Centre for Internet and Society

WIP SCCR 27 (April 30, 2014)

praskrishna — 2014-05-25T04:06:04Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wipo-sccr-27-discussion-transcripts-day-3.pdf

Winter School on Privacy, Surveillance and Data Protection

praskrishna — 2015-02-07T00:37:55Z

The Centre for Communication Governance (CCG) in collaboration with the UNESCO Chair on Freedom of Communication and Information at the University of Hamburg and the Hans Bredow conducted a week-long winter school on 'Privacy, Surveillance and Data Protection at National Law University, Delhi, from January 19 to 23, 2015.

The winter school focused on the law governing privacy in the EU and in India and covered issues ranging from surveillance to data protection. German and Indian members of faculty used interactive methods of teaching and group activities in each session, to help students from Germany, India and Israel contribute to the classroom and learn from each other.

Bhairav Acharya was a speaker at the event. He spoke on 'privacy theory'. More information here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/winter-school-on-privacy-surveillance-data-protection

Winners of the Opensource.com 2015 Community Awards

praskