On February 25, 2021, the Indian government unveiled a new set of rules aimed at increasing the onus of accountability on social media companies and strengthening their scrutiny to fight the menace of fake news, which often sparks communal tensions in the world’s most populous democracy. Though the industry had been anticipating stricter regulations since 2019, the timing of the government’s move and the urgency with which the Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules, 2021, was notified in the gazette have raised a few eyebrows. While the government termed it a “soft-touch regulatory architecture”, a section of industry watchers see the new guidelines as a response to its month-long tiff with Twitter after the microblogging site was asked to pull down content. According to highly placed sources, an FIR was filed late last year against a Twitter policy executive in India. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment on the matter. Clearly, by introducing the new set of rules the Indian government has signalled that it wants more control over US-based Big-Tech companies. At the same time, the tech industry is divided on the rule book standards set by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for social media players operating in India. While Indian tech companies have welcomed the new guidelines, US-based Big-Tech players are apparently concerned over stringent compliance requirements. According to sources close to the government, these companies were growing big, thanks to the huge, data-driven Indian market, and hence need to be held more “accountable” and “responsible” for their policies. 81377908“The call for responsible freedom and ensuring that no information or data is misleading is key to a diverse democracy like India in curbing the widespread issue of fake news,” the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) said about the new rules. A leaf from EU’s playbook Including in their home country, the US, Big-Tech companies are facing extreme scrutiny on their content moderation policies in several markets such as the European Union (EU), Australia, and the UK. According to government sources, the recently held G7 meeting in Tokyo saw some countries speaking in support of decrypting of messages by platforms such as WhatsApp. According to them, countries such as France, UK, and Australia are moving towards a regime wherein decryption will be mandatory. Interestingly, the EU recently came up with a similar version of the guidelines, the Digital Services Act, which includes similar rules for online intermediary services. The rule book in the EU proposes separate rules for large platforms as they are the gatekeepers. As per that, “gatekeepers” are defined by the special role that they fulfil in a marketplace — one that is defined by their size, the role they play, and their durability in the market. On the basis of size, gatekeepers are defined as large players with huge annual turnover or market capitalisation and with an active presence in several member states. Based on their roles, companies that fall into this category operate as a gateway between a very large number of businesses and individual users. On the durability front, gatekeepers’ entrenched position persists over time. “It is easy to imagine how the combination of those criteria can give gatekeepers an unfair advantage on a given service,” Margrethe Vestager, executive vice-president, in charge of competition policy at the European Commission, had said in December 2020, referring to the new rules for digital platforms. At the Symposium on Digitalisation in The Hague on February 3, 2020, Vestager had said, “We may not have a tech giant like Facebook or Google in Europe. But we do have thousands of world-leading companies. So our industrial strategy needs to show the way for companies like that to reach their potential — and not try to measure our success just by the size of a handful of the very biggest companies”. India seems to be taking a leaf out of the EU playbook when it comes to classifying Big Tech companies and ensuring that they are transparent and held accountable. A handful of domestic apps have even benefitted from the government’s push for Atmanirbhar Bharat. According to sources, Samwad, a messaging app developed by the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT), and Sandes, an instant-messaging app developed by the National Informatics Centre, are being used by government employees for internal communication and the products are being tested as an alternative to WhatsApp. 81377916Andrian Kreye, editor-at-large at German news daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, points out that competing with US-based Big-Tech companies is going to be an uphill task for the smaller ones. “The EU law definitely tries to level the playing field between different EU social media companies with the Big Tech of US. These are established monopolies. A domestic app won’t be able to compete with the likes of Twitter or Facebook. US Big-Tech companies anyways have a big first-mover advantage,” adds Kreye, who has been closely tracking Big-Tech companies in the EU. Creating national champions Though India has followed the footsteps of the EU in drafting the new regulations, but for a relatively lighter compliance burden as against that on their bigger US-based rivals, no additional support has been provided for small social media companies domiciled in the country. Unlike the US and China, India has not been able to create big social media companies. Many in the industry say it’s an irony that despite having a rich talent pool, not a single company like Facebook or WeChat has emerged from the country. Even with all the government backing, home-grown microblogging site Koo has been struggling to attract users on a consistent basis. Under this scenario, industry experts say, regulating US-based Big-Tech firms could prove to be a small part of the solution to make Indians use indigenous platforms. Over the last few years, wide penetration of mobile phones and cheap data prices (as a result of the price war triggered by Reliance Jio’s disruptive entry) has helped both US-based and Chinese social media companies to expand their India footprint at a rapid pace. The wide reach of messaging and social media apps comes with the risk of fake news and disinformation spreading fast, thereby potentially ‘endangering communal harmony’. According to highly placed government sources, to protect its national interests India would follow the UK and Australian model in framing its tech policy. They say India could be moving in the same direction as Australia, which passed a law on February 25, 2021, forcing Facebook and Google to pay local media companies for using the content on their respective platforms. On February 18, 2021, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi had discussed over phone “the progress” on Australia’s News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code Bill, 2020. Fergus Hanson, director of Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s International Cyber Policy Centre, tells ET Prime, “In the short-term, it is highly likely countries around the world will copy Australia’s lead on cracking down on Big Tech, especially the mandatory news media bargaining code. In the medium term, however, the opposite is likely to occur. The logic of bifurcation with China means there will be an ever closer alignment of interests between Western tech companies and democratic governments. That will lead to much closer collaboration replacing the current conflictual relationship”. Traceability: the privacy vs. security debate US instant messaging companies have been tight-lipped on India’s new social media rules classify them as “significant social media intermediaries”. As per the new rules, they will have to trace the first originator of messages and tweets. “There is a question on first originator…who was the first creator of the mischief. Content is retweeted, there is mayhem created on WhatsApp during mob lynching. They will have to tell about the first originator. We don’t like to have the content [of the message] of the first originator….if it’s from outside India, you [social media companies] have to tell who started the mischief in India,” IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said at the press briefing announcing the new rules. Sources close to US Industry tell ET Prime that US tech players could be looking at challenging these rules in Indian courts. And when that happens, traceability and encryption will be debated. WhatsApp has reportedly conveyed that it will not compromise on privacy even after the new rules were notified. Talking to ET Prime, NS Nappinai, Supreme Court lawyer and founder of Cyber Saathi, an online initiative focusing on cyber safety, points out that the “Traceability and its impact on encryption is something which the platforms have to clarify. It appears what is being asked by the government is metadata, which is not encrypted and hence not breaking of encryption. As such, the rule is untenable because of the way [in which] ‘who the first originator’ is being decided. That way, it may be applied to harm individual liberties”. According to some legal experts, tracing the ‘first originator’ could be a tricky affair. Ashish Aggarwal, head of public policy, Nasscom, tells ET Prime, “The guidelines do not mandate breaking of encryption where decryption keys are not available. The reference to decryption rules in the guidelines and the subsequent language make that clear”. The Madras High Court matter on tracking the originator upon lawful demand from a court without diluting encryption is a case in point. However, how the rule book will be interpreted on the field on a day-to-day basis by law enforcement agencies is what the social media companies are worried about. Law enforcement agencies in India have said that they have not been receiving information from social media companies based in the country even after a court order to the effect. 81377946“On the issue of encryption, currently greater and greater access to digital communications is highly appealing to law enforcement agencies around the world, because it makes their lives easier. However, the escalating competition between democracies and China is likely to centre around values. This in turn will see democracies go to increasingly greater lengths to ensure the adoption of surveillance tools is balanced by democratic checks and balances, so they can differentiate the way they treat their citizens from the way authoritarian states do,” Hanson adds. The bottom lineLegal experts in the industry, who are often consulted by some of the US-based Big-Tech companies in India, point out that the biggest concern for social media and messaging platforms would be in interpreting the term ‘first content originator’ in India. They say that these companies are complying with similarly stringent rules on various data-security policies in countries such as Australia and the UK. India is an even larger market for these firms, and hence they wouldn’t want to exit it even though stricter compliance would mean higher costs. Industry watchers see it as a price they need to pay to be present in a vast market such as India. With great power comes great responsibility for the ‘gatekeepers’ of tech. However, the lack of clarity over the interpretation of the term ‘content originator’ could create loopholes in the system that could be exploited to harm civil liberties in certain cases, legal experts warn. Global tech-policy experts warn that governments tracing back the originator of messages may not technically amount to decryption, but it still could be breach of individual privacy. In either case, one thing is certain: the Internet won’t be the same ever again. (Graphics by Sadhana Saxena)
from Economic Times https://ift.tt/38jGDMg
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment