Tag: Internet governance

It’s not over yet, let’s keep the gears of net neutrality moving

Hindustan Times (edited)
May 1, 2015

By Vasudevan Mukunth & Anuj Srivas

On November 26, 2008, when most of India was getting ready to turn in for the night, those people that turned on their television were in for a rude shock. A group of terrorists had stormed the Taj Mahal and Oberoi Hotels, taking hundreds of guests hostage.

As it turned out, our law enforcement authorities were in for an equally rude shock after they discovered that the gunmen were using BlackBerry devices to communicate; a communication channel that, at the time, the Indian government did not have real-time access to.

Less than a month later after the 26/11 attacks, Parliament passed an amendment bill to the Information Technology Act, 2000 which was primarily aimed at intercepting communications that threatened the security of the State, but also included a few nasty surprises such as the now struck-down Section 66 A.

What was more astonishing, however, was that the amendments were passed without debate or any sort of discussion and, apart from a few sparsely scattered voices, were met with very little outrage.

The Indians for Internet freedom

This is in stark contrast to the groundswell of visible opposition that has risen in response to the TRAI consultation paper on regulation of over-the-top services. A sustained and successful campaign has been waged on Twitter by a group of activists, artists, journalists, lawyers and scholars over the last month, to mobilize public debate and prompt calls for the government to preserve net neutrality.

The rise of this movement, which has seen support from hard-working politicians to Bollywood actors, is a phenomenon that deserves to be celebrated and can only be a positive development for India’s mushrooming online population.  And yet, in its present form, it needs to encourage greater nuance in the general debate while transforming into something that will remain sustainable in the long run.

The surge started in the last week of March and picked up steam around April 11. By April 18 (at the time of writing this), some tweeters had claimed more than 100,000 emails had been sent to TRAI via savetheinternet.in, the lightning-rod website set up to give fist-shakers something to do.

By this time, telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had announced that the Department of Telecom would set up a committee to “look into” and ensure the preservation of net neutrality in India, although no specifics were mentioned.

Nonetheless, the movement in question was something that didn’t manifest itself when Section 66 A was drawn up and passed. Of course, it has been eight years since then, and in that time, not only has social media matured into a formidable agent for change, there are more people willing to devote time and speak out.

The spectrum of support

Enmeshed in the movement are also mediapersons and politicians, many hankering for a bite of the mileage an agglomeration of public opinion usually offers. Media establishments such as the Times of India and NDTV had signed up to be a part of Facebook’s internet.org initiative earlier this year. Earlier this month, however, after public outrage, they backed away from the initiative and asserted their commitment to net neutrality instead.

The questions beg to be asked: what did the organisations think they were signing up for, and is their commitment to net neutrality sincere? In the best case scenario, it signals a complete lack of awareness and in the worst, it smacks of opportunism.

And the political class refuses to be left out. The DMK’s MK Stalin, son of party supremo M Karunanidhi, issued a statement saying, “This attempt to increase the profits of the telecom companies by surrendering social gains should be condemned. I request the TRAI to dismiss this proposal and let the internet continue to be a neutral medium which serves our country and community instead of a select few companies.” Was this the first time Stalin has said anything about Internet governance?

At the other end of the spectrum, we have politicians like BJD MP Tathagata Satpathy and Kerala’s Rajeev Chandrasekher who have been able to articulate the reasons behind what has been consistent support. However, what is more important is that the online movement against net neutrality is forcing politicians across the spectrum to understand and speak the language of the Internet. After all, the term “net neutrality” is now part of the conversation at the DMK HQ.

Open up the debate

In Andhra Pradesh, in fact, the debate over net neutrality will be closer home. The local government has an app called AP Speaks that’s been bundled along with Facebook’s internet.org in state circles. It allows citizens and residents of Andhra Pradesh to give advice or feedback to the government on a number of subjects. How does this co-exist with our current conceptualization of net neutrality and zero-rating? Is there any situation by which zero-rating could be useful for India’s low-income Internet population? The debate in its present form concedes no space for such perspectives, treating net neutrality as a monolithic idea.

And by voting for net neutrality once a year and creating committees to vocalize the government’s stand every time a ‘wave’ erupts on Twitter is not going to be of any help if there isn’t also a mechanism to ensure commitments don’t flag. The government has to explicitly define what it means by net neutrality, which parts it intends to safeguard and how. Overall, it must be loyal to the idea of keeping active watch over entry-barriers and impose penalties on attempts at traffic-shaping.

The movement’s skepticism showed best when TRAI’s consultation paper – a document asking what should be done – was interpreted as being suggestive. The TRAI servers were flooded with hundreds of thousands of emails from people concerned about the violation of net neutrality even as it seemed everyone knew the source of ‘evil’ was the telecom companies.

On April 17, the Amazon India homepage sported a banner claiming it fully supported net neutrality and – more important – that TRAI was planning to allow telcos an “extreme violation of net neutrality”. If it was the BJP-led government’s plan to scapegoat TRAI and then project a beneficent entity in the form of a committee constituted by the DoT, which has been hailed as a good thing, it worked splendidly without the government having issued a single unsolicited statement on Internet governance.

On the other hand, its response seems a poisoned reflection of the on-the-ground movement. The people involved are, colloquially speaking, good people, sincere practitioners of their professions. What could give more weight to their ambitions is the presence of an institution or two. So where are they?

Keep moving the gears

In 2012, in the U.S., during the online movement against the proposed implementation of the SOPA and PIPA Acts, social media was at the forefront – but it was also backed up by activist institutions such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the benevolent clout of organizations such as Wikipedia and Reddit.

In India, the social media movement is there. But there were and are no institutions, no agents to cohere the debate, no doors to knock on after the “Save the Net” wave has passed. Already the government is known to be working on a replacement for Section 66 A. Who will call for a fight, or should we just wait and hope AIB will make another video?

The more vocal think-tanks like the Centre for Internet and Society and the Centre for Communication Governance are prohibited from grassroots activism or campaigning/lobbying as part of their charter and conditions attached to their funding.

Nevertheless, this is a great start; something that will hopefully lead to and surpass the Internet freedom ecosystem in the US. What is missing, however, is an institutionalized ecosystem comprising different actors. It is that which keeps the machinery moving even during times of peace, forever on the road to change.

Alibaba IPO – A vindication of China’s Internet?

This is a guest post contributed by Anuj Srivas, tech. journalist and blogger, until recently the author of Hypertext, The Hindu.

The differences between Jack Ma – the founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba – and an average Silicon Valley CEO are numerous and far-reaching. Mr. Ma’s knowledge of mathematics, for instance, was once so poor that it almost prevented him from attending college. Contrast this to the technological genius of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak or the academic-based origins of Google’s search algorithm.

His background as an English teacher, who dabbled in a number of different sectors before being fascinated by the Internet industry, is more characteristic of the average American investor that was duped by the dot-com bubble than it is of a Bill Gates or a Mark Zuckerberg.

And yet, today, Alibaba stands shoulder-to-shoulder with much of Silicon Valley. Its recently launched initial public offering (IPO) raked in a little over $20 billion, turning it into the world’s biggest technology flotation.

Is this event an inflection point? To some, it may seem to be a natural course of affairs after Yahoo! threw Alibaba a lifeline back in 2005. But is there something else to take away from it other than the obvious comparisons with India’s fledgling Internet industry?

Foremost, it is enormously pleasing to see Jack Ma, like Lenovo’s YY, clearly avoid subscribing to the Silicon Valley ideology of ‘transparency through opacity’. The CEOs of Google, Yahoo!, Facebook and Microsoft paint a picture of openness, sharing, and transparency wherever they go. The world of the cloud seems to make life easier (“look, no wires!”) but in fact wraps its users in an opaque black box. We have no tools that allow us to track our information and data, let alone allow us to take charge.

Of course, Mr. Ma (who sticks to doling out life and management tips in his speeches) is clearly constrained by the circumstances that allowed Alibaba to become what it is today: namely, the way China views, approaches and governs its Internet. This brings us to one of the more interesting implications of Alibaba’s IPO.

For decades now, China has been the poster-boy for how the Internet would look if we stopped fighting for a transparent, open and censorship-free system. The Great Firewall of China has continued to stand, quite proudly, in the face of international criticism.

The country itself has managed to make more than one U.S technology company come around to its way of thinking. As US government official Tom Lantos commented after Yahoo actively helped China in its censorship efforts, “While technologically and financially you [Yahoo!] are giants, morally you are pygmies.”

What are we to take away from the fact that China is in the process of undergoing one of its harshest ever Internet censorship/crackdown periods since 2003 (when it started construction of its Firewall) while Alibaba may yet go down in history as the biggest technology IPO ever? China’s approach to the Internet is a deadly mixture of censorship, propaganda and protectionism. The victory of Alibaba at the New York Stock Exchange will prove to be fodder for three takeaways.

First, that China’s protectionism-censorship stance (there cannot be one without the other) works. Despite years of criticism and threatened sanctions, China currently houses three of the world’s ten most valuable technology companies. After Alibaba’s IPO, how can Beijing look at its Internet governance approach with anything but approval? This is a moment of triumph for the country’s Internet regulators.

Second, that investors do not, and will not ever, care about censorship.

Third: will other countries, already outraged by the NSA and the Snowden incident, be emboldened to take China-like steps when it comes to governing their local Internet industries? There is little doubt that most countries that need to be build their own digital infrastructure, but China and Russia have shown us that their version of digital sovereignty comes with a lack of privacy and the introduction of a censorship regime. Asian, African and Latin American countries will have to escape this trap; the success of Alibaba does not help this.

On the other hand, this will also prove to be the biggest challenge for China’s Internet. If the country wants its Internet firms to go international, it will find it tough to take refuge behind its current Internet governance policies. Companies like Huawei and ZTE, which are in the telecommunication business, have to constantly defend themselves every time they enter a new country. Alibaba, which of course will not be plagued with national security issues, will have to consciously and unconsciously defend the Chinese Internet wherever it goes.

It would be instructive to monitor Mr. Ma and whichever ideology he chooses to adopt and market in the near future. I have a feeling it will tell us quite a bit about the fate of China’s Internet.

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