Centre for Internet and Society

The two-faced FRAND: Licensing and injunctive relief in ICTs

rohini — 2016-03-16T02:37:02Z

Important takeaways from the Indo-Europe Conference on Building a Sustainable IPR-ICT Ecosystem for Promoting Innovation, held in Bangalore in November 2015. Ericsson and the Indian Cellular Association presented an interesting set of views on FRAND licensing as well as injunctive relief, from seemingly opposite ends of the spectrum.

For the schedule, and more information, visit: http://www.ict-ipr.in/sipeit/conference

Ericsson’s position on patenting

-- Companies file numerous patent applications every year but 95% of all granted patents are never commercialised.

-- Ericsson manages to commercialise less than 5 percent of its patents.

-- A patent application could be rejected because it is not inventive or novel enough. Sometimes, a competitor manages to file for or obtain a patent for the same or similar technology a few days before Ericsson. Hence, it becomes prior art and Ericsson is unable to apply for a patent.

-- Monetising patents is a challenge because the technology they pertain to may not be good enough to be implemented. Either that, or nobody in the market wants the technology. There is no business aspect to it. Thus, patenting is expensive but but filing patents is a trial-and-error activity, which makes patenting financially cumbersome.

-- Ericsson feels the need to file a lot of patents, so that some of those patents could be useful from a business perspective. The rest are not commercialised.

-- The number of patents filed are rising in certain countries, but the numbers are misleading. Some patents are of poor quality and/ or unusable for commercialisation.

-- Ericsson gets approximately 5,000 inventions per year but files patent applications for only around 1,500 to 1,600, as the rest of the inventions do not have a business aspect to it. That is, Ericsson does not believe that the invention has good business potential or that there is little way for the market to adapt to it.

-- When companies invest heavily on research and development, and when they try to get (what will later become a) standardised technology released into the market, they should get fair returns on investment.

-- Indian companies need to invest in IPR. They need to do trial-and-error with respect to patenting. Only then, perhaps, some returns will accrue to them from owning patents.

-- Monetisation is besides selling products. It's a side effect of investment in research and development.

Ericsson’s position on FRAND licensing

-- No company apart from non-practising entities (NPEs) make all or most of its money from licensing. Ericsson makes most of its money from its products and not patents.

-- A large number of companies such as Ericsson have inventors based in India but the patents get registered abroad, [that is, the patents are not filed by the Indian subsidiary of Ericsson].

-- The percentage fee charged for a FRAND license is a low, single-digit number.

-- It's a wrong conception that FRAND licensing is very expensive and will shut down Indian companies. If there were no FRAND agreements, no Indian company would be able to put out a phone in the market.

-- It’s a wrong notion that FRAND agreements are prohibiting any company from the market. Indian companies will not be thrown out of the market by FRAND companies or companies that possess a lot of patents. No Indian company would be able to make and sell a phone if FRAND terms didn’t exist.

-- Ericsson is called a patent troll because it doesn’t make mobile phones anymore, but Ericsson built the technology it patented [unlike other patent trolls who buy and gather patents].

-- Ericsson has entered into more than licensing 100 agreements worldwide. Many of its licensees are repeat licensees.

-- The average selling price (ASP) of China-made phones sold in India is USD 50. This money goes to China. The ASP of high-end phones elsewhere is USD 250. Thus, a royalty of USD 15, calculated on the sale price of the end product, is not high.

Ericsson’s position on SEP litigation in India and injunctions

-- Nobody starts litigation in order to render an injunction in the end. The idea is to get the other party to the table and negotiate reasonable terms.

-- Litigation without injunction is a toothless tiger. The 'licensee' has the financial upper hand of not paying the licensor. So the former can keep prolonging negotiations.

-- When hold-out happens during licensing negotiations, litigation is used as a last resort. Injunctions are one of the possible outcomes of litigation.

-- India should play the SEP game. 5G development starts in January 2016 and India should try to get a stake in the development. Indian companies should try to get high quality patents.

[This suggestion seems to be for homegrown Indian companies as Ericsson also stated during the conference that, “A large number of companies such as Ericsson have inventors based in India but the patents get registered abroad”, that is, the patents are not filed by the Indian subsidiary of Ericsson.]

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Indian Cellular Association on injunctive relief, SEPs and FRAND licensing rates

-- When the standard setting process is collaborative, it is not logical to apply injunctive relief. It is against the ethos of the community.

--Telecommunication was the first industry to create monopolies, that is, standardisation in order to serve the customer better.

-- [With reference to SEP infringement litigation happening in India], the so-called infringer is not in league/ not competing with anything the patent holder is making and/ or selling.

-- The Competition Act in India is a wide-ranging law. It is not a restrictive trade practices act or a monopolies act. Patents are out of the purview of competition.

-- If a rights holder has acquired dominance as a part of the standard setting process, it is undoubtedly dominant. But if the rights holder's market practices are fair, then it is not violating any provisions of the Competition Act.

-- India has a “demographic dividend”. Legacy patent holders should look at India differently, and consider our purchasing power. If technology has to proliferate, then consumers in India cannot be burdened with the same royalties as the developed world.

-- We are trying to strengthen the TSDSI, India's indigenous standards development body [so that India can have a stake in international standards development].

-- The size of the global smartphone market today [2015] is USD 500 billion; India's mobile phone market is worth USD 16 billion. The mobile phone market share of China is pegged at USD 110 billion.

-- The mobile phone market in India will be worth USD 100 billion as of the year 2022 or 2023. For SEP royalties that reward the innovation of all the SEP holders, what will be the amount of royalty outflow? If the outflow is USD 500 billion [in the year 2022 or 2023], then the FRAND percentage be 0.5, which is not a single-digit number, unlike what was stated by Ericsson's representative.

-- In the projected figure of USD 100 billion, USD 30 billion accounts for display, USD 5 billion accounts for Lithium-ion battery, USD 5 billion for communication protocol, and the complete chipset stack for around USD 10 billion. If the FRAND rate were to be determined as a percentage of the price of the smallest practising component of the [finished] device, then it would be, say, 2% of USD 10 billion. If the FRAND rate were to be determined as a percentage of the end product, it would be 0.5% of USD 100 billion. But, if the FRAND percentage were a single-digit number, which could also be 9, then all the manufacturers except the rights holders would be snuffed out. China's mobile market is at USD 110 billion now and is projected to be at USD 400 billion in 2022, will be paying around USD 1 billion in total royalty outflows.

-- We also need to evaluate macro costs of research and development globally. How many times, how much, and for how many years do we need to reward innovation? What is the right return amount for inventors? All this will come up for serious debate with the patent office, the Competition Commission of India, the companies, and with the ministries. To ensure equitable growth and a level playing field, all these entities need to get involved.

-- There is deep distrust of rights holders due to opaqueness in their operations. For example, injunctive relief was sought against a small importer in an Indian court. The royalty rate demanded happened to be half of that demanded from another Indian importer in the same court against an interim injunction. The rights holder then claimed that the email sent to the former importer was a mistake and it revised the rates so that it was equal for both importers.

[This seems to be a reference to Ericsson suing Saral Communications for patent infringement in the Delhi High Court around the same time that Micromax complained to the Competition Commission of India alleging abuse of its dominant positon by Ericsson. The interim royalty rates quoted to Saral were half of the rates that Micromax was ordered to pay, rendering Ericsson's conduct discriminatory and in violation of FRAND. Ericsson subsequently claimed that the rates conveyed to Saral via email were a mistake and asked for the same interim royalty rates as it from Micromax. For more details refer to, Court document reveals discriminatory royalty demands by Ericsson for its wireless patents.

This is also an indication that the market practices of certain rights holders are not consistent, which not only results in a trust deficit but prevents the implementation of a harmonised FRAND rate across the world.]

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Injunctive relief and FRAND licensing in Europe

-- According to the German Patent Act, there is automatic injunction as a consequence of patent infringement. No injunctive relief is granted for SEPs anymore in Germany, if certain conditions are fulfilled by the willing licensee.

-- Long-standing provisions exist in Germany for calculating royalties when multiple patents and multiple patent holders exist. FRAND licensing for one patent is useless. There should be FRAND for the whole complex.

-- As per the Huawei decision of the European Court of Justice, dated 16 July 2015, a willing licensee can make an offer for the price it wishes to pay to use a patent under the condition that it deposits an amount in the bank as a security for the licensor. Then the licensor cannot enforce the injunction anymore.

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Open data in patenting

If the data available with patent offices across the world is made publicly accessible by the respective governments in a way that it is possible to search, understand, and visualise it, then there could be an explosion in innovation.

The trade-off between access and innovation

Inexpensive phones of sub-standard quality break down or stop working sooner than good quality phones. This also destroys incentives for innovators who want to bring high quality phones into the market. So the inexpensive, low-quality phones is a trade-off between having access to mobile phones today and experiencing the fruits of innovation tomorrow. The Hatch Waxman Act in the US addresses this issue by allowing imitators to come into the economy through an authorised mechanism, which also restores some incentives for innovation.

The tradeoff is also addressed better by implementing an evidence-based approach instead of a one-size-fits-all solution. Some regions require an emphasis on access. In other places that do not lack access due to their geographical location and clusters of innovators, IPRs can be implemented more strictly. Such a segmented approach to regions and product-markets can be crafted into policy.

The challenge of harmonisation

Denmark does not have a dedicated intellectual property office. Work on IP is integrated in the government offices for trade, growth, economy, and so on. IPR is strongly interlaced with competition law in the country. Similarly, the Department of Telecom, Department of Health, the Indian Patent Office and the Competition Commission of India should work in tandem to avoid conflict in the way they address cases and issues.

Patenting for universities

Indian university do not carry out patenting as much as their counterparts in other countries. The DieTY has schemes for supporting patent filing by universities and academic institutions.

Number of patents granted annually to:

Xingua University, China: 1,000

MIT, United States: 4,000

IIT and IISC, India: Between 100 and 200

Technology areas and number of SEPs in Europe

Telecom via public network: 4,284

IT and Internet: 534

Audio/ video systems, coding, et cetera.: 221

Security, cryptography, biometrics: 182

(Source: Competition Policy Brief, June 2014, Issue 8, Standard Essential Patents, European Commission)

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All comments in square brackets and italics by the author.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/two-faced-frand-licensing-and-injunctive-relief-in-icts

The tragedy of the unused commons

Shyam Ponappa — 2018-01-05T14:50:56Z

Hope for the good sense and guts to handle it.

The article was published by Business Standard on December 6, 2017 and in the Organizing India Blogspot on the same day.

“The tragedy of the commons” as you may recall, refers in economics to the overexploitation of shared resources because of unregulated access. The tragedy results from shared resources being depleted or degraded because users pursue their own interests, contrary to the common good. This leads to unsustainable depletion or degradation. The atmosphere and oceans are examples of such shared resources.

There are also reverse situations, in which resources that are available for the benefit of society are unused, to the detriment of the common good. In such cases, there are opportunity costs from disuse that result in detriments, because the benefits of use are foregone. India’s abundant sunlight is a good example. Given its abundance, a reasonable expectation might be that extensive innovation and market organisation would be focused on harvesting this potential energy. Alas, India is a laggard in innovation relating to solar power.

Another resource that is neither depleted nor degraded by usage but underused is radio frequency spectrum. The opportunity cost for unused spectrum is therefore even greater than for a degradable mineral resource such as coal, resulting in an extreme tragedy of unused commons.

Some Issues Need Resolution

The situation today is that swathes of spectrum are unused because of our inability, perhaps unwillingness, to develop the appropriate regulations and organisation to benefit from them. This is true of all unused and underused radio frequency spectrum, although some of it is the most useful means for broadband connectivity for the majority of our rural and semi-urban population. It would also give more urban users less expensive access. For both sets, judicious use would enhance productivity and improve living conditions.
The entire thrust of the Digital India initiative requires these enabling policies and procedures, that is, the administrative rules and regulations that would enable the use of presently unused and therefore wasted spectrum. There are, of course, many other steps required than merely putting in place the regulations. The market structures and organisation have to be created under government leadership with other stakeholders in industry and civil society that would permit sustainable use of “the commons” — namely, the spectrum, if it were a shared resource instead of being apportioned in silos.

At present, private operators in this sector, except one, have too much debt, very low profitability, and insufficient network coverage. Services can be good in some locations, but countrywide, are spotty and not universally accessible. Yet, operators apparently want auctions, not now but at some time in the future (perhaps next year), for the essential resource that is the prerequisite for building the coverage that they don’t have although sorely needed, as it has been for years. While clearly impractical because of how auctions soak up capital, limiting subsequent investment in networks because of the deprivation of capital, operators reportedly want this in order to reduce competitive threats.

Another baffling aspect of our reality is that the administration and regulator took no effective action to prevent the destruction of existing market structures in the telecom sector when there was a disruptive new entrant. With overwhelming resources from unrelated activities, unsustainable strategies and tactics could be construed as jeopardising India’s current and future productivity. Meanwhile, the administration and the regulator dithered, debating theoretical concepts of what constitutes anticompetitive or predatory activity, and the judiciary remained on the sidelines.

Yet another aspect of puzzling inactivity is that there have been no steps to test certain promising technologies for permitting their use through appropriate policies in India, such as TV White Space or the development of MIMO — Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output — using arrays of antennas, yielding (a) greater throughput (b) over longer distances (c) to more users, thereby improving spectrum capacity for broadband. While initial tests for TV White Space, conducted after a delay of several years, have been promising (disclosure: the author was associated with some), proposals for larger follow-up trials have stalled. Without these, policymakers can’t even consider policies that would enable the development and use of TV White Space devices for extending optical fibre from gram panchayats to hundreds of thousands of village users.

In the press, confusing articles short on facts make policy formulation even more difficult and risky in this already technically and financially complex space. One instance is an article about Maharashtra’s Village Social Transformation initiative avoiding TV White Space because this technology has problems with security clearance, in addition to Foreign Contribution Regulation Act clearance for Microsoft’s sponsorship of the pilot. The fact that the problem in India is in getting permission to use TV White Space for purposes other than for Doordarshan’s broadcasts finds no mention. The security risk in these frequencies is the same as in other frequencies, and transmission in any band can be monitored.

Another article suggests the government is considering allocating a high-speed wireless frequency band of unused spectrum (V band or 60 GHz, which is like short-range wireless optic fibre) on a first come, first served basis “which is a gross violation of the Supreme Court order”. Somewhere down the page is a surmise that since the Broadband India Forum is advocating de-licencing of this band and foreign companies support it, this “means that it should be allocated without auction on first come, first served basis”. The Broadband India Forum in its white paper clearly recommends aligning with an international standard, the Harmonised European Standard.1
According to this, low power equipment within specified emission limits in this band doesn’t need a licence. Wi-Fi is de-licenced spectrum that is open access and not allocated. Other de-licenced spectrum would not need to be allocated either, although in India, bands such as 60 GHz could be restricted to authorised operators.

It needs government intervention to cut the Gordian knot and initiate discussions on pooling spectrum for networks and working out practicable, sustainable options. Here’s hoping good sense and guts will help to make a start.

Shyam (no-space) Ponappa at gmail dot com
1: "V band - 60 GHz: The Key to Affordable Broadband in India"
White Paper by Broadband India Forum, November 9, 2016http://www.broadbandindiaforum.com/img/White%20Paper%20on%20V-BAND%20Revised%20Final.pdf

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/business-standard-december-6-2017-shyam-ponappa-the-tragedy-of-the-unused-commons

The Technology Behind Big Data

praskrishna — 2016-12-02T01:23:26Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/technology-behind-big-data.pdf

The Technology behind Big Data

Geethanjali Jujjavarapu and Udbhav Tiwari — 2016-12-04T09:53:43Z

The authors undertakes a high-level literature review of the most commonly used technological tools and processes in the big data life cycle. The big data life cycle is a conceptual construct that can be used to study the various stages that typically occur in collecting, storing and analysing big data, along with the principles that can govern these processes.

Download the Paper (PDF, 277 kb)

Introduction

Defining big data is a disputed area in the field of computer science^{^[1]}, there is some consensus on a basic structure to its definition^{^[2]}. Big data is data that is collected in the form of datasets that has three main criteria: size, variety & velocity, all of which operate at an immense scale^{^[3]}. It is ‘big’ in size, often running into petabytes of information, has vast variety within its components, and is created, captured and analysed at an incredibly rapid velocity. All of this also makes big data difficult to handle using traditional technological tools and techniques.

This paper will attempt to perform a high-level literature review of the most commonly used technological tools and processes in the big data life cycle. The big data life cycle is a conceptual construct that can be used to study the various stages that typically occur in collecting, storing and analysing big data, along with the principles that can govern these processes. The big data life cycle consists of four components, which will also be the key structural points of the paper, namely: Data Acquisition, Data Awareness, Data Analytics & Data Governance.⁴ The paper will focus on the aspects that the author believes are relevant for analysing the technological impact of big data on both technology itself and society at large.

Scope: The scope of the paper is to study the technology used in big data using the "Life Cycle of Big Data" as model structure to categorise & study the vast range of technologies that are involved in big data. However, the paper will be limited to the study of technology related directly to the big data life cycle. It shall specifically exclude the use/utilisation of big data from its scope since big data is most often being fed into other, unrelated technologies for consumption leading to rather limitless possibilities.

Goal: Goal of the paper is twofold: a.) to use the available literature on the technological aspects of big data, to perform a brief overview of the technology in the field and b.) to frame the relevant research questions for studying the technology of big data and its possible impact on society.

Data Acquisition

Acquiring big data has two main sub components to it, the first being sensing the existence of the data’ itself and the second, the stage of collecting and storing this data. Both of these subcomponents are incredibly diverse fields, with lots of rapid change occurring in the technology utilised to carry out these tasks. The section will provide a brief overview of the subcomponents and then discuss the technology used to fulfil the tasks.

Data Sensing

Data does not exist in a vacuum and is always created as a part of a larger process, especially in the aspect of modern technology. Therefore, the source of the data itself plays a vital role in determining how it can be captured and analysed in the larger scheme of things. Entities constantly emit information into the environment that can be utilised for the purposes of big data, leading to two main kinds of data: data that is “born digital” or “born analogue.”^{^[4]}

Born Digital Data

Information that is “born digital,” is created, by a user or by a digital system, specifically for use by a computer or data‐processing system. This is a vast range of information and newer fields are being added to this category on a daily basis. It includes, as a short, indicative list: email and text messaging, any form of digital input, including keyboards, mouse interactions and touch screens, GPS location data, data from daily home appliances (Internet of Things), etc. All of this data can be tracked and tagged to users as well as be aggregated to form a larger picture, massively increasing the scope of what may constitute the ‘data’ in big data.

Some indicative uses of how such born digital data is catalogued by technological solutions on the user side, prior to being sent for collection/storage are:

a.) Cookies - There are small, often just text, files that are left on user devices by websites in order to that visit, task or action (for example, logging into an email account) with a subsequent event.^{^[5]} (for example, revisiting the website)

b.) Website Analytics^{^[6]} - Various services, such as Google Analytics, Piwik, etc., can use JavaScript and other web development languages to record a very detailed, intimate track of a user's actions on a website, including how long a user hovers above a link, the time spent on the website/application and in some cases, even the time spent specific aspects of the page.

c.) GPS^{^[7]} - With the almost pervasive usage of smartphones with basic location capabilities, GPS sensors on these devices are used to provide regular, minute driven updates to applications, operating systems and even third parties about the user's location. Modern variations such as A-GPS can be used to provide basic positioning information even without satellite coverage, vastly expanding the indoor capabilities of location collection.

All of these instances of sensing born digital data are common terms, used in daily parlance by billions of people from all over the world, which is a symbolic of just how deeply they have pervaded into our daily lifestyle. Apart from privacy & security concerns this in turn also leads to an exponential increase in the data available to collect for any interested party.

Sensor Data

Information is said to be “analogue” when it contains characteristics of the physical world, such as images, video, heartbeats, etc. Such information becomes electronic when processed by a “sensor,” a device that can record physical phenomena and convert it into digital information. Some examples to better illustrate information that is born analogue but collected via digital means are:

a.) Voice and/or video content on devices - Apart from phone calls and other forms communication, video and voice based interactions have started to regularly be captured to provide enhanced services. These include Google Now^{^[8]}, Cortana^{^[9]} and other digital assistants as well as voice guided navigation systems in cars, etc.

b.) Personal health data such as heartbeats, blood pressure, respiration, velocity, etc. - This personal, potentially very powerful information is collected by dedicated sensors on devices such as Fitbit^{^[10]}, Mi Band^{^[11]}, etc. as well as by increasingly sophisticated smartphone applications such as Google Fit that can do so without any special device.

c.) Camera on Home Appliances - Cameras and sensors on devices such as video game consoles (Kinect^{^[12]} being a relevant example) can record detailed human interactions, which can be mined for vast amounts of information apart from carrying out the basic interactions with the devices itself.

While not as vast a category as born digital data, the increasingly lower costs of technology and ubiquitous usage of digital, networked devices is leading to information that was traditionally analogue in nature to be captured for use at a rapidly increasing rate.

Data Collection & Storage

Traditional data was normally processed using the Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) methodology, which was used to collect the data from outside sources, modify the data to fit needs, and then upload the data into the data storage system for future use.^{^[13]} Technology such as spreadsheets, RDBMS databases, Structured Query Languages (SQL), etc. were all initially used to carry out these tasks, more often than not manually. ^{^[14]}

However, for big data, the methodology traditionally followed is both inefficient and insufficient to meet the demands of modern use. Therefore, the Magnetic, Agile, Deep (MAD) process is used to collect and store data^{^[15]}^{^[16]}. The needs and benefits of such a system are: attracting all the data sources regardless of their quality (magnetic), logical and physical contents of storage systems adapting to the rapid data evolution in big data (agile) and complex algorithmic statistical analysis required of big data on a very short notice^{^[17]}. (deep)

The technology used to perform data storage using the MAD process requires vast amount of processing power, which is very difficult to create in a single, physical space/unit for nonstate or research entities, who cannot afford supercomputers. Therefore, most solutions used in big data rely on two major components to store data: distributed systems and Massive Parallel Processing^{^[18]} (MPP) that run on non-relational (in-memory) database systems. Database performance and reliability is traditionally gauged using pure performance metrics (FLOPS per second, etc.) as well as the Atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability (ACID) criteria.^{^[19]} The most commonly used database systems for big data applications are given below. The specific operational qualities and performance of each of these databases is beyond the scope of this review but the common criteria that makes them well suited for big data storage have been delineated below.

Non-relational databases

Databases traditionally used to be structured entities that operated solely on the ability to correlate information stored in them using explicitly defined relationships. Even prior to the advent of big data, this outlook was turning out to be a limiting factor in how large amounts of stored information could be leveraged, this led to the evolution of non relational database systems. Before going into them in detail, a basic primer on their data transfer protocols will be helpful in understanding their operation.

A protocol is a model that structures instructions in a particular manner so that it can be reproduced from one system to another^{^[20]}^{^[21]}. The protocols which govern technology in the case of big data have gone through many stages of evolution, starting off with simple HTML based systems^{^[22]}, which then evolved to XML driven SOAP systems^{^[23]}, which led to JavaScript Object Notation, or JSON^{^[24]}, the currently used form for in most big database systems. JSON is an open format used to transfer data objects, using human-readable text and is the basis for most of the commonly used non-relational database management systems. Examples of Non-relational databases also known as NoSQL databases, include MongoDB^{^[25]}, Couchbase^{^[26]}, etc. They were developed for both managing as well as storing unstructured data. They aim for scaling, flexibility, and simplified development. Such databases rather focus on the high-performance scalable data storage, and allow tasks to be written in the application layer instead of databases specific languages, allowing for greater interoperability.^{^[27]}

In-Memory Databases

In order to overcome performance limitation of traditional database systems, some modern databases now use in-memory databases. These systems manage the data in the RAM memory of the server, thus eliminating storage disk input/output. This allows for almost realtime responses from the database, in comparisons to minutes or hours required on traditional database systems. This improvement in the performance is so massive that, entirely new applications are being developed for using IMDB systems.^{^[28]} These IMDB systems are also being used for advanced analytics on big data, especially to increase the access speed to data and increase the scoring rate of analytic models for analysis.^{^[29]} Examples of IMDB include VoltDB^{^[30]}, NuoDB^{^[31]}, SolidDB^{^[32]} and Apache Spark^{^[33]}.

Hybrid Systems

These are the two major systems used to store data prior to it being processed or analysed in a big data application. However, the divide between data storage and data management is a slim one and most database systems also contain various unique attributes that cater them to specific kinds of analysis. (as can be seen from the IMDB example above) One example of a very commonly used Hybrid system that deals with storage as well as awareness of the data is Apache Hadoop³³, which is detailed below.

Apache Hadoop

Hadoop consists of two main components: the HDFS for the big data storage, and MapReduce for big data analytics, each of which will be detailed in their respective section.

The HDFS^{^[34]}^{^[35]} storage function in Hadoop provides a reliable distributed file system, stored across multiple systems for processing & redundancy reasons. The file system is optimized for large files, as single files are split into blocks and spread across systems known as cluster nodes.^{^[36]} Additionally, the data is protected among the nodes by a replication mechanism, which ensures availability even if any node fails. Further, there are two types of nodes: Data Nodes and Name Nodes.^{^[37]} Data is stored in the form of file blocks across the multiple Data Nodes while the Name Node acts as an intermediary between the client and the Data Node, where it directs the requesting client to the particular Data Node which contains the requested data.

This operating structure for storing data also has various variations within Hadoop such as HBase for key/value pair type queries (a NoSQL based system), Hive for relational type queries, etc. Hadoop’s redundancy, speed, ability to run on commodity hardware, industry support and rapid pace of development have led to it being almost co-equivalently associated with big data.^{^[38]}

Data Awareness

Data Awareness, in the context of big data, is the task of creating a scheme of relationships within a set of data, to allow different users of the data to determine a fluid yet valid context and utilise it for their desired tasks.^{^[39]} It is a relatively new field, in which most of the work is currently being done on semantic structures to allow data to gain context in an interoperable format, in contrast to the current system where data is given context using unique, model specific constructs.^{^[40]} (such as XML Schemes, etc.)

Some of the original work on this field was carried out in the form of utilising the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which was built primarily to allow describing of data in a portable manner, especially being agnostic towards platforms and systems for Semantic Web at the W3C. SPARQL is the language used to implement RDF based designs but both largely remain underutilised in both the public domain as well as big data. Authors such as Kurt

Cagle^{^[41]} and Bob DuCharme^{^[42]} predict its explosion in the next couple of years. Companies have also started realising the value of interoperable context, with Oracle Spatial^{^[43]} and IBM’s DB2^{^[44]} already including RDF and SPARQL support in the past 3 years.

While underutilised, the rapid developments taking place in the field will make the impact that data awareness may have on big data as big as Hadoop and maybe even SQL. Some aspects of it are already beginning to be used in Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, etc. with tremendous scope for development.^{^[45]}

Data Processing & Analytics

Data Processing largely has three primary goals: a. determines if the data collected is internally consistent; b. make the data meaningful to other systems or users using either metaphors or analogy they can understand; and (what many consider most importantly) provide predictions about future events and behaviours based upon past data and trends.^{^[46]}

Being a very vast field with rapidly changing technologies governing its operation, this section will largely concentrate on the most commonly used technologies in data analytics.

Data analytics requires four primary conditions to be met in order to carry out effective processing: fast, data loading, fast query processing, efficient utilisation of storage and adaptivity to dynamic workload patterns. The analytical model most commonly associated with meeting this criteria and with big data in general is MapReduce, detailed below. There are other, more niche models and algorithms (such as Project Voldemort^{^[47]} used by LinkedIn), which are used in big data but they are beyond the scope of the review, and more information about them can be read at article linked in the previous citation. (Reference architecture and classification of technologies, products and services for big data system)

MapReduce

MapReduce is a generic parallel programming concept, derived from the “Map” and “Reduce” of functional programming languages, which makes it particularly suited for big data operations. It is at the core of Hadoop^{^[48]}, and performs the data processing and analytics functions in other big data systems as well.^{^[49]} The fundamental premise of MapReduce is scaling out rather than scaling up, i.e., (adding more numerical resources, rather than increasing the power of a single system)^{^[50]}

MapReduce operates by breaking a task down into steps and executing the steps in parallel, across many systems. This comes with two advantages, a reduction in the time needed to finish the task and also a decrease in the amount of resources one has to expend to perform the task, in both power and energy. This model makes it ideally suited for the large data sets and quick response times required of big data operations generally.

The first step of a MapReduce job is to correlate the input values to a set of keys/value pairs as output. The “Map” function then partitions the processing tasks into smaller tasks, and assigns them to the appropriate key/value pairs.^{^[51]} This allows unstructured data, such as plain text, to be mapped to a structured key/value pair. As an example, the key could be the punctuation in a sentence and the value of the pair could be the number of occurrences of the punctuation overall. This output of the Map function is then passed on “Reduce” function.^{^[52]} Reduce then collects and combines this output, using identical key/value pairs, to provide the final result of the task.^{^[53]} These steps are carried using the Job Tracker & Task Tracker in Hadoop but different systems have different methodologies to carry out similar tasks.

Data Governance

Data Governance is the act of managing raw big data as well as the processed information that arises from big data in order to meet legal, regulatory and business imposed requirements. While there is no standardized format for data governance, there have been increasing call with various sectors (especially healthcare) to create such a format to ensure reliable, secure and consistent big data utilisation across the board. The following tactics and techniques have been utilised or suggested for data governance, with varying degrees of success:

Zero-knowledge systems: This technological proposal maintains secrecy with respect to the low-level data while allowing encrypted data to be examined for certain higherlevel abstractions.^{^[54]} For the system to be zero-knowledge, the client’s system will have to encrypt the data and send it to the storage provider. Due to this, the provider stores the data in the encrypted format and cannot decipher the same unless he/she is in possession of the key which will decrypt the data into plaintext. This allows the individual to store his data with a storage provider while also maintaining anonymity of the details contained in such information. However, these are currently just beginning to be used in simple situations. As of now, they are not expandable to unstructured and complex cases and have to be developed marginally before they can be used for research and data mining purposes.
Homomorphic encryption: Homomorphic encryption is a privacy preserving technique which performs searches and other computations over data that is encrypted while also protecting the individual’s privacy.^{^[55]} This technique has however been considered to be impractical and is deemed to be an unlikely policy alternative for near future purposes in the context of preserving privacy in the age of big data.^{^[56]}
Multi-party computation: In this technique, computation is done on encrypted distributed data stores.^{^[57]} This mechanism is closely related to homomorphic encryption where individual data is kept private using encryption algorithms called “collusion-robust” while the same is used to calculate statistics.^{^[58]} The parties involved are aware of some private data and each of them use a protocol which produces results based on the information they are aware of and the information they are not aware of, without revealing the data they are not already aware of.^{^[59]} Multi-party computations thus help in generating useful data for statistical and research purposes without compromising the privacy of the individuals.

Differential Privacy: Although this technological development is related to encryption, it follows a different technique. Differential privacy aims at maximizing the precision of computations and database queries while reducing the identifiability of the data owners who have records in the database, usually through obfuscation of query results.^{^[60]} This is widely applied today in the existence of big data in order to ensure preservation of privacy while trying to reap the benefits of large scale data collection.^{^[61]}
Searchable encryption: Through this mechanism, the data subject can make certain data searchable while minimizing exposure and maximizing privacy.^{^[62]} The data owner can make his information available through search engines by providing the data in an encrypted format but by adding tags consisting of certain keywords which can be deciphered by the search engine. This encrypted data shows up in the search results when searched with these particular keywords but can only be read when the person is in possession of the key which is required for decrypting the information.

This technique of encryption provides maximum security to the individual’s data and preserves privacy to the greatest possible extent.

K-anonymity: The property of k-anonymity is being applied in the present day in order to preserve privacy and avoid re-identification.^{^[63]} A certain data set is said to possess the property of k-anonymity if individual specific data can be released and used for various purposes without re-identification. The analysis of the data should be carried out without attributing the data to the individual to whom it belongs and should give scientific guarantees for the same.
Identity Management Systems: These systems enable the individuals to establish and safeguard their identities, explain those identities with the help of attributes, follow the activity of their identities and also delete their identities if they wish to.^{^[64]} It uses cryptographic schemes and protocols to make anonymous or pseudonymous the identities and credentials of the individuals before analysing the data.
Privacy Preserving Data Publishing: This is a method in which the analysts are provided with the individual’s personal information with the ability to decipher particular information from the database while preventing the inference of certain other information which might lead to a breach of privacy.^{^[65]} Data which is essential for the analysis will be provided for processing while sensitive data will not be disclosed. This tool primarily focuses on microdata.
Privacy Preserving Data Mining: This mechanism uses perturbation methods and randomization along with cryptography in order to permit data mining on a filtered version of the data which does not contain any form of sensitive information. PPDM focuses on data mining results unlike PPDP.^{^[66]}

Conclusion

Studying the technology surrounding big data has led to two major observations: the rapid pace of development in the industry and the stark lack of industry standards or government regulations directed towards big data technologies. These observations have been the primary motivating factor for framing further research in the field. Understanding how to deal with big data technologically, rather than just the potential regulation of possible harms after the technological processes have been performed might be critical for the human rights dialogue as these processes become even more extensive, opaque and technologically complicated.

[1] EMC: Data Science and Big Data Analytics. In: EMC Education Services, pp. 1–508 (2012)

[2] Bakshi, K.: Considerations for Big Data: Architecture and Approaches. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Aerospace Conference, pp. 1–7 (2012)

[3] Adams, M.N.: Perspectives on Data Mining. International Journal of Market Research 52(1), 11–19 (2010) ⁴ Elgendy, N.: Big Data Analytics in Support of the Decision Making Process. MSc Thesis, German University in Cairo, p. 164 (2013)

[4] Big Data and Privacy: A Technological Perspective - President’s Council of Advisors on Science and

Technology (May 2014)

[5] Chen, Hsinchun, Roger HL Chiang, and Veda C. Storey. "Business Intelligence and Analytics: From Big Data to Big Impact." MIS quarterly 36.4 (2012): 1165-1188.

[6] Chandramouli, Badrish, Jonathan Goldstein, and Songyun Duan. "Temporal analytics on big data for web advertising." 2012 IEEE 28th international conference on data engineering. IEEE, 2012.

[7] Laurila, Juha K., et al. "The mobile data challenge: Big data for mobile computing research." Pervasive Computing. No. EPFL-CONF-192489. 2012.

[8] Lazer, David, et al. "The parable of Google flu: traps in big data analysis." Science 343.6176 (2014): 12031205.

[9] ibid

[10] Banaee, Hadi, Mobyen Uddin Ahmed, and Amy Loutfi. "Data mining for wearable sensors in health monitoring systems: a review of recent trends and challenges." Sensors 13.12 (2013): 17472-17500.

[11] ibid

[12] Chung, Eric S., John D. Davis, and Jaewon Lee. "Linqits: Big data on little clients." ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News. Vol. 41. No. 3. ACM, 2013.

[13] Kornelson, Kevin Paul, et al. "Method and system for developing extract transform load systems for data warehouses." U.S. Patent No. 7,139,779. 21 Nov. 2006.

[14] Henry, Scott, et al. "Engineering trade study: extract, transform, load tools for data migration." 2005 IEEE Design Symposium, Systems and Information Engineering. IEEE, 2005.

[15] Cohen, Jeffrey, et al. "MAD skills: new analysis practices for big data." Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment

[16] .2 (2009): 1481-1492.

[17] Elgendy, Nada, and Ahmed Elragal. "Big data analytics: a literature review paper." Industrial Conference on Data Mining. Springer International Publishing, 2014.

[18] Wu, Xindong, et al. "Data mining with big data." IEEE transactions on knowledge and data engineering 26.1 (2014): 97-107.

[19] Supra Note 17

[20] Hu, Han, et al. "Toward scalable systems for big data analytics: A technology tutorial." IEEE Access 2 (2014):

[21] -687.

[22] Kurt Cagle, Understanding the Big Data Lifecycle - LinkedIn Pulse (2015)

[23] Coyle, Frank P. XML, Web services, and the data revolution. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., 2002.

[24] Pautasso, Cesare, Olaf Zimmermann, and Frank Leymann. "Restful web services vs. big'web services: making the right architectural decision." Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web. ACM, 2008.

[25] Banker, Kyle. MongoDB in action. Manning Publications Co., 2011

[26] McCreary, Dan, and Ann Kelly. "Making sense of NoSQL." Shelter Island: Manning (2014): 19-20.

[27] ibid

[28] Zhang, Hao, et al. "In-memory big data management and processing: A survey." IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 27.7 (2015): 1920-1948.

[29] ibid

[30] ibid

[31] Supra Note 20

[32] Ballard, Chuck, et al. IBM solidDB: Delivering Data with Extreme Speed. IBM Redbooks, 2011.

[33] Shanahan, James G., and Laing Dai. "Large scale distributed data science using apache spark." Proceedings of the 21th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. ACM, 2015. ³³ Shvachko, Konstantin, et al. "The hadoop distributed file system." 2010 IEEE 26th symposium on mass storage systems and technologies (MSST). IEEE, 2010.

[34] Borthakur, Dhruba. "The hadoop distributed file system: Architecture and design." Hadoop Project Website

[35] .2007 (2007): 21.

[36] ibid

[37] ibid

[38] Zikopoulos, Paul, and Chris Eaton. Understanding big data: Analytics for enterprise class hadoop and streaming data. McGraw-Hill Osborne Media, 2011.

[39] Bizer, Christian, et al. "The meaningful use of big data: four perspectives--four challenges." ACM SIGMOD Record 40.4 (2012): 56-60.

[40] Kaisler, Stephen, et al. "Big data: issues and challenges moving forward." System Sciences (HICSS), 2013 46th Hawaii International Conference on. IEEE, 2013.

[41] Supra Note 21

[42] DuCharme, Bob. "What Do RDF and SPARQL bring to Big Data Projects?." Big Data 1.1 (2013): 38-41.

[43] Zhong, Yunqin, et al. "Towards parallel spatial query processing for big spatial data." Parallel and

Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops & PhD Forum (IPDPSW), 2012 IEEE 26th International. IEEE, 2012.

[44] Ma, Li, et al. "Effective and efficient semantic web data management over DB2." Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data. ACM, 2008.

[45] Lohr, Steve. "The age of big data." New York Times 11 (2012).

[46] Pääkkönen, Pekka, and Daniel Pakkala. "Reference architecture and classification of technologies, products and services for big data systems." Big Data Research 2.4 (2015): 166-186.

[47] Sumbaly, Roshan, et al. "Serving large-scale batch computed data with project voldemort." Proceedings of the 10th USENIX conference on File and Storage Technologies. USENIX Association, 2012.

[48] Bar-Sinai, Michael. "Big Data Technology Literature Review." arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.08978 (2015).

[49] ibid

[50] Condie, Tyson, et al. "MapReduce Online." Nsdi. Vol. 10. No. 4. 2010.

[51] Supra Note 47

[52] Dean, Jeffrey, and Sanjay Ghemawat. "MapReduce: a flexible data processing tool." Communications of the ACM 53.1 (2010): 72-77.

[53] ibid

[54] Big Data and Privacy: A Technological Perspective, White House,

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/PCAST/pcast_big_data_and_privacy__may_2014

[55] Tene, Omer, and Jules Polonetsky. "Big data for all: Privacy and user control in the age of analytics." Nw. J. Tech. & Intell. Prop. 11 (2012): xxvii.

[56] Big Data and Privacy: A Technological Perspective, White House,

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/PCAST/pcast_big_data_and_privacy__may_2014

[57] Privacy by design in big data, ENISA

[58] Big Data and Privacy: A Technological Perspective, White House,

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/PCAST/pcast_big_data_and_privacy__may_2014

[59] Id

[60] Id

[61] Tene, Omer, and Jules Polonetsky. "Privacy in the age of big data: a time for big decisions." Stanford Law Review Online 64 (2012): 63.

[62] Lane, Julia, et al., eds. Privacy, big data, and the public good: Frameworks for engagement. Cambridge University Press, 2014.

[63] Crawford, Kate, and Jason Schultz. "Big data and due process: Toward a framework to redress predictive privacy harms." BCL Rev. 55 (2014): 93.

[64] http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~sguerses/papers/DanezisGuersesSurveillancePets2010.pdf

[65] Seda Gurses and George Danezis, A critical review of 10 years of privacy technology, August 12th 2010, http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~sguerses/papers/DanezisGuersesSurveillancePets2010.pdf

[66] Id

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/technology-behind-big-data

The Supreme Court Judgment in Shreya Singhal and What It Does for Intermediary Liability in India?

jyoti — 2015-04-17T23:59:34Z

Even as free speech advocates and users celebrate the Supreme Court of India's landmark judgment striking down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act of 2000, news that the Central government has begun work on drafting a new provision to replace the said section of the Act has been trickling in.

The SC judgement in upholding the constitutionality of Section 69A (procedure for blocking websites) and in reading down Section 79 (exemption from liability of intermediaries) of the IT Act, raises crucial questions regarding transparency, accountability and under what circumstances may reasonable restrictions be placed on free speech on the Internet. While discussions and analysis of S. 66A continue, in this post I will focus on the aspect of the judgment related to intermediary liability that could benefit from further clarification from the apex court and in doing so, will briefly touch upon S. 69A and secret blocking.

Conditions qualifying intermediary for exemption and obligations not related to exemption

The intermediary liability regime in India is defined under S. 79 and assosciated rules that were introduced to protect intermediaries for liability from user generated content and ensure the Internet continues to evolve as a “marketplace of ideas”. But as intermediaries may not have sufficient legal competence or resources to deliberate on the legality of an expression, they may end up erring on the side of caution and takedown lawful expression. As a study by Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in 2012 revealed, the criteria, procedure and safeguards for administration of the takedowns as prescribed by the rules lead to a chilling effect on online free expression.

S. 69A grants powers to the Central Government to “issue directions for blocking of public access to any information through any computer resource”. The 2009 rules allow the blocking of websites by a court order, and sets in place a review committee to review the decision to block websites as also establishes penalties for the intermediary that fails to extend cooperation in this respect.

There are two key aspects of both these provisions that must be noted:

a) S. 79 is an exemption provision that qualifies the intermediary for conditional immunity, as long as they fulfil the conditions of the section. The judgement notes this distinction, adding that “being an exemption provision, it is closely related to provisions which provide for offences including S. 69A.”

b) S. 69A does not contribute to immunity for the intermediary rather places additional obligations on the intermediary and as the judgement notes “intermediary who finally fails to comply with the directions issued who is punishable under sub-section (3) of 69A.” The provision though outside of the conditional immunity liability regime enacted through S. 79 contributes to the restriction of access to, or removing content online by placing liability on intermediaries to block unlawful third party content or information that is being generated, transmitted, received, stored or hosted by them. Therefore restriction requests must fall within the contours outlined in Article 19(2) and include principles of natural justice and elements of due process.

Subjective Determination of Knowledge

The provisions for exemption laid down in S. 79 do not apply when they receive “actual knowledge” of illegal content under section 79(3)(b). Prior to the court's verdict actual knowledge could have been interpreted to mean the intermediary is called upon its own judgement under sub-rule (4) to restrict impugned content in order to seek exemption from liability. Removing the need for intermediaries to take on an adjudicatory role and deciding on which content to restrict or takedown, the SC has read down “actual knowledge” to mean that there has to be a court order directing the intermediary to expeditiously remove or disable access to content online. The court also read down “upon obtaining knowledge by itself” and “brought to actual knowledge” under Rule 3(4) in the same manner as 79(3)(b).

Under S.79(3)(b) the intermediary must comply with the orders from the executive in order to qualify for immunity. Further, S. 79 (3)(b) goes beyond the specific categories of restriction identified in Article 19(2) by including the term “unlawful acts” and places the executive in an adjudicatory role of determining the illegality of content. The government cannot emulate private regulation as it is bound by the Constitution and the court addresses this issue by applying the limitation of 19(2) on unlawful acts, “the court order and/or the notification by the appropriate government or its agency must strictly conform to the subject matters aid down in Article 19(2).”

By reading down of S. 79 (3) (b) the court has addressed the issue of intermediaries complying with takedown requests from non-government entities and has made government notifications and court orders to be consistent with reasonable restrictions in Article 19(2). This is an important clarification from the court, because this places limits on the private censorship of intermediaries and the invisible censorship of opaque government takedown requests as they must and should adhere, to the boundaries set by Article 19(2).

Procedural Safeguards

The SC does not touch upon other parts of the rules and in not doing so, has left significant procedural issues open for debate. It is relevant to bear in mind and as established above, S. 69A blocking and restriction requirements for the intermediary are part of their additional obligations and do not qualify them for immunity. The court ruled in favour of upholding S. 69A as constitutional on the basis that blocking orders are issued when the executive has sufficiently established that it is absolutely necessary to do so, and that the necessity is relatable to only some subjects set out in Article 19(2). Further the court notes that reasons for the blocking orders must be recorded in writing so that they may be challenged through writ petitions. The court also goes on to specify that under S. 69A the intermediary and the 'originator' if identified, have the right to be heard before the committee decides to issue the blocking order.

Under S. 79 the intermediary must also comply with government restriction orders and the procedure for notice and takedown is not sufficiently transparent and lacks procedural safeguards that have been included in the notice and takedown procedures under S. 69. For example, there is no requirement for committee to evaluate the necessity of issuing the restriction order, though the ruling does clarify that these restriction notices must be within the confines of Article 19(2). The judgement could have gone further to directing the government to state their entire cause of action and provide reasonable level of proof (prima facie). It should have also addressed issues such as the government using extra-judicial measures to restrict content including collateral pressures to force changes in terms of service, to promote or enforce so-called "voluntary" practices.

Accountability

The judgement could also have delved deeper into issues of accountability such as the need to consider 'udi alteram partem' by providing the owner of the information or the intermediary a hearing prior to issuing the restriction or blocking order nor is an post-facto review or appeal mechanism made available except for the recourse of writ petition. Procedural uncertainty around wrongly restricted content remains, including what limitations should be placed on the length, duration and geographical scope of the restriction. The court also does not address the issue of providing a recourse for the third party provider of information to have the removed information restored or put-back remains unclear. Relatedly, the court also does not clarify the concerns related to frivolous requests by establishing penalties nor is there a codified recourse under the rules presently, for the intermediary to claim damages even if it can be established that the takedown process is being abused.

Transparency

The bench in para 113 in addressing S. 79 notes that the intermediary in addition to publishing rules and regulations, privacy policy and user agreement for access or usage of their service has to also inform users of the due diligence requirements including content restriction policy under rule 3(2). However, the court ought to have noted the differentiation between different categories of intermediaries which may require different terms of use. Rather than stressing a standard terms of use as a procedural safeguard, the court should have insisted on establishing terms of use and content restriction obligations that is proportional to the role of the intermediary and based on the liability accrued in providing the service, including the impact of the restriction by the intermediary both on access and free speech. By placing requirement of disclosure or transparency on the intermediary including what has been restricted under the intermediary's own terms of service, the judgment could have gone a step further than merely informing users of their rights in using the service as it stands presently, to ensuring that users can review and have knowledge of what information has been restricted and why. The judgment also does not touch upon broader issues of intermediary liability such as proactive filtering sought by government and private parties, an important consideration given the recent developments around the right to be forgotten in Europe and around issues of defamation and pornography in India.

The judgment, while a welcome one in the direction of ensuring the Internet remains a democratic space where free speech thrives, could benefit from the application of the recently launched Manila principles developed by CIS and others. The Manila Principles is a framework of baseline safeguards and best practices that should be considered by policymakers and intermediaries when developing, adopting, and reviewing legislation, policies and practices that govern the liability of intermediaries for third-party content.

The court's ruling is truly worth celebrating, in terms of the tone it sets on how we think of free speech and the contours of censorship that exist in the digital space. But the real impact of this judgment lies in the debates and discussions which it will throw open about content removal practices that involve intermediaries making determinations on requests received, or those which only respond to the interests of the party requesting removal. As the Manila Principles highlight a balance between public and private interests can be obtained through a mechanism where power is distributed between the parties involved, and where an impartial, independent, and accountable oversight mechanism exists.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/sc-judgment-in-shreya-singhal-what-it-means-for-intermediary-liability

The Supreme Court Delivers

Shyam Ponappa — 2012-12-21T09:57:57Z

Now, the spectrum and licence issues need resolution. On September 27, 2012, the Supreme Court of India delivered the opinion of a bench comprising five Judges on the Presidential Reference regarding the auction of 2G spectrum.

Published in Organizing India Blogspot on October 11, 2012 and in Business Standard on October 4, 2012.

The Supreme Court’s opinion on the Presidential reference[*]dismissed two preposterous claims. One is that it is beyond the ambit of Parliament and the government to formulate economic policies. The second is that the government must allocate resources only through auctions. It’s like the end of a self-destructive nightmare. True, our heedless kleptocracy as a society of rogue politicians, bureaucrats, defence personnel, and complicit citizens, led to this pass. Even so, the anarchic “destructionism” of these claims is as reprehensible as the kleptocracy they seek to tear down. Fortunately, the Supreme Court opinion rose above the populist clamour.

There’s still a mess to clear. The big picture is that the Supreme Court left its decision on spectrum auctions unaddressed. In matters of detail, some points need resolution based on facts. These are discussed below to dispel prevalent myths.

Myth 1: Auctions maximise govt revenues

"Auctions may be the best way of maximising revenue…": paragraph 116 of the opinion. This contravenes the evidence after the National Telecom Policy -99, that revenue-sharing maximises government revenues as well as public benefits. It also ignores the many auction failures.

Consider the evidence: auction revenues foregone were estimated at under Rs 20,000 crore for 1999-2007, because the sector was mired in losses and was unable to provide services effectively or pay those dues. By comparison, actual collections from revenue-sharing by March 2007 were more than double, at Rs 40,000 crore. Collections by March 2010 were Rs 80,000 crore. Current annual contributions to government revenues may be about Rs 18,000 crore on Adjusted Gross Revenues estimated at Rs 1,40,000 crore, plus taxes, amounting to perhaps Rs 36,000 crore.

Re public benefits, access to telephony grew from a few million users in 1999 to about 700 million today (excluding around 250 million shadow subscriptions).

An ameliorating caveat in paragraph 12 states: "…if the State arrives at the conclusion … that maximum revenue would be earned by auction of the natural resource in question, then that alone would be the process", and this is expanded in paragraph 119:

"Where revenue maximisation is not the object of a policy of distribution, the question of auction would not arise. Revenue considerations may assume secondary consideration to developmental considerations."

This has not prevented erroneous conclusions in the press that auctions are the only valid process, notwithstanding that the conditions stipulated in the order, eg, that government’s actions be “fair, reasonable, non-discriminatory”, were always operative, if not adhered to in instances of abuse, as in the 2G scam.

Myth 2: Maximum govt collections are in the public interest

Government collections as the public interest criterion may work for colonial powers extorting revenues from subject states, or possibly for utopias whose political economy is so balanced that such cross-subsidisation works. Developing economies like India presumably can and should seek the welfare of their people. The same populists crusading for maximum government collections accuse governments of corruption and waste. This doesn’t provide a coherent approach to infrastructure, where each capital-intensive sector is configured to deliver a specific service. For instance, the energy sector has to deliver power, while telecommunications must deliver communications services. Neither can be expected to deliver toilets or water. Yet, many well-intentioned people seem to nurture such irrational expectations.

The spectrum and broadband link

The first prerequisite for broadband is high-speed connectivity. The second is reasonably priced services. Our objectives are, therefore: (a) a broadband network, (b) available anywhere (c) at reasonable prices. Our networks are deficient, however, particularly in rural and semi-urban areas. A host of factors are responsible, ranging from limited public sector network rollout, combined with a private sector focus on the most lucrative urban centres, with incentives skewed to voice telephony. Applications need connectivity based on networks that require spectrum.

Problems and solutions

Consider an application like distance education. The need is for networks and services of high quality (followed by the additional requirement of content). What is apparent is that such applications cannot be effective without the connectivity. So we’re back to the need for networks, of fibre where feasible, and wireless elsewhere. This brings us back to the need for spectrum.

Reviewing facts

As regards the facts relating to the 2G judgment deserving review:
The solution the Supreme Court has not considered is that operators need only to use spectrum, for which they can be charged a fee. The evidence of widely available Wi-fi shows that innovation and usage thrive if spectrum is available. The Supreme Court, the government, and the public need to recognise that allocating spectrum to operators is only one way to use spectrum.

There need be no alienation of spectrum at all, if policies allow open access and charge fees. Then, spectrum could be used like any infrastructure network, eg, airports, highways, or rail, on payment of usage charges. The sharing could be in at least two ways. Operators could pool spectrum for collective use. For this, (i) regulations must allow pooling/active facilities sharing, and (ii) operators must agree on terms and procedures. Another way is for mandatory spectrum sharing using the database-driven systems being implemented in the US by Spectrum Bridge and Telcordia. Similar deployments are planned in the UK, the European Union, and in Singapore. The TV white space is shared because this range is available for sharing, and not because other bands cannot be shared.

There are immense societal costs of duplication in capital investments in multiple networks, including the last-mile spectrum access, of operators using dedicated networks with limited passive facilities sharing (such as towers), compared with the benefits of open-access to common networks, if policies changed. These would employ active facilities sharing (equipment, and not just construction) to reduce capital equipment, construction costs, energy for towers, carbon emissions from a more limited physical network, possibly reduced radiation from a rationalised network with small cells with lower-powered equipment, and the multiplier effect on the finite available spectrum.

Enormous productivity benefits could accrue through ICT applications in infrastructure such as smart grids for energy, transportation, education, healthcare, and government services, as well as many commercial applications.

The Supreme Court could also uphold contractual obligations, by discriminating against actual transgressors in the 2G spectrum allocation, while rehabilitating those who operated within the law.

[*].http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/outtoday/op27092012.pdf

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/organizing-india-blogspot-october-11-2012-shyam-ponappa-the-supreme-court-delivers

The STI Policy Proposes a Transformative Open Access Approach for India

sinha — 2021-04-28T17:22:43Z

Anubha Sinha explains what the draft national Science, Technology and Innovation policy means for open access to scientific literature for Indians. This article was first published in The Wire Science on January 21, 2021.

Indians may soon be able to read scientific papers for free.

Reading scientific papers is currently an expensive affair. Many scientific journals charge a couple of hundred dollars for a single article. Under a proposed ‘One Nation, One Subscription’ plan of India’s fifth (draft) Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) Policy, the government will negotiate with journal publishers to enable access for everyone. The policy also suggests that research produced in Indian publicly funded institutions be made freely accessible to everyone, at the time of publication.

These proposals are a big shift in how we learn and do science, as a country. The previous edition of the policy (2013) did not even recognise affordability or availability of scientific literature as problems. While ‘One Nation, One Subscription’ could alleviate this issue partly, its success will depend largely on how negotiations with publishers materialise. The approach is uncommon: it has been tried in two countries, with limited success, as I discussed here, in an analysis of the idea’s feasibility.

While it is crucial for people to be able to access locked-in research, it is equally important to address the practices that prevent research from being openly accessible in the first place.

The STI policy prescribes a green open access (OA) approach to ensure that research output and data produced with public funds are immediately accessible to the people – as opposed to taxpayers funding the research and paying again to access the results. Under green OA, researchers will be obligated to place their publications and data in online repositories, without any restrictions on how the output may be used.

Individual research and funding agencies, such as the Departments of Science & Technology and of Biotechnology, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and the Wellcome Trust adopted green OA a while ago. A national STI policy stands to provide an extra impetus to adopt and enforce it.

These promising shifts come at a time when the biggest research publishers have launched a copyright infringement lawsuit in India to block Sci-Hub and LibGen on the Indian web. Sci-Hub and LibGen host copyrighted and paywalled research articles and ebooks. Anyone can download this material for free from their servers. As such, these ‘shadow libraries’ serve a vital function for everyone, and the Delhi high court has already deemed this litigation to be one of public importance. The Indian scientific research community will be intervening as well. While the case will proceed at its own pace, it would definitely be in the public interest for the STI policy to implement green OA as a mandatory requirement.

It is also notable that the policymaking process was a collaborative effort by academics, scientists and policymakers. There were multiple thematic consultative rounds with stakeholders. It has been heartening to see the results of a democratic consultation reflected in our national open access approach.

However, as is the case with high-level policies, bringing meaningful implementation often requires more operational and committed work at all levels. It would be a shame to not capitalise on the direction and vision of OA as described in the policy.

Access this article on The Wire Science here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/the-sti-policy-proposes-a-transformative-open-access-approach-for-india

The State of Secure Messaging

divyank — 2020-07-17T08:12:15Z

A look at the protections provided by and threats posed to secure communication online.

This blogpost was edited by Gurshabad Grover and Amber Sinha.

The current benchmark for secure communication online is end-to-end encrypted messaging. It refers to a method of encryption wherein the contents of a message are only readable by the devices of the individuals, or endpoints, participating in the communication. All other Internet intermediaries such as internet service providers, internet exchange points, undersea cable operators, data centre operators, and even the messaging service providers themselves cannot read them. This is achieved through cryptographic mechanisms that allow independent devices to establish a shared secret key over an insecure communication channel, which they then use to encrypt and decrypt messages. Common examples of end-to-end encrypted messaging are applications like Signal and WhatsApp.

This post attempts to give at-risk individuals, concerned citizens, and civil society at large a more nuanced understanding of the protections provided and threats posed to the security and privacy of their communications online.

Threat Model

The first step to assessing security and privacy is to identify and understand actors and risks. End-to-end encrypted messaging applications consider the following threat model:

Device compromise: Can happen physically through loss or theft, or remotely. Access to an individual’s device could be gained through technical flaws or coercion (legal, or otherwise). It can be temporary or be made persistent by installing malware on the device.
Network monitoring and interference: Implies access to data in transit over a network. All Internet intermediaries have such access. They may either actively interfere with the communication or passively observe traffic.
Server compromise: Implies access to the web server hosting the application. This could be achieved through technical flaws, insider access such as an employee, or through coercion (legal, or otherwise).

End-to-end encrypted messaging aims to offer complete message confidentiality and integrity in the face of server and network compromise, and some protections against device compromise. These are detailed below.

Protections Provided

Secure messaging services guarantee certain properties. For mature services that have received adequate study from researchers, we can assume them to be sound, barring implementation flaws which are described later.

Confidentiality: The contents of a message are kept private and the ciphers used are practically unbreakable by adversaries.

Integrity: The contents of a message cannot be modified in transit.

Deniability: Aims to mimic unrecorded real-world conversations where an individual can deny having said something. Someone in possession of the chat transcript cannot cryptographically prove that an individual authored a particular message. While some applications feature such off-the-record messaging capabilities, the legal applicability of such mechanisms is debatable.

Forward and Future Secrecy: These properties aim to limit the effects of a temporary compromise of credentials on a device. Forward secrecy ensures messages collected over the network, which were sent before the compromise, cannot be decrypted. Future secrecy ensures messages sent post-compromise are protected. These mechanisms are easily circumvented in practice as past messages are usually stored on the device being compromised, and future messages can be obtained by gaining persistent access during compromise. These properties are meant to protect individuals aware of these limitations in exceptional situations such as a journalist crossing a border.

Shortcomings

While secure messaging services offer useful protections they also have some shortcomings. It is useful to understand these and their mitigations to minimise risk.

Metadata: Information about a communication such as who the participants are, when the messages are sent, where the participants are located, and what the size of a message is can offer important contextual information about a conversation. While some popular messaging services attempt to minimize metadata generation, metadata leakage, in general, is still considered an open problem because such information can be gleaned by network monitoring as well as from server compromise. Application policies around whether such data is stored and for how long it is retained can improve privacy. There are also experimental approaches that use techniques like onion routing to hide metadata.

Authentication: This is the process of asserting whether an individual sending or receiving a message is who they are thought to be. Current messaging services trust application servers and cell service providers for authentication, which means that they have the ability to replace and impersonate individuals in conversations. Messaging services offer advanced features to mitigate this risk, such as notifications when a participant’s identity changes, and manual verification of participants’ security keys through other communication channels (in-person, mail, etc.).

Availability: An individual’s access to a messaging service can be impeded. Intermediaries may delay or drop messages resulting in what is called a denial of service attack. While messaging services are quite resilient to such attacks, governments may censor or completely shut down Internet access.

Application-level gaps: Capabilities offered by services in addition to messaging, such as contact discovery, online status, and location sharing are often not covered by end-to-end encryption and may be stored by the application server. Application policies around how such information is gathered and retained affect privacy.

Implementation flaws and backdoors: Software or hardware flaws (accidental or intentional) on an individual’s device could be exploited to circumvent the protections provided by end-to-end encryption. For mature applications and platforms, accidental flaws are difficult and expensive to exploit, and as such are only accessible to Government or other powerful actors who typically use them to surveil individuals of interest (and not for mass surveillance). Intentional flaws or backdoors introduced by manufacturers may also be present. The only defence against these is security researchers who rely on manual inspection to examine software and network interactions to detect them.

Messaging Protocols and Standards

In the face of demands for exceptional access to encrypted communication from governments, and risks of mass surveillance from both governments and corporations, end-to-end encryption is important to enable secure and private communication online. The signal protocol, which is open and adopted by popular applications like WhatsApp and Signal, is considered a success story as it brought end-to-end encryption to over a billion users and has become a de-facto standard.

However, it is unilaterally developed and controlled by a single organisation. Messaging Layer Security (or MLS) is a working group within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) that is attempting to standardise end-to-end encryption through participation of individuals from corporations, academia, and civil society. The draft protocol offers the standard security properties mentioned above, except for deniability which is still being considered. It incorporates novel research that allows it to scale efficiently for large groups up to thousands of participants, which is an improvement over the signal protocol. MLS aims to increase adoption further by creating open standards and implementations, similar to the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol used to encrypt much of the web today. There is also a need to look beyond end-to-end encryption to address its shortcomings, particularly around authentication and metadata leakage.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-state-of-secure-messaging

The State is Snooping: Can You Escape?

snehashish — 2019-04-29T15:09:18Z

Blanket surveillance of the kind envisaged by India's Centralized Monitoring System achieves little, but blatantly violates the citizen's right to privacy; Snehashish Ghosh explores why it may be dangerous and looks at potential safeguards against such intrusion.

The Snowden Leaks have made it amply clear that the covert surveillance conducted by governments is no longer covert. Information by its very nature is prone to leaks. The discretion lies completely in the hands of the personnel handling your data or information. Whether it is through knowledge obtained by an intelligence analyst about the US Government conducting indiscriminate surveillance, or hackers infiltrating a secure system and leaking personal information, stored information has a tendency to come out in the open sooner or later.

This raises the question whether, with the advancement of technologies, we should trust our personal information and data with computers. Should we have more stringent laws and procedural safeguards to protect our personal information? Of course, the broader question that remains is whether we have a ‘Right to be Forgotten’.

Similar to PRISM in the US, India is also implementing a Centralized Monitoring System (CMS) which would have the capabilities to conduct multiple privacy-intrusive activities, ranging from call data record analysis to location based monitoring. Given the circumstances and the current revelations by a whistleblower in the US, it is more than imperative to take a closer look at the surveillance technologies which are being deployed by India and question what implications it might have in the future.

Technological shift and procedural safeguards
The need for procedural safeguards was brought to light in the Supreme Court case, when news reports surfaced about the tapping of politicians' phones by the CBI. The Court while deciding on the issue of phone tapping in the case of People’s Union of Civil Liberties v. Union of India (1996), observed that the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885 is an ancient legislation and does not address the issue of telephone tapping. Thereafter, the court issued guidelines, which were implemented by the Government by amending and inserting Rule 419A of the Indian Telegraph Rules, 1951. These procedural safeguards ensure that due process will be followed by any law enforcement agency, while conducting surveillance.

Section 5(2) of the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885 grants the power to the Government to conduct surveillance provided that there is an occurrence of any public emergency or public safety. If and only if the conditions of public safety and public emergency are compromised, and if the concerned authority is convinced that it is expedient to issue such an order for interception in the interest of “the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of an offence” is surveillance legitimized. The same was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in the 1996 judgment on wire tapping.

Now, as the Government of India is planning to launch a new technology, the Centralized Monitoring System (CMS) which would snoop, track and monitor communication data flowing through telecom and data networks, the question arises: can we have procedural safeguards which would protect our right to privacy against technologies such as the CMS?

The key component of a procedural safeguard is human discretion; either a court authorization or an order from a high ranking government official is necessary to conduct targeted surveillance and the reasons for conducting surveillance have to be recorded in writing. This is the procedure which is ordinarily followed by law enforcement agencies before conducting any form of surveillance. However, with the computational turn, governments have resorted to practices which would do away with the human discretion. Dragnet surveillance allows for blanket surveillance. Before getting to the problems in evolving a due process for systems like CMS, it is imperative to examine the capabilities of the system.

Centralized Monitoring System and death of due process
Setting up of a CMS was conceptualized in India after the 2008 Mumbai attacks. It was further consolidated and found a place in the Report of the Telecom Working Group on the Telecom Sector for the Twelfth Five Year Plan (2012-2017). The Report was published in August, 2011 and goes into the details of the CMS.

When machines and robots are deployed to conduct blanket surveillance and impinge on the most fundamental right to life and liberty, and also violate the basic tenets of due process, then much cannot be done by way of procedures. What then do we resort to, is the primary question. Can there be a compromise between the right to privacy and security?

The Report indicates that the technology will cater to “the requirements of security management for law enforcement agencies for interception, monitoring, data analysis/mining, antiâ€socialâ€networking using the country’s telecom infrastructure for unlawful activities.”

The CMS will also be capable of running algorithms for interception of connection oriented networks, algorithms for interception of voice over internet protocol (VoIP), video over IP and GPS based monitoring systems. These algorithms would be able to intercept any communication without any intervention from the telecom or internet service provider. It would also have the capability to intercept and analyze data on any communication network as well as to conduct location based monitoring by tracking GPS locations. Given such capabilities, it is clear that a computer system will be sifting through the internet/communication data and will conduct surveillance as instructed through algorithms. This would include identifying patterns, profiling and also storing data for posterity. Moreover, the CMS will have direct access to the telecommunication infrastructure and would be monitoring all forms of communication.

With the introduction of CMS, state surveillance will shift to blanket surveillance from the current practice of targeted surveillance which can be carried out under specific circumstances that are well defined in the law and in judgments. Moreover, when it comes to current means of surveillance, there are well-defined procedures under the law which have the ability to prevent misuse of the surveillance systems. This is not to say that the current procedural safeguards under the laws are not prone to abuse, but if implemented properly, there is less chance of them being misused. Furthermore, with strong privacy and data protection laws, unlawful and illegal surveillance can be minimized.

In the current legal framework, with respect to surveillance, if CMS is implemented then it will be in violation of the fundamental right to privacy and freedom of speech as guaranteed under our Constitution. It will be also in contravention of the procedural safeguards laid down in the Supreme Court judgement and the Rule 419A of Indian Telegraph Rules, thereof. Strong privacy laws and data protection laws may be put in place, which are completely absent now. But at the end of the day, a machine will be spying on every citizen of India or anyone using any communication services, without any specific targets or suspects.

In the People’s Union of Civil Liberties v. Union of India (1996), the Supreme Court laid down that “the substantive law as laid down in Section 5(2) of the [Indian Telegraph Act, 1885] must have procedural backing so that the exercise of power is fair and reasonable.” But with technologies such as CMS, it will be very difficult to have any form of procedural backing because the system would do away with human discretion which happens to be a key ingredient of any legal procedure.

The argument which can be made in favour of CMS, if any, is that a machine will be going through personal data and it will not be available to any personnel or law enforcement agency without authorization and therefore, it will adhere to the due process. However, such a system will be keeping track of all personal information. Right to privacy is the right to be left alone and any incursion on this fundamental right can only be allowed in special cases, in cases of public emergency or threat of public safety. So, electronic blanket surveillance without human intervention also amounts to violation of the substantive law, which specifically allows surveillance only to be conducted under certain conditions, and not through a system such as CMS that is designed to keep a constant watch on everyone, irrespective of the fact whether there is a need to do so.

Additionally, there exists a strong, pre-established notion that whatever comes out of a computer is bound to be true and authentic and there cannot be any mistakes. We have witnessed this in the past where an IT professional from Bangalore was arrested and detained by the Maharashtra Police for posting derogatory content on Orkut about Shivaji. Later, it was found that the records acquired from the Internet Service Provider were incorrect and the individual had been arrested and detained illegally.

Telephone bills, credit card bills coming out from a computer system are often held to be authentic and error-free. With UID, our identity has been reduced to a number and biometrics stored in a database corresponding to that number. It is this trust in anything which comes out of a computer or a machine that can lead to massive abuse of the system in the absence of any form of checks and balance in place. Artificial things taking control over human lives and our almost unflinching trust in technology will not only cause gross violations of privacy but will also be the death of due process and basic human rights as we know it.

In this regard, due emphasis should be given to the landmark Supreme Court judgment in the case of Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India (1978) which deals with issues related to due process and privacy. It states that "procedure which deals with the modalities of regulating, restricting or even rejecting a fundamental right falling within Article 21 has to be fair, not foolish, carefully designed to effectuate, not to subvert, the substantive right itself. Thus, understood, ‘procedure’ must rule out anything arbitrary, freakish or bizarre. A valuable constitutional right can be canalised only by canalised processes".

When machines and robots are deployed to conduct blanket surveillance and impinge on the most fundamental right to life and liberty and also violate the basic tenets of due process, then much cannot be done by way of procedures. What then do we resort to, is the primary question. Can there be a compromise between the right to privacy and security?

A no-win situation
In reality, dragnet surveillance or blanket surveillance is not very useful for gathering valuable intelligence to prevent instances of threat to national security, public safety and public emergency. For example, if the CMS is used to mine data, analyse content related to anti-social activities and even if the system is 99 per cent accurate, the remaining 1 per cent which is a false positive happens to be a large set. So, 1 out of every 100 individuals identified as an anti-social element by CMS may actually be an innocent citizen. Given the possibility of false positives and which may be more than 1 per cent, the number of innocent citizens caught in the terrorist net would be much higher.

Even though blanket surveillance or dragnet surveillance can keep a tab on everyone, it is nearly impossible for an algorithm to separate the terrorists from the rest. Moreover, the data set collected by the machine is too big for any human analyst, to actually analyze and identify the terrorist in the midst of a deluge of information. Therefore, the argument that a system like CMS will ensure security in lieu of minor intrusions of privacy is a flawed one. Implementation of CMS will not really ensure security but will be a case of blatant violation of individual’s right to privacy anyway.

What is perhaps more shocking is that not only will CMS be futile in preventing security breaches or neutralizing security threats, it will on the contrary expose individual Indian citizens to breach of personal security. If personal data and information are stored for future reference through a centralized mechanism, which is also the case with UID, it will be highly susceptible to attacks and security threats. It will be a Pandora’s Box with a potential to create havoc the moment someone is able to gain access to the information with intention to misuse that. Leaking of personal information and data on a large scale can be detrimental to society and give rise to instances of public emergency.

The ‘Right to be Forgotten’

Currently, the European Union is engulfed in the debate on the “Right to be Forgotten” laws. The Right to be Forgotten finds its origins in the French Law le droit Ã l’oubli or the right of oblivion, where a convict who has served his sentence can object to the publication of facts of his conviction and imprisonment or penalty. This law has a new found meaning in the context of social media and the internet, where we have the right to delete all our personal information permanently. This is an important issue which India should debate and discuss, as we live in an era where privacy comes at a cost.

On the one hand, technology has made it easier to track, trace, monitor and snoop, on the other it has also seen innovation in the field of encryption and anonymity tools. Encryption tools such as Open PGP exist online, which can secure information from third party access. Tor Browser, allows an user to surf the web anonymously. The use of such technologies should be encouraged as there is no law which prohibits their use. If systems are being built to spy on us, it will be better if we use technologies which protect our personal information from such surveillance technologies.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/india-together-june-26-2013-snehashish-ghosh-the-state-is-snooping-can-you-escape

The Spies We Trust: Third Party Service Providers and Law Enforcement Surveillance

praskrishna — 2012-07-31T04:47:48Z

Christopher Soghoian's dissertation was submitted to the faculty of the Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree "Doctor of Philosophy" in the School of Informatics, Department of Computer Science, Indiana University

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/spies-we-trust

The South African Telecommunications Sector: Poised for Change

radha — 2011-10-21T09:59:51Z

CIS in collaboration with the LINK Centre, Graduate School of Public and Development Management, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa and in association with different institutions across India is organizing a Lecture Tour on:
“The South African Telecommunications Sector: Poised for Change” By Sagie Chetty, Senior Manager, Eskom, South Africa.
It will be our pleasure to have you join us for the talks.

The Co-hosts, Dates and the Venues for the Talk are given below –

Co-Host: Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
Date: 19th October, 2009 at 3.30pm
Venue – IIT-M, Chennai

Co-Host: Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
Date: 20th October, 2009 at 4.00pm
Venue – IIT-B, Mumbai

Co-Host: International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore
Date: 23rd October, 2009 at 4.00pm
Venue – IIIT-B, Bangalore

Co-Host: Indira Gandhi National Open University, Delhi
Date: 26th October, 2009 at 3.00pm
Venue – IGNOU, Delhi

Co-Host: National Institute of Science Technology and Development Studies, Delhi
Date: 27th October, 2009 at 3.00pm
Venue – NISTADS, Delhi

Co-Host: CCMG - Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi
Date: 29th October, 2009 at 2.00pm
Venue – CCMG - Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi

About the Speaker:

Sagie Chetty is a Senior Manager in Eskom, South Africa’s largest electricity utility. Sagie spent the first part of his career at Eskom as Information Manager in the Generation Division. In that time he was responsible for information systems strategy development and implementation. Some of the key projects he has been involved in are the implementation of SAP Plant Maintenance, Business Intelligence systems and other bespoke Information Systems for Generation Power Stations.

Abstract of the Lecture: The South African Telecommunications Sector: Poised for Change

With a gross domestic product of over $506 billion (PPP, 2008) South Africa is one of the leading economies on the African continent. Only Nigeria with a GDP of $328 billion and Egypt with a GDP of $453 billion currently rival the South African economy. The economy is strong in manufacturing and agriculture, but is still based significantly on mining of gold, diamonds, platinum, coal and iron ore. Its main trading partner is the European Union. Bilateral trade with India amounts to $6, 2 billion (2008) with the balance of trade in South Africa’s favour to the value of about $1 billion.
Although one of the leading economies in Africa, South Africa’s Information and Communications (ICT) sector has not shown the concomitant level of development that reflects its economic position in Africa. ICT usage – telephony and Internet – has historically been low, and electronic transactions are utilised largely by business. There are a number of reasons for this; however the high cost of telecommunications is certainly a contributing factor. The high cost is attributed largely to policy and regulatory failure in the telecommunications sector. The sector is characterized by powerful incumbent telecoms operators that thwart competition and further entrench their dominant market positions. The consequence is that the high telecommunications costs impact access, affordability and the cost of doing business for the region.
Recent developments in the telecommunications sector, however could spell the end to high costs if policy and regulatory actions do not hinder competition. South African consumers can in the very near future look forward to lower telecommunications prices with the laying of new undersea cables, a new national backbone to compete with the existing one, new satellite ventures to provide the backhaul between cellular and broadband towers, a landmark court decision allowing value added network service providers (VANS) to build their own networks and the imminent entry of the incumbent telecommunications fixed line operator into the mobile arena. It is an opportune time for policy makers and regulators to take bold steps to free up the sector and open it up for true competition.
Lines that historically demarcated fixed, mobile, voice, data are blurring, causing shifts in market structures. However, currently the market is structured around the incumbent Telkom for fixed lines services and Vodacom and MTN for mobile services. A second PSTN, Neotel has been licensed but is only offering limited services. A third mobile operator, Cell C is operating but has yet to gain any significant market share.

The talk is open to all and there are no registration or entry fees.
Please let us know if you require any further details.

VIDEOS

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/events/lecture-tour-by-sagie-chetty

The Role of ICT in Judicial Reform- An Exploration

rebecca — 2011-08-02T07:17:22Z

A seminar held this month by the Communications and Manufacturing Association of India (CMAI) explored the role that information and communication technology can assume in the process of India's judicial reform efforts. The broad consensus among panelists was that “law is not keeping pace with technology”. However, whether technology will be harnessed to actually facilitate much needed transparency and access to the justice system, or be simply used to improve efficiency within the judicial branch still remains unclear.

The Indian judiciary is facing mounting pressures to reform its apparatus. Even the judiciary itself has come to recognize, on the books, that change is long overdue. Some estimates have it that it would require almost three years to clear the current backlog of cases in High Courts. While technocrats herald that the enormous backlog of cases may eventually be the death knell for India's judicial branch, reform efforts must go beyond achieving the speedier delivery of justice and work towards tackling other inadequacies of the system if “access to justice for all”(1) is to become a reality.

The rural penetration of courts in India is extremely low, which significantly limits access to justice for the many citizens living far beyond the district courts of city centers. An extremely low judge to population ratio in India only contributes further to the already high incidence of pending cases, making delays in justice a regular occurrence. Mr. P.K. Malhotra from the Department of Legal Affairs has noted that increased litigation within the government has also caused a stark increase in the number of pending cases. While the need for reform can be demonstrated quite clearly on a practical level, the right to information (RTI) movement has also provided further impetus for reform on a more fundamental level. Well organized citizens are now demanding the right to a more transparent and accountable judiciary.

As e-government initiatives continue to transform the nature of India's bureaucracy and enhance the quality of government services, there is a mood of great optimism that ICT will also come to play a central role in judicial reform efforts. Speakers at the seminar enthusiastically cited innovative practices such as Singapore's “paperless court” which makes a compelling case for automation. Notable success in implementing ICT in the judiciary have also been achieved in Canada, Australia, and in several countries across Latin America. This is not to say, however, that the appropriation of ICT is uniform in every case. Variables such as political will and context, institutional capacity and reform goals all play a role in shaping the outcome. Plans could, for example, take more of an operational approach by prioritizing the improved efficiency and the rationalization of resources by implementing electronic case management systems. Other strategies may be designed and implemented from an access perspective, seeking to restore faith in the justice system by increasing transparency and accountability. This could be done, for example, by installing video technology in court rooms, or publishing legal information online.

At the seminar, India's consortium of well-organized and highly ambitious technocrats were not shy in suggesting the many ways ICT may be used to transform the judicial system, and, additionally, the many ways such an endeavor provides the IT sector with “new opportunities”. Dr M. Veerappa Moily, Union Minister for Law and Justice, has proposed for India a centrally funded and administered National Judicial Technology Program. Such a program aims to use ICT in the courtrooms to free the legal system of “historical inefficiencies". It is of no doubt that ICT can reduce the duplicity of the paper world and make courts more green through electronic case filing and video conferencing. Online case filing systems can increase speed in which citizens can have their cases heard, and real time access to online repositories of legal information drastically expedites the case cycle.

Mr. C P Gurnani, CEO of Tech Mahindra made the bold assertion that with ICT, India's 300 year case backlog can be reduced to three years, in a span of only three years (2). Features of this newly envisioned e-justice system include the use of video hearings to reduce transportation costs, case filing operation systems, RFID based file tracking, and the creation of a publicly accessible and easily searchable e-library. While others were much less optimistic than Mr. Gurani and recognize that the use of ICT in the reform process is “no instant coffee”, the question of whether or not ICT can be a strategically appropriated in the Indian context still remains.

Optimistic accounts of how ICT will increase access to justice, incorporate the marginalized into the law-making process, and increase judicial transparency and accountability all sounds uncomfortably techno-utopian. While ICT should facilitate the reform process, past experiences have shown that the over zealous use of technology has too-often resulted in less than impressive results (3). To ensure that the reform process in India is not driven mainly by the IT sector, it is important that the use of technology remains complimentary to a sound national judicial reform strategy. An abundant supply of technical support with little demand for the reform process from within the judicial branch may spell disappointing results for all stakeholders. Seeing that India's first seminar discussing the role of IT in the judiciary has been organized by the IT industry, it is safe to assume that reform strategies are being crystallized through the gaze of technocrats rather than the judiciary itself. Technology has an important role to play, but India's technocrats may be jumping the gun.

Many deep-seated challenges must be overcome before the use of ICT can be truly transformative. Often cited is the level of resistance judicial cultures express towards externally imposed change. Quite logically, those required to make change are also those who may have the most to lose in the short-term by doing so. Similarly, it is also difficult garnering the levels of political support judicial reforms require to be effective. Because the judiciary is such a highly politicized apparatus, efforts to fundamentally transform the system will require the support of a vast number of stakeholders . The low level of technological literacy which exists among India's judges is also problematic. Not only will members of the judiciary be open to new ways of doing business, they will also have to be diligent in adopting a new skill-set in which they may be more than a decade behind in acquiring.

Other deep-rooted limitations of India's judicial system are becoming increasingly apparent today. Questions surrounding access to justice remain deeply embedded in the asymmetries of class power, which are often reinforced by the political nature of the judiciary. Constitutional law in India also remains unstable, as the principles informing judicial action have become increasingly less clear (5). Furthermore, the courts have come to maintain a disproportionate share of power and influence in the Indian political sphere (6). It is questionable if ICT can work to ameliorate some of these malignancies, or if its use will only come to reinforce them. If technology is appropriated in a way which serves to make the judicial process more transparent and accountable, protect the rights of citizens, and provide greater and more equitable access to justice, it may be safe to assume that a more tech-savvy judiciary is a positive development for citizens. Publishing legal information online, for example, currently allows for greater transparency in the law making process and allows dialogue on important issues of governance and citizenship.

However, it is almost unnecessary to reiterate that such outcomes are not guaranteed. Technology is often seen as neutral– the evaluative outcome of its application remains dependent on numerous variable factors. Most important is whether or not the government provides a legal framework conducive to the appropriation of ICT in ways which are considered to further the public interest. It may be useful to view the successful appropriation of ICT to judicial reform as a cumulative process, each step being a precondition to the other. It is clear to see how basic infrastructure such as civil courts in rural areas must be in place before the use of ICT can facilitate access to justice for individuals who remain peripheral to the legal system. Similarly, one would assume that laws would have to first be to be nondiscriminatory to all members of society before it could it can be widely accepted that more technology will better safeguard our rights and freedoms.

Without a legal framework which is considered to be socially just, greater speed of the judicial process, aided by technology, may become a tool which enables the judiciary to act more arbitrarily, more efficiency. This could be troubling for individuals who are already marginalized by certain policies or legal practices. Technology can also make it possible for judges to insulate themselves from the necessary checks and balances required in the law-making process. While Mr Gurani stated that ICT can help preserve judicial independence, it is questionable if the use of technology is an appropriate strategy to mitigate politicization of the judicial branch. Any frivolous efforts to spearhead the reform process through the introduction of ICT without the required commitment of judges and policy makers may be naïve at best. At worst, it could serve to reinforce what judicial bodies believe they do well without critically re-examining the fundamental roles, norms and principles of the Indian judicial system itself.

Online case-filing services may unintentionally, due to cost or lack of awareness, erect further barriers to justice for individuals who traditionally remained outside of the sphere of access. In the same vein, if ICT is favored for use in criminal rather than civil courts, technology may simply become a tool used to sentence people, more quickly. This scenario sits quite polemic to visions of technology serving as a tool to empower individuals to better assert their rights and seek justice. Foreshadowing the role ICT may play in the future of India's judicial reform process, SPANCO Technologies is currently piloting the use of video technology in criminal courts. Furthermore, India's judiciary has made several attempts to insulate itself from the provisions of the RTI act, indicating that new laws, and even new technologies, may not be able to change practice. There are also strong doubts looming that the Gramin Nyayalayas Act will be successful in leveraging the required financial support needed to construct civil courts in rural areas. Without the basic building blocks, it is difficult to envision how a National Judicial Technology Program will be successful in bringing "justice" to all who are awaiting it. Such instances serve as a light warning that technology, even within a favorable legal framework, may not necessarily spell a more accessible, transparent and accountable justice system.

A well-functioning judicial system is required to keep up with the demands of modern democratic society. It is unquestionable that technology can play an influential role in ensuring that the relationship between citizens and the government is strong and communicative. However, it is important to ask under what conditions may it be beneficial to implement technology’s use. Inferring from last week’s seminar, proposals and rationale behind potential reforms were made from an economic perspective; how ICT can be used to see that cases are filed and judgments are delivered more quickly to improve efficiency and rationalize resources. Whether technology will be appropriated to facilitate a more equitable justice system is unknown, but it is certain that such will require a coherent national reform strategy with long-term political backing. Short-shorted technological fixes may improve India's judicial efficiency in the short term, but may, however, overshadow opportunities to bring about a more transparent and accountable system in the long-term.

Notes

1. This was a notion emphasized often throughout the seminar.

2. Where these estimates were drawn is unknown.

3. For a concise account of how the use of ICT may be misappropriated in the judicial reform process, see E-Justice: Towards a Strategic Use of ICT in Judicial Reform by Waleed H. Malik

4. For an interesting account of India's judicial system, see "The Rise of Judicial Sovereignty" by Pratap Bhanu Mehta in "The State of India's Democracy", Oxford University Press, 2009.

5. Pratap Bhanu Mehta.

6. Ibid.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/what-will-be-the-role-of-ict-in-indias-judical-reform-process

The Road to Financial Inclusion

salelkar — 2014-06-03T06:46:18Z

It is increasingly frustrating to hear about wonderful steps being taken for financial inclusion within the private sector which completely ignores the question of inclusion of persons with disabilities.

Those of us working in the disabilities sector and those who live with the reality of disability know how difficult it is for persons with disabilities to even open bank accounts independently, and for those who are allowed to open bank accounts on their own, access to added services like ATM cards, chequebooks, internet banking — facilities which many of us take for granted — becomes a matter of discretion of bank managerial staff. The CIS Report on Banking Accessibility is a seminal document on the problems being faced on accessibility to banking, and it was hoped that the Reserve Bank of India would take cognizance of the numerous issued raised within it.

On May 21, 2014, the Reserve Bank of India issued a notification mandating all scheduled banks to take necessary steps to provide all existing ATMs / future ATMs with ramps for the same to be accessible for persons with disabilities, and provided further that the height of the ATMs should not create an impediment in their use by wheelchair users. The onus is on banks to provide this, and in cases where such changes are not practicable, this requirement may be dispensed with, for reasons recorded and displayed in branches or ATMs concerned. The requirements for ramps at entrances is also extended to bank branches (wherever feasible). The notification also notes the failure of Banks to ensure that at least 1/3rd of all their ATMs are "talking" ATMs with Braille keypads as per the 2009 Circular and now mandates that all ATMs installed from July 1, 2014 shall be talking ATMs with Braille Keypads.

The 2014 Notification goes one step forward and makes special provisions for providing magnifying glasses for persons with low vision in order to assist them in the carrying out of banking transactions. Banks should maintain a list of facilities for persons with disabilities and make this information available for customers prominently. On the May 27, a similar Notification, extending similar provisions to Regional Rural Banks, was published.

What does this mean for accessibility and banking? Definitely, the circulars come as a big boost to accessibility, particularly with regard to ATM facilities. ATM Machines which are designed to accommodate persons with disabilities do make a huge difference, though many, many persons have reported not even being given access to these facilities on account of their disabilities which has not been addressed in these circulars.

Additionally, it does not appear that non compliance is actionable, as Banks are merely advised to report the progress made in this regard periodically to their respective Customer Service Committee of the Board and ensure compliance. As pointed out above, reasons for non compliance are merely to be recorded and displayed. The procedures to approach the Ombudsman do not include accessible measures, and this continues to allow bank staff to act with impunity in denying banking facilities for persons with disabilities.

Despite actively intervening in the eventual Report of the Technical Committee on Banking of the RBI, disability rights activists have found that the banking industry has not been receptive to the needs of persons with disabilities. From this background, the RBI Notifications are a welcome start, though slightly premature — what is of utmost urgency on the part of the RBI is a categorical statement that no person with disability who comes to the bank to open a bank account will be denied access to the same. Additional tools which can be extremely beneficial to persons with disabilities, including mobile and internet banking, must be made accessible and available to persons with disabilities. It is also important for basic training on disability and communication be made part of syllabus for training of banking officials, and that regular interactions and training is encouraged for bank officials. It would be useful for all bank branches, and all departments of the RBI, to have an accessibility officer, a bank official given the additional responsibility of ensuring accessibility of the bank branch or the Department as the case may be, who is given specialized training in matters relating to accessibility. This would go a long way in ensuring that financial inclusion leaves no one behind.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/the-road-to-financial-inclusion

The Right to Read Campaign, now in Delhi

praskrishna — 2011-08-17T08:45:56Z

The Right to Read campaign, this time in Delhi, the national capital of the country has been announced. This is the third in the series. The previous two held in Calcutta and Chennai were highly successful and Delhi too promises quite a lot.

About 70 million Indians are unable to read printed material owing to various forms of disabilities. According to industry estimates, around 80,000-100,000 books get published every year in India of which only about 700 are made available for these persons. Technologies like screen readers make it possible for persons with disabilities to access knowledge in alternate formats like Braille, e-text, audio, large print, et cetera. Yet people are unable to convert books into accessible formats thanks to the provisions of the Indian Copyright Act, 1957.

India needs to change the situation quickly and put an end to the shortage of books and enable these 70 million persons to participate in social life. For this we need to make use of the developments in technology which makes it possible for all persons to access knowledge and enable them to live a life of social inclusion and participation on par with the rest of society. People with disabilities too have a right to access information like other persons- let copyright laws recognize the diverse needs of persons with disabilities and open up the gates of knowledge to all.

Objectives of the Right to Read Campaign

To expedite copyright law reform by informing policy makers on the necessity and nature of amendment. This has to be made to the Indian Copyright Act 1957 to give effect to the rights of persons with disabilities.
To raise awareness on the issue amongst the parliamentarians, members of the judiciary, educationalists, publishers and the public.

The Campaign

The Indian campaign is a part of the global Right to Read campaign which was started by the World Blind Union in 2008. It is a nationwide campaign and seeks to:

Accelerate change in the copyright law;
Raise public awareness on the issue of access to reading for the print-impaired; and
Gather Indian support for the Treaty for the Blind proposed by the World Blind Union at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/right-to-read-campaign

The Right to Information, The Right to Knowledge (Talk by Sam Pitroda & Carl Malamud)

pranesh — 2018-02-14T12:19:16Z

On October 15, 2017, Sam Pitroda and Carl Malamud will speak on open data and knowledge in India.

HasGeek and NUMA Bangalore are co-organizing a talk by two eminent internet pioneers — Sam Pitroda and Carl Malamud — on open data and knowledge in India. Pranesh Prakash of CIS will introduce the speakers and their work.

The Right to Information, The Right to Knowledge

Sam Pitroda and Carl Malamud will talk about their efforts in India, the U.S., and many other countries to help promote universal access to knowledge. They'll discuss the constitutional underpinnings of this right in India and some of the information they've been making available, including 3 lakh books from the Digital Library of India, 19,000 official standards from the Bureau of Indian Standards, and a raft of other resources such as the entire Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.

They will discuss how key laws such as the Right to Information make this possible but will focus more on how the world of open source and the Internet can turn that promise into a reality. Universal access to knowledge is the great unmet promise of our times, and they will talk about what we can all do to make this dream possible.

About the speakers

Dr. Sam Pitroda was a senior advisor to Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi and Manmohan Singh and is widely credited for having led India’s telecommunications and technology revolutions in the 1980s. Dr. Pitroda holds 20 honorary PhDs, close to 100 worldwide patents, and helped create the first digital PBXs in the 1960s.

Carl Malamud started the first radio station on the Internet and is considered one of the pioneers of the U.S. open government movement. Carl runs Public.Resource.Org, an NGO which has placed hundreds of millions of pages of government information online, including all 19,000 Indian Standards.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/events/the-right-to-information-the-right-to-knowledge