[governance] Sibal snowed in with issues of free speech

[Pranesh Prakash]

There was a meeting yesterday in New Delhi on ITRs, and there will be a 
meeting tomorrow about other free speech issues including s.66A of 
India's Information Technology Act[1].  It is to be seen if tomorrow's 
meeting is an open one.

  [1]: Text of 66A: http://goo.gl/kFBfw | Analysis: http://goo.gl/cdxce

==

<http://goo.gl/Z8msI>

Sibal snowed in with issues of free speech

SHALINI SINGH

Industry, civil society to provide final inputs for ITU meet and local 
laws to be reviewed this week

Taking a liberal view of widespread concerns that India’s proposal on 
International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs) submitted to the ITU 
could lead to online content control to curb freedom of expression, 
Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal on Tuesday committed that he would 
reconsider the language used in the proposal to ensure a match with the 
government’s genuine intent that neither the Internet, Internet traffic 
nor the content falls under ITU control.

Mr. Sibal was speaking at an Open House with industry and civil society 
to discuss the unpalatable components of India’s proposal submitted to 
the ITU on November 3, 2012 in the run-up to final negotiations at the 
World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) 2012 in 
Dubai in December. A total of 193 government delegations are gathering 
in Dubai to renegotiate the ITRs — which are a binding treaty — for the 
first time since 1988.

According to Mr. Sibal, the options of modifying or dropping restrictive 
language remains open till the WCIT meetings begin on December 3. 
Industry and civil society have been requested to provide their final 
language with appropriate reasoning by Thursday.

The meeting was called after industry and civil society wrote to the DoT 
expressing concern over India’s existing proposals, which are at 
variance with their inputs submitted in September while additionally 
using language that could easily slide into content control and 
international regulatory oversight of an inter-governmental body in 
which industry, civil society or technical media have no real voice or 
dispute-related recourse.

Concerns are especially concentrated around the inclusion of the words 
‘ICTs’, ‘processing’, ‘spam’ and ‘provisions’ relating to cyber 
security, since it is feared that these can be interpreted in the final 
treaty as giving access to ‘user information’ to governments, sparking 
off fears of surveillance and content control.

Mr. Sibal’s meeting also comes in the background of several new 
proposals pouring into the ITU, including one from Russia, which is 
fairly explicit in its intent that the Russian government would like to 
control the Internet through the ITU. Russia has included language 
relating to Internet, Internet traffic, Internet access, basic Internet 
infrastructure and importantly, National Internet Section under Article 
2 of the proposals. On the other hand, 27 members of the European 
Parliament have voted against the ITRs being modified in any form or 
shape during the upcoming conference.

At the WCIT, governments will discuss proposals to modify the ITRs in 
the new global environment, and potentially ICTs and the Internet. While 
normal meetings at the ITU are technical, with some commercial aspects, 
this year’s conference in December is highly political and has divided 
the world amongst those who have explicitly stated that they want the 
ITU to have control over the web and issues of Internet governance and 
others that want to keep the cyber world out of the ITU’s control. 
Leading from this is the entire issue of online freedom of speech and 
affordability.

Issues of free speech have been dominating Mr. Sibal’s agenda both on 
the global and domestic fronts. On November 29, at 10 a.m., Mr. Sibal is 
holding a meeting of the ‘Cyber Regulation Advisory Committee’ following 
misuse of the IT Rules under Article 66A by police officials in 
Maharashtra to arrest two young girls for posting some comments on their 
Facebook account. Critics are divided on whether this was excessive use 
of police force or action based on language that lends itself to misuse.

-- 
Pranesh Prakash
Policy Director
Centre for Internet and Society
T: +91 80 40926283 | W: http://cis-india.org
PGP ID: 0x1D5C5F07 | Twitter: @pranesh_prakash

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