internet law and policy in India from the rights based approach should be an important agenda for furthering digital rights in India. For this, civil society organizations have an important role to play. Exploring the public interest could be done effectively with public participation of stakeholders. Here in, platforms such as India Internet Governance Forum could play a crucial role.</p>
<p>Apart from the civil society organizations, it is also pertinent for state and governmental institutional mechanism to also take a pro-active stance. For ensuring that the rights based approach to Internet has to be duly included in the Internet law and policy; and there should be institutional mechanism, which could look into areas pertaining to human rights and Internet. It is a well know fact that India lacks institutional mechanism for looking into communication and privacy issues regulation. Further, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) also needs to look at the relevance of human rights for Internet. Inspiration could be drawn from the pioneering work of Australian Commission of Human Rights on applying human rights norms and standards to Internet medium [15]. This essay has only flagged the need to apply the established human rights norms to Internet space. Much more issues such as access to Internet by disabled, safety of children and Internet medium are also pertinent areas.</p>
<p>Moreover, it is important to have digital rights of Internet users in India to be explicitly enshrined in a legal framework. Presently, a gap in law and policy framework regarding human rights and Internet is evident, as highlighted in this essay. The pertinent questions regarding access, privacy and freedom of expression are to be taken seriously by the government and state machinery for which clear and well-defined rights relating to Internet space have to be framed. For Internet and human rights to be taken seriously, it is high time that legal and institutional framework to explore these issues also are evolved.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Emphasizing the Right to Communication in India</h2>
<p>Further, the present understanding of right to communication in India, which is perceived in narrow manner, could be re-worked with the help of a pro-active application of human rights norms to the Internet governance. The intrusion into the freedom of speech and expression especially in the telecommunication context has to be highlighted. Protection of communal harmony has been used as rationale for capping the number of the SMS messages that could be sent per day during the exodus of people of Northeastern states origin from Bangalore, Pune and other major cities in India.</p>
<p>This move has been criticized for being unreasonable and universality of capping the number of SMS messages [16]. Further, the telecommunication and Internet services (especially Facebook and YouTube) were blocked in Kashmir for restricting the protest [17]. The telecommunication and Internet services were blocked on the grounds of protection of national security. The reasonableness of restrictions that could be imposed on right to communication is a major concern in the above-mentioned instances. Making a blanket ban applicable in a universal manner undermines the right to communication of various genuine users of bulk messaging and social media sites.</p>
<p>The right to communication especially in the digital and telecommunication media needs to be emphasized. Applying human rights perspective and norms to Internet governance would help in articulating and evolving the right to communication in India. With adequate institutional oversight, the human rights norms could make the digital right to communication an effective right.</p>
<p>To conclude, the Internet discourse in India has already paved path for human rights norms to be applied to Internet space. The seriousness that could be attributed to those rights is evident by the assertions by the Internet users in India. But the state and government machinery in India also should explore the human rights and Internet agenda seriously.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Endnotes</h2>
<p>[1] Frank La Rue, Report Of The Special Rapporteur On The Promotion And Protection Of The Right To Freedom Of Opinion And Expression, Available at <a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/17session/A.HRC.17.27_en.pdf">http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/17session/A.HRC.17.27_en.pdf</a> (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).</p>
<p>[2] Ibid, Special Rapporteur in the Report points out that the language of Article 19 of ICCPR is media neutral and is applicable to online media technological developments also. Para 20 and 21 of the Report.</p>
<p>[3] UN High Commissioner on Human Right, Report on ‘The Right To Privacy In The Digital Age’, Available at <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session27/Documents/A.HRC.27.37_en.pdf">http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session27/Documents/A.HRC.27.37_en.pdf</a> (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).</p>
<p>[4] WSIS Declaration for Building of Information Society, Available at <a href="http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/official/dop.html">http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/official/dop.html</a>. (Last accessed on 25/05/2015). Article 58, WSIS Declaration reads as follows: “The use of ICTs and content creation should respect human rights and fundamental freedoms of others, including personal privacy, and the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion in conformity with relevant international instruments”.</p>
<p>[5] Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet Available at <a href="http://internetrightsandprinciples.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/IRP_booklet_final1.pdf">http://internetrightsandprinciples.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/IRP_booklet_final1.pdf</a>, (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).</p>
<p>[6] See Section 66A:Six Cases That Sparked Debate, Available at <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Politics/xnoW0mizd6RYbuBPY2WDnM/Six-cases-where-the-draconian-Section-66A-was-applied.html">http://www.livemint.com/Politics/xnoW0mizd6RYbuBPY2WDnM/Six-cases-where-the-draconian-Section-66A-was-applied.html</a>, (Last accessed on 25/05/2015). Also see, Facebook Trouble:10 Cases of Arrest Under Section 66A of IT Act, Available at <a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/facebook-trouble-people-arrested-under-sec-66a-of-it-act/article1-1329883.aspx">http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/facebook-trouble-people-arrested-under-sec-66a-of-it-act/article1-1329883.aspx</a> (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).</p>
<p>[7] Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, Available at <a href="http://indiankanoon.org/doc/110813550/">http://indiankanoon.org/doc/110813550/</a> (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).</p>
<p>[8] Tim Wu, Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination, Available at <a href="https://cdt.org/files/speech/net-neutrality/2005wu.pdf">https://cdt.org/files/speech/net-neutrality/2005wu.pdf</a> (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).</p>
<p>[9] F.C.C. Approves Net Neutrality Rules, Classifying Broadband Internet Service as a Utility, Available at <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/technology/net-neutrality-fcc-vote-internet-utility.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/technology/net-neutrality-fcc-vote-internet-utility.html</a> (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).</p>
<p>[10] The online campaign by www.savetheinternet.in and the AIB video have played a crucial role in gathering public support.</p>
<p>[11] Court of Justice of European Union, Case C-131/12.</p>
<p>[12] Rising like a Phoenix: The ‘Right to be Forgotten’ before the ECJ, Available at <a href="http://europeanlawblog.eu/?p=2351">http://europeanlawblog.eu/?p=2351</a> (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).</p>
<p>[13] Viktor Mayor Schonberg, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in Digital Age, Princeton University Press (2009).</p>
<p>[14] Right to be Forgotten Poses A Legal Dilemma in India, Available at <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Industry/5jmbcpuHqO7UwX3IBsiGCM/Right-to-be-forgotten-poses-a-legal-dilemma-in-India.html">http://www.livemint.com/Industry/5jmbcpuHqO7UwX3IBsiGCM/Right-to-be-forgotten-poses-a-legal-dilemma-in-India.html</a>, (Last accessed on 25/05/2015). Also see We received a Right to be Forgotten request from an Indian user, Available at <a href="http://www.medianama.com/2014/06/223-right-to-be-forgotten-india/">http://www.medianama.com/2014/06/223-right-to-be-forgotten-india/</a> (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).</p>
<p>[15] Human Rights and Internet, Available at <a href="https://www.humanrights.gov.au/our-work/rights-and-freedoms/projects/human-rights-and-internet">https://www.humanrights.gov.au/our-work/rights-and-freedoms/projects/human-rights-and-internet</a> (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).</p>
<p>[16] Chinmayi Arun, SMS Block as Threat to Free Speech, Available at <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/www-the-hindubusinessline-op-ed-sep-1-2012-chinmayi-arun-sms-block-as-threat-to-free-speech">http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/www-the-hindubusinessline-op-ed-sep-1-2012-chinmayi-arun-sms-block-as-threat-to-free-speech</a> (Last accessed on 15/07/2015).</p>
<p>[17] Pamposh Raina and Betwa Sharma, Telecom Services Blocked to Curb Protests in Kashmir, Available at <a href="http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/telecom-services-blocked-to-curb-protests-in-kashmir/?_r=0">http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/telecom-services-blocked-to-curb-protests-in-kashmir/?_r=0</a> (Last accessed on 15/07/2015).</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Author's Note: All the views expressed are my own and in no way are linked to the opinion of my employers. I thank CIS for this opportunity to explore Internet and Human Rights interface in India as part of the Studying Internet in India essay series.</em></p>
<p><em>Note: The post is published under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International</a> license, and copyright is retained by the author.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_studying-the-internet-discourse-in-india-through-the-prism-of-human-rights'>https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_studying-the-internet-discourse-in-india-through-the-prism-of-human-rights</a>
</p>
No publisherDeva Prasad MHuman RightsInternet StudiesRAW BlogHuman Rights OnlineResearchers at Work2015-07-22T04:18:37ZBlog EntryStudying Internet in India: Selected Abstracts
https://cis-india.org/raw/studying-internet-in-india-selected-abstracts
<b>We received thirty five engaging abstracts in response to the call for essays on 'Studying Internet in India.' Here are the ten selected abstracts. The final essays will be published from June onwards.</b>
<p> </p>
<h3>Deva Prasad M - 'Studying the Internet Discourse in India through the Prism of Human Rights'</h3>
<p>Exploring Internet from the perspective of human rights gives rise to the multitude of issues such as right to privacy, freedom of expression, accessibility. Pertinent socio-political and legal issues related to Internet which was widely debated upon in the past one year in India includes lack of freedom of expression on Internet and Section 66A of Information Technology Act, 2000. The recent net neutrality debate in India has also evoked deliberation about the right of equal accessibility to Internet and to maintain Internet as a democratic space. The repercussions of ‘Right to be Forgotten’ law of European Union also had led to debate of similar rights in Indian context. Interestingly all these issues have an underlying thread of human right perspective connecting them and need pertinent deliberation from human rights perspective.</p>
<p>This paper is an attempt to understand and analyze theses issues from the human rights angle and also how they have contributed in evolving an understanding and perspective amongst the digitally conscious Indian’s to ensure the democratic nature of “Internet” is perceived. Moreover, analysis of these three issues would also help in emphasizing upon the need for a right-based approach in studying Internet in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Dibyajyoti Ghosh - 'Indic Scripts and the Internet'</h3>
<p>Whereas the status of the internet in India is similar to the status of the internet in similar economies with low-penetration and a primarily mobile-based future, an alphabetically diverse nation such as India has its added worries. Whereas the 1990s saw an overdomination of English given the linguistic communities which were developing the world of computers and the world of the internet, by 2015, some of the disparity with offline linguistic patterns has been reduced. However, for Indic scripts, much less development has taken place. If one is studying the internet in India, chances are one is studying it in English.</p>
<p>What does this hold for the future of these Indic scripts? Given the multilingual skills of Indian school-goers and the increasing amount of daily reading time of those connected to the internet (which is somewhere between 12% and 20% of the population) being devoted to reading on the internet, chances are reading is increasingly in English. In this essay, I shall attempt to study the effects this has on the internet population of India, some of which are as follows.</p>
<ul>
<li>The kind of mimetic desire it causes</li>
<li>The degneration in spelling skills caused due to transliteration</li>
<li>The effacement of non-digitised Indic verbal texts</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h3>Divij Joshi - 'The Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination'</h3>
<p>The first mention of the 'Internet' in the vocabulary of Indian judicial system was a fleeting reference to its radical capability to allow access to knowledge. In one of its most recent references, it expounded upon and upheld the idea of the Internet as a radical tool for free expression, announcing its constitutional significance for free speech.</p>
<p>The judicial imagination of the Internet – the understanding of its capabilities and limitations, its actors and constituents, as reflected in the judgements of Indian courts – plays a major role in shaping the Internet in India, both reflecting and defining conceptions of the Internet and its relationship with society, law, and public policy.</p>
<p>This essay is an attempt to use legal and literary theory to study the archives of judicial decisions, tracing the history of the Internet in India through the lens of judicial trends, and also to look at how the judiciary has defined its own role in relation to the Internet. It attempts a vital study of how courts in India have conceptualized and understood the Internet, and how these conceptions have, in turn, impacted the influence of the Internet on Indian society.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Ipsita Sengupta</h3>
<p>The proposed essay will make observations of a specific kind of conversation that takes place on the social media platform of YouTube. The conclusive argument is imagined along questions of high versus low culture, as described below.</p>
<p>Under study are two objects- one, particular YouTube videos which play Rabindra-Sangeet, i.e. songs penned and composed in the late 19- early 20th centuries by the Bengali writer and artist Rabindranath Tagore, the body of work which today has become a genre of Indian music; and the second, comments that these videos receive from users of the site.</p>
<p>Visuals of YouTube song videos of Rabindra-Sangeet are of many kinds. So are renditions, with solitary or duet or band performances, and with varying pace and instrumental accompaniment.</p>
<p>The videos which have visuals from contemporary cinema, like images of urban youth, and the remixed renditions have often been found to receive comments which reflect/ reveal hurt sentiments of people trying to preserve some kind of sanctity of Rabindra-Sangeet, comments which state how the ethics of presenting the genre have been violated, via their notation and design, by either makers of the film in the song’s incorporation, or by the way young pop stars have been placed in particular montages.</p>
<p>Some examples:</p>
<p><iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/1aGwOBgyWTo?rel=0" frameborder="0" height="315" width="420"></iframe></p>
<p><iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/8_z3blCxCCQ?rel=0" frameborder="0" height="315" width="420"></iframe></p>
<p>In such a scenario, YouTube as medium of user-generated expression becomes interesting to analyse individual and group dynamics- given the space for commenting (below the video), and statistical data such as “Likes”, “Dislikes”, and “Views”. The debate here is that in Tagore’s “Nationalism”, when he himself is seen to have an imagination of the human race beyond patriotic groupings and consequent othering, does this apparent need to avoid “insulting” his compositions by preserving an intangible art form in a particular way, become then a type of jingoism of region or identity? And what is this Benjaminian “aura” of the “original” that listeners look for in their experience of these videos?</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Laird Brown - 'Dharamsala Networked'</h3>
<p>Three hours after regulations governing public access to WiFi in India were changed in 2005 the first router went up in Dharamsala. It was homemade, open source, and eventually, “monkey proof.” Something unimaginable had happened: high-speed Internet access in one of India’s most difficult physical geographies. Dharamsala has also become one of India's interesting information networks and has a burgeoning, unlikely 'tech scene’. But is it so unlikely?</p>
<p>Since 1959 Dharamsala has been home to the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan people and, government in exile. This single, significant incident possibly set in motion a number of factors that made it possible for the mountain-town to become a political, global, communications. However, much like the rest of India, the region struggles for human and environmental rights against fractured ideas of 'development'. This essay will draw on archives and interviews to unpack this microcosmic tale of Internet access, its histories and economics and the factors at play in shaping it - mundane and maverick, familiar and outlier.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Maitrayee Deka - 'WhatsApp Economy'</h3>
<p>Everyone around us is connected to the Internet through some or other electronic devices, phones, laptops, and tablets. However, not everyone use Internet for the same purpose. Through an ethnographic account of the usage of WhatsApp messages by the traders in three electronic bazaars in Delhi, Palika Bazaar, Nehru Place and Lajpat Rai Market, we see how Internet on the phone is used predominantly for business purpose. The paper seeks to examine how Whatsapp messages, which are for most of the users a medium for social communication, for the traders in Delhi, become a mode to establish business contact with their counterparts in China. From sharing of pictures of new tools to quoting prices of different products, Whatsapp messages become the lifeline of what many has termed as ‘globalization from below’. This paper argues what has started as economic exchanges through Whatsapp messages may start a new political alliance of similar mass markets in Asia. With the electronic bazaars in Delhi facing stiff competition from formal business actors both online and offline, the WhatsApp messages that is a space of new innovations and trade alliances could sustain the mass markets in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Purbasha Auddy - 'Citizens and their Internet'</h3>
<p>Suddenly it seems internet data package on mobile phones is the reply to the problems in India. As mobile phones remain with us most of the time, it is as if we are ready to face the world if our mobile phones have a data package. Yes, several television commercials in India are gleefully harping on the notes of knowledge, empowerment and freedom. Moreover, internet is being identified as a virtual institution.</p>
<p>The essay proposes to look into those advertisements which talk about the internet to promote data packages, mobile phones or apps. Through this, the essay firstly, would like to construct the idea of the internet using the Indian citizen who is depicted as smart and almost infallible. Secondly, on the other hand, the essay would analyse how an affirmative and constructive view of using the internet in the minds of citizens has been generated by these advertisements, like the virtual world of the internet can save you from any drastic situation.</p>
<p>Advertisements are creative constructs, which have a strong aptitude to entice target consumers. While studying the internet in India, studying the ‘texts’ of Indian advertisements which refer to the act of ‘consuming’ the internet could result in an interesting study.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Sailen Routray - 'The Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar'</h3>
<p>Those of us who have jumped or meandered across to the wrong (or perhaps the right) side of thirty by now, first came to consume internet in what were called, and are still called, cyber cafes or internet cafes. Their numbers in big Indian cities is dwindling because of the increasing ubiquity of smartphone, and netbooks and data cards. The cyber café seems to be inexorably headed the way of the STD booth in the geography of large Indian cities. The present paper is a preliminary step towards capturing some of the experience of running and using internet cafes. With ethnographic fieldwork with cyber café owners and internet users in these cafes in the Chandrasekharpur area of Bhubaneswar (where the largest section of the computer industry in the state of Odisha is located), this paper tries to capture experiences that lie at the interstices of ‘objects’ and spaces - experiences that are at the same time a history of the internet as well as a personal history of the city.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Sarah McKeever - 'Quantity over Quality: Social Media and the New Class System in India'</h3>
<p>From the humblest mobile phones to the most sophisticated computers, the Internet is everywhere and nowhere in India. The boundaries, the contours of the space remain nebulous and opaque. When engaging with social media in urban India in particular, we are bound to the conventions of corporations which demand quantity over quality creating a new class system of the Internet: those who are “active” – and therefore a “better” user – and those who have seemingly failed to keep up with the demands of the medium, buried in the ever‐growing noise and chaos. The creation of a new class system on the Internet, based on Western corporate desire for data, has shaped who is seen and heard on the Internet in India.</p>
<p>Based on fieldwork in New Delhi which examines the impact of the Internet on offline social movements – including the anti corruption movement in 2011 and the Delhi Rape Case in 2012 – I will argue that the study of the Internet in India can reinforce Western corporate conceptions of how to use the Internet properly among various users involved in the movements. By challenging these preconceptions, this essay will engage with issues of Western corporate notions of Internet use and how we engage with and find participants, how we evaluate what is “good” use of the Internet, and the creation of a new class system on the Internet in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Smarika Kumar - 'Governing Speech on the Internet: Transforming the Public Sphere through Policymaking'</h3>
<p>In the privatised spaces of the World Wide Web and the internet, how does one make sense of speech? Should speech in such a space be understood as the product of a marketplace of ideas? Or should its role in democratic participation be recognised by contextualising the internet as part of the Habermasian public sphere? These questions have interesting implications for the regulation of speech on the internet, as they employ different principles in understanding speech. Recent scholarship has argued for the benefits of employing the public sphere approach to the internet and thus recognising its democratic potential. But taking into account that all speech is inherently made in private spaces on the internet, the application of this
approach is far from simple.</p>
<p>This creates a tension between the marketplace of ideas and the public sphere approaches to speech on the internet in policymaking. I propose to explore how legal and regulatory mechanisms manage these tensions by
creating governance frameworks for the internet: I argue that through the use of policy and regulation, the private marketplace of the internet is sought to be reined in and reconciled to the public sphere, which is mostly represented through legislations governing the internet. I propose that this less-than-perfect reconciliation then manages to modify the very idea of the public sphere itself in the Indian context, by infusing participation of the "other" on the internet through indirect means.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/studying-internet-in-india-selected-abstracts'>https://cis-india.org/raw/studying-internet-in-india-selected-abstracts</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroResearchers at WorkFeaturedInternet StudiesRAW Blog2015-08-28T06:53:33ZBlog Entry Studying Internet in India (2016): Selected Abstracts
https://cis-india.org/raw/studying-internet-in-india-2016-selected-abstracts
<b>We received some great submissions and decided to select twelve abstracts, and not only ten as we planned earlier. Here are the abstracts.</b>
<p> </p>
<h3><strong>Abhimanyu Roy</strong></h3>
<p><strong><em>The Curious Incidents on Matrimonial Websites in India</em></strong></p>
<p>What is love? Philosophers have argued over it, biologists have researched it and in the age of the internet, innovators have disrupted it. In the west, dating websites such as OKCupid and eHarmony use all manner of algorithms to find its users their optimal match. In India’s conservative society though, dating is fast-tracked or skipped altogether in favor of marriage. This gives rise to a plethora of matrimonial sites such as Jeevansathi.com and Shaadi.com. This is where things get tricky.</p>
<p>Matrimonial websites are different from other internet-enabled services. The gravity of the decision and the major impact that it has on the lives of users brings in pressure and a range of emotions that are not there on casual transactions such as an Uber ride or a foodpanda order. From outright fraud to online harassment newspaper back pages are filled with nightmare stories that begin on a matrimonial website. So much so, that in November of last year, the Indian government decided to set up a panel to regulate matrimonial sites in order to curb abuse. The essay will analyze India’s social stand on marriage, the role of matrimonial websites in modern day India, the problems this awkward amalgamation of the internet and love gives rise to and the steps authorities and matrimonial companies are taking to prevent these issues from occurring.</p>
<h3><strong>Anita Gurumurthy, Nandini Chami, and Deepti Bharthur</strong></h3>
<p><strong><em>Internet as Sutradhar: The Aesthetics and Politics of Digital Age Counter-power</em></strong></p>
<p>The open Internet is now a feeble, wannabe, digital age meme. The despots have grabbed it and capitalism has colonised it. But the network that engulfs its users is also a multi-headed organism; the predictables have to make peace with the unpredictables, both arising as they do with the unruly affordances of the network. The much celebrated public domain of open government data, usually meant for geeks and software gurus dedicated to the brave new 'codeful' future, has meant little for marginal subjects of India's development project. Data on government websites have been critiqued worldwide for often being too clunky to catalyse civic use or too obscure to pin down government efficacy. However, as an instrument of accountable governance, data in the public domain can help hold the line, fuelling vanguard action to foster democracy. Activists engaged in the right to food movement in India had reason to rejoice recently when the Supreme Court of India pulled up the central government for delay in release of funds under the MGNREGA scheme and violating the food security law. The series of actions leading to this victory enjoins deeper examination of the MGNREGS website, the design principles of the MIS that generates reports based on the data, and the truth claims that arose in the contingent context marking this struggle. <em>What were the ingredients of this happy irony; the deployment of the master's tools to disband the master's house? What aesthetics and principles made for a public data structure that allowed citizens to hack into state impunity? And what do such practices around the digital tell us about the performativity of the Internet - not as a grand, open, phenomenon for the network to access the multitude, but as the inane, local, Sutradhar (alchemist who produces the narrative), who allows truths to be told?</em></p>
<h3><strong>Aishwarya Panicker</strong></h3>
<p><strong><em>How Green is the Internet? The Good, the Bad and the Ugly</em></strong></p>
<p>Groceries at your doorstep, data on your fingertips, an Uber at the tap of a button and information overload- human negotiations with the internet have definitely changed drastically in the past few decades. Research in the area, too, has transformed to not just the supply of internet to the masses, but has evolved to include innovative and revolutionary ideas in terms of internet infrastructure and governance. With over 3.2 Billion internet users in the world, and over 400 million of these from India, this is no surprise.</p>
<p>However, while environmental sustainability remains at the forefront of many-a-government, there is little data / debate / analysis / examination of the environmental impact of the internet. This is true especially for India. In 2011, Joel Gombiner wrote an academic paper on the problem of the Internets carbon footprint, with a premise based on the lesser known fact that the ICT industry has been ‘responsible for two to four percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions’- an area that the Climate Group’s Smart 2020 report had focused on back in 2008 as well. Clearly this is a war on the environment that is yet to receive large-scale attention.</p>
<p>How can we move beyond particular fascinations with the internet and engage holistically with the internet? By moving towards a dimension of internet infrastructure studies, that has large policy and implementation benefits. This paper, then, will seek to elucidate four central issue areas: first, as the third highest country in terms of internet use, what is the current environmental impact of internet usage in India? Second, are there any regulatory provisions that give prescriptive measures to data centres and providers? Third, do any global standards
exist in this regard and finally, what future steps can be taken (by the government, civil society
and individuals) to address this?</p>
<h3><strong>Deepak Prince</strong></h3>
<p>One of the most important effects of increasing internet connectivity coupled with universal electronic display screens, multimedia digital objects and supple graphic interfaces, is the proliferation of systems of enunciation. The business letter, typewriter, electric telegraph and radio, each in its own time, transformed how humans make sense in different forms of writing. Some of these survive to this day (forms of address from letters, the abbreviations and ‘cablese’ from telegraph operators etc). Now, we find new spaces of networked sociality emerging at rapid speeds, and everyday, we forget many others that are now outdated, no longer ‘supported’ or desired. How does one study this supple flow of discourse? Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of tracing collective assemblages of enunciation (the structuring structures of discourse) and Gilbert Simondon’s Law of relaxation (where technical elements created by complex ensembles are released into a path of technological evolution where they may or may not crystallize the formation of new ensembles) are two philosophical notions that seek to address this problem. The anthropologist Ilana Gershon suggests that new social media platforms like Facebook have a detrimental effect on sociality because they impose a neo-liberal notion of personhood on its users, through the interface. I take this as my point of departure, and based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a new media marketing agency, I attempt to draw out how ‘posting’ is modulated on facebook, about how subjectivity is configured within the complex matrix comprising a constant flow of posts, the economy of ‘liking’, algorithmic sorting and affects that do not cross the threshold of the screen.</p>
<h3><strong>Maitrayee Mukerji</strong></h3>
<p>By some latest estimates, around 35% of the population access the Internet in India using multiple devices. As Indians browse, search, transact and interact online, one can observe the increasing intertwining of the Internet in their everyday lives. But, how much do we know about the influence and impact of the Internet on Indian and in India? Advances in big data technologies provide an exciting opportunity for social science researchers to study the Internet. So, trends can be detected, opinions and sentiments can be calibrated, social networks can be discovered by using technologies for collecting and mining data on people online. But are social science researchers in India equipped enough to do a rigorous and detailed study of the India? Leaving aside debates on epistemology, ontology and methodology of researching Internet using big data analytics, the very first challenge is
limited access to data. A cursory scan of the available research would indicate that the data – tweets, trends, comments, memes etc. have generally been collected manually. The bulk of the data is collected by private companies and available either at a price or by writing programs to access them through APIs. The latter allows only limited extraction of data and more often than not has a learning curve. Access to raw data, through institutional repositories or special permission, if available is only to select few. Legal and ethical issues arise if one considers scrapping websites for data. The essay is an attempt to articulate the challenges in accessing data while making attempts to study the Internet using big data analytics.</p>
<h3><strong>Muhammed Afzal P</strong></h3>
<p><strong><em>Internet Memes as Effective Means of Social and Political Criticism</em></strong></p>
<p>By looking at the user-generated memes posted from the Malayalam Facebook pages “Troll Malayalam” and “International Chalu Union”, this essay argues that political memes function as effective means of social and political criticism in Kerala. In a society where conversations often tend to feature examples from popular films, memes from these pages use images from popular culture including television to respond to current affairs as well as contemporary social and political questions. Often described mistakenly as 'trolls' by the practitioners themselves, a major portion of the memes have a progressive content in terms of discussing questions related to religion, sexuality, nationalism, etc. It won’t be an exaggeration to state that many Malayalis see these memes as instant 'news analysis' of current affairs. The argument of this essay will be advanced through an analysis of the memes that were produced in relation to contemporary socio-political and cultural questions such as beef ban, the rise of right-wing politics in Kerala, the question of religious conservatism, etc. Through this the essay seeks to investigate how internet memes creatively contribute to social movements and also to see how critical questions in cultural criticism are translated into "the popular.'</p>
<h3><strong>Dr. Ravikant Kisana</strong></h3>
<p><strong><em>Archetyping the 'Launda' Humor on the Desi Internet</em></strong></p>
<p>Humor on the internet has proven a massive social unifying force for young, upper class Indian millennials. The humor is not just consumed via Western (mainly US) humor collectives such as 9GAG, Cracked, etc - the proliferation of 'Indian' humor pages on the Facebook and the countless YouTube comedy channels is testament to the localisation of this content. However, the humor which is seen as a unifying force is largely 'launda' aka. 'heteronormative-upper caste-male' in its sensibilities. Comedy collectives like TVF, with its popular channel 'Q-tiyapa' had to create a separate handle 'Girliyapa' to cater to feminist themes. The idea is that humor by default is male, and 'feminist humor' needs a separate space.</p>
<p>This essay seeks to study the 'launda'-cultural attributes of online Indian humor. It will seek to document and wean archetypes of comedy tropes which fit this mode. The area of the documentation will be YouTube comedy channels and Facebook humor pages—however, the same can be extended to Twitter handles and the suchlike.</p>
<h3><strong>Siddharth Rao and Kiran Kumar</strong></h3>
<p><strong><em>Chota Recharge and the Chota Internet</em></strong></p>
<p>Uniform and affordable Internet is emerging as one of the fundamental civil rights in developing countries. However in India, the connectivity is far from uniform across the regions, where the disparity is evident in the infrastructure, the cost of access and telecommunication services to provide Internet facilities among different economic classes. In spite of having a large mobile user base, the mobile Internet are still remarkably slower in some of the developing countries. Especially in India, it falls below 50% even in comparison with the performance of its developing counterparts!</p>
<p>This essay presents a study of connectivity and performance trends based on an exploratory analysis of mobile Internet measurement data from India. In order to assess the state of mobile networks and its readiness in adopting the different mobile standards (2G, 3G, and 4G) for commercial use, we discuss the spread, penetration, interoperability and the congestion trends.</p>
<p>Based on our analysis, we argue that the network operators have taken negligible measures to scale the mobile Internet. Affordable Internet is definitely for everyone. But, the affordability of the Internet in terms of cost
does not necessarily imply the rightful access to Internet services. Chota recharge is possibly leading us to chota (shrunken) Internet!</p>
<h3><strong>Smarika Kumar</strong></h3>
<p><strong><em>Why Mythologies are Crucial to Understand Governance on the Internet: The Case of Online Maps</em></strong></p>
<p>How does one study internet in India? This essay proposes to provide one possible answer to this question through its central argument that internet, like other technologies, is very much a part of a “mythological” or “fictional” narrative of the history of this country, and without an understanding of these mythologies, the development of internet governance in the country cannot be hoped to be understood. This central argument is traced in the essay through the debates and discussions on law and policymaking around online maps. The essay, in its first part, explores what a “mythological” account of the history of India might mean, and what role technological developments play in it. It does so by tracing the narrative of mapmaking in medieval India and its deep ties with magic, secrecy and mythical stories. It then surveys how modern mapping surveys in the colonial period interacted with the idea of the “native”, and argues that such interactions created a dichotomy between “native” sciences, folklore on the one hand, and colonial achievements, national security on the other. It argues that it is this latter strand of a certain “national security” vision of technology which found dominant voice in the regulation
of maps in India post-independence, yet the sense of the unknown, mystical, or “mythological” in such technological deployment as mapmaking requires, survived. The essay finally uses such evidence to trace how even in online
interactions, and internet governance design in India- this aspect of the mystical and the fear of it often sustains, driven by a (repressed?) memory of mythology, through the use of analogies. And it is within this twilight
zone, within this frontier between “mythology” and nation-building, that a governance design for online maps is being presently constructed in India. The essay then argues that it becomes crucial to understand such mythologies around technology generally and internet specifically and the manner they interact with law and policymaking in order to really get a sense of a 21st century India’s experience of the internet.</p>
<h3><strong>Sujeet George</strong></h3>
<p><strong><em>Understanding Reddit: The Indian Context</em></strong></p>
<p>Even as social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter seek to carve a niche within the Indian social media landscape, the presence and impact of news aggregator website reddit seems relatively unnoticed. Known for its excessive self-referentiality and inability to emerge from a restricted pool of informational flow, reddit nevertheless has come to be a major focal point of convergence of news and public opinion, especially in the United States. The web interface, which allows for users with overlapping interests to converge under a common platform namely the “subreddit,” allows the possibility of understanding questions of user taste and the directions in which information and user attention flow.</p>
<p>This paper seeks to offer a preliminary gesture towards understanding reddit’s usage and breadth in the Indian context. Through an analysis of the “India” subreddit and examining the manner and context in which information and ideas are shared, proposed, and debunked, the paper aspires to formulate a methodology for interrogating sites like reddit that offer the possibilities of social mediation, even as users maintain a limited amount of privacy. At the
same time, to what extent can such news aggregator sites direct the ways in which opinions and news flows change course as a true marker of information generation responding to user inputs.</p>
<h3><strong>Supratim Pal</strong></h3>
<p>India, being a multilingual country, owes a lot to the Internet for adding words to the vocabulary of everyday use in different languages.</p>
<p>This paper would critically examine how Net words like "selfie", "wall", "profile" and others have changed the way Indians write or talk. For example, a word like "nijaswi" was not there in Bengali language five years back but is used across several platforms as a translation of "selfie".</p>
<p>On one hand, computer-mediated communication (CMC) has helped us to express in short messages and on the other, we all have picked up use of punctuation marks like colon or a semicolon to express our emotion - which have got another name, "emoticons".</p>
<p>The paper would be more practical in approach than theoretical. For example, it would feature chat (another example of CMC) conversations 10 years ago when hardly an emoticon was used, and that of today's when we cannot think of a chat without a "smiley" or a "sticker". Even the linguist, David Crystal, probably could not have thought that in 15 years, the language (not just lingua franca, English) would change worldwide since he first tried to theorize Internet language in 2001.</p>
<p>Today, a linguist need not to have a proper publication to introduce a word in any language but Netizens can re-invent words like "troll" or "roast" to criticize one or "superlike" to celebrate an achievement or even "unfriend" someone to just relax.</p>
<h3><strong>Surfatial</strong></h3>
<p>Surfatial is a trans-local collective that operates through the internet. We use conversations to aid learning outside established structures. We are concerned with enabling disinhibition through the internet, for expressing
what may not be feasible in physical reality. What role does partial or complete anonymity play in this process of seeking “safe” zones of expression? Fake profiles on social media offer such zones, while perhaps also operating to propagate, mislead or troll.</p>
<p>Our essay would argue:</p>
<ol><li>That there is a desire to participate in speculative fora in the Indian cultural context and the internet has created space for philosophical questioning among contemporary Indian participants which can develop further, despite common assertions that online spaces are largely uncivil and abusive.</li>
<li>That anonymous and pseudonymous content production offers a method for exploring and expressing with a certain degree of freedom.</li>
<li>Spam-like methods used in sub-cultural outreach efforts on social media have proved effective in puncturing filter bubbles.</li></ol>
<p>Our essay would be drawn from experiments via Surfatial’s online engagement platforms (Surfatial’s Study groups and post_writer project) to examine:</p>
<ol><li>Extent of participation.</li>
<li>Disinhibition facilitation and dialoguing.</li>
<li>Reach.</li>
<li>Emergence and development of ideas.</li>
<li>Creating an archive of internet activity and re-processing it into new forms of presentation.</li></ol>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/studying-internet-in-india-2016-selected-abstracts'>https://cis-india.org/raw/studying-internet-in-india-2016-selected-abstracts</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroResearchers at WorkFeaturedInternet StudiesRAW Blog2016-07-06T06:24:42ZBlog EntryNot a Goodbye; More a ‘Come Again’: Thoughts on being Research Director at a moment of transition
https://cis-india.org/raw/not-a-goodbye-more-a-come-again
<b>As I slowly make the news of my transition from being the Research Director at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, to taking up a professorship at the Leuphana University, Lueneburg, Germany, there is a question that I am often asked: “Are you going to start a new research centre?” And the answer, for the most part, is “No.”</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Not because I don’t see the value of creating institutional spaces like these or that starting and running CIS has been anything short of a dream, but because I don’t how to. When I tell people I don’t know how CIS came into being, they suspect that I am being either facetious or dismissive. But I am not. If somebody asked me to write an Origin Story for CIS, I would be baffled – or probably sum it up by saying that it happened. There was the germ of an idea, a whole lot of people who responded to it, and like the great Tolkienian epic, it was a story that grew in its telling.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I was 27, when Sunil Abraham, the now Executive Director and I met together in New Delhi, to talk about what a research organisation that represents the public interest at the intersections of Internet & Society would look like. We spent three days in the Delhi heat, coming up with the most fantastic ideas about methods, structures and core areas of interest. It was one of those divine exercises where you build the template for your dream work and then, like a fairy-tale, we had incredible people who came and supported us to make that dream a reality. In six months of that first conversation – I had just turned 28 and was completing the last drafts of my Ph.D. dissertation – CIS got officially registered and with some of the most incredible people, who have been with us, both in their generous affective investment as well as in their intellectual and professional support, we kicked-off a research centre, that has become not only hard to ignore but also significantly important in bringing about scholarly and practice based research around the different facets of how the emergence and widespread reach of the Internet is changing the ways in which we become human, social and political in emerging information societies of the Global South.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the 7 years since that first conversation started, I have learned so much from CIS and the networks that built around it, that it would be impossible to write an exhaustive account of it. However, as I now take up a new position at the CIS as a member of its board, and continue to collaborate with the on-the-ground teams intellectually, from my new position as a Professor, there are five things I want to dwell upon, more to remind myself of important lessons learned, but also as approaches that the new director and team might want to reference:</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Research cannot be individually focused</b><br />One of the things that academic training does is that it promotes the idea of an individual researcher. We write, publish, seek grants and present our work, taking individual credit and building a body of work that is centred on us. True, we collaborate and we participate and we are opening up more distributed modes of learning and research, but at the end of the day, there is still an imagination of a research community that is built of individual scholars who work in a happy symbiosis and synthesis.<br /><br />The biggest lesson I learned with the CIS was that research requires collectives – peers, supporters, and critics – that can help materialise a vision. Instead of trying to do ‘my’ research, it was the first time that I was enabling others’ research. I had a say in building the research vision, and establishing protocols of rigour and review, but to have a dream, and then to share it with others, so that it becomes a collective dream was an incredible experience. It was the beginning of a method that I hope informs all my work, where research methods are constantly going to accommodate for and be shaped by collective visions and approaches rather than just the individual as a lone warrior. More than anything else, it reassures us that we are not alone, either in our triumphs or our road-blocks, and it builds a community of thinkers that is more important than just the single authored outputs that we bring out.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Research requires infrastructure</b><br />Institutions are infrastructure. However, our jobs are so segregated, that we don’t always realise the incredible effort that goes into building such institutions and then making them work as efficient infrastructure to support research. It is very rare, in research publications that we thank our everyday office staff, the accounts team that processes the complicated bureaucracies of research funding, the programme managers who create networks and evaluation formats, or the numerous people who perform ‘non-research’ jobs so that we can do the research. <br /><br />I had worked in project and programme manager positions before CIS. I had also worked as an independent researcher and consultant before that. But this was the first time I actually took the dual responsibility of not only initiating research but also providing the infrastructure for it. And I know that I am a wiser person for it. The intricate world of fund-raising, managing and developing networks, of implementing and monitoring research projects and contracts, and the need to constantly find sustainable options for the research programmes is something that requires an incredible amount of effort and resources. The researchers often are kept away from this world, or we often just ignore the intense quotidian activities that give us the privilege of doing our work, and my time with CIS taught me not only to appreciate this, but also to recognise these tasks as research.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>All research must try and answer the ‘So What?’ question</b><br />Within academic circles, research has inherent value. We do have the freedom to develop new frameworks and ideas that might not have any immediate relevance and might in fact even fail without seeing the light of day. Academia is privileged because as long as we perform our pedagogic tasks, we have the space to experiment and often work on areas that might not benefit anybody outside the disciplines that we are located in.<br /><br />At CIS, working at such close quarters with colleagues who are experts in policy and regulation, research became critical for me. It wasn’t research for research’s sake. It was research with a cause. At the same time, making the research relevant was not an exercise in dumbing it down so that it can be reduced to easy implementation. The effort required at making academic and intellectual research accessible, while still retaining its complexity has been a heady experience for me. Since CIS, I have tried to make sure that all research is able to answer the ‘So What?’ question, and every time, it has made the research more robust, more rigorous and having a greater audience and impact than it would otherwise have. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>To be a research organisation is to be unafraid</b><br />One of the most fantastic things about being a young research organisations was that we were not afraid to voice our opinions and voice them loud. In the last 6 years, CIS has evolved into a strong voice that is not unanimous, but is still clear. We have had disagreements with established research and policy actors. We have critiqued decisions taken by policy and development institutions when we felt that they were flawed. We have provided a critical commentary to different instruments of law and regulation when necessary. We have challenged academic researchers in their methodology as well as in their disconnect from the ‘real world’. And we did it, because early on, the people who guided us, taught us, that research organisations have to be unafraid. <br /><br />Unafraid, not just to ask tough questions of those outside, but also of asking tough questions internally. The team, as it has grown, has been a smorgasbord of disciplinary and stakeholder locations. We don’t necessarily speak the same language. We don’t also, agree on many critical points. But we never tried to be a consensus generation institute. Instead, we learned to coexist and even collaborate in our differences – it was something that external partners often had problems with. How can one set of people work towards critically opposing a phenomenon when others might actually write in favour of some of the aspects of that same phenomenon? How is it possible that some in the institute have great collaborations with a network that the others critique persistently in their work? These tensions, for me, have been generative and I hope that they continue, both in the institution but also in my future work.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Researchers are people too</b><br />This is one of the strangest things to realise, but it is a good lesson to remember. Academia and research work through abstractions. At some point, the researchers become names. They become only a body of work, a certain number of words. But dealing with researchers is to deal with human beings. We have to remember that researchers, while they are often driven and passionate and unable to extricate their lives from their work, do have lives and bodies and socialities that need to be managed. Institutions often get driven by matrices of measurement and politics of promotion and evaluation, at the neglect of the people who actually build it. The constant push at CIS was to recognise that we are all too human in our everyday lives. And to build work environments, relationships and spaces that nurture the people we work with is the primary responsibility of all research. <br /><br />These points are probably too vague, but this blog post is already too long. I just wanted to take this opportunity to write some ‘Notes to the self’ about things that have been the most important to me in being the co-founder and Research Director at the Centre for Internet and Society. And now, it is time for me to move on. I want to place myself in an academic setting where I learn, I get some headspace to think and write, and do the one thing that I enjoy the most – teach. Starting 1st October 2014<a href="#fn*" name="fr*">[*] </a>I am stepping down as the Research Director and taking up a professorship in a new and exciting university, designing courses and research agendas at the intersections of internet studies, media studies, culture studies and aesthetic studies, bringing together some of my most passionate areas of interest. However, I continue to be interested and invested in CIS’ institutional growth. I shall be a part of the search committee as we invite a new Research Director in the Bangalore office, I shall be a part of the Board that governs the CIS, and I shall always think of CIS as my home, continuing mentoring and implementing existing collaborations but also building more, especially towards the pedagogic and knowledge production side of things.<br /><br />When the final decisions about this transition were made last week, I had thought I would be emotional and heart broken. Instead, I only feel excited. I have a wonderful set of colleagues in Bangalore, and they, in turn, are at the centre of networks of support, love, empathy and trust. CIS will benefit from having a new Research Director who will bring new visions, new methods, new processes and infrastructure to the table, and I hope that as my own academic career grows, I shall find myself returning to CIS in different capacities and roles, both for what I could contribute to it, but also for what I continue to learn from the rich range and variety of activities that it anchors.</li>
</ol>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr*" name="fn*">*</a>].For me, this is not a goodbye, but just a change in roles at the CIS. I will continue to use my CIS credentials and email address, and will be found on the existing contact details there for any queries or interactions with and on behalf of the CIS. So no need to change your address books, just yet.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/not-a-goodbye-more-a-come-again'>https://cis-india.org/raw/not-a-goodbye-more-a-come-again</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at WorkFeaturedInternet StudiesResearch2014-06-15T02:17:06ZBlog Entry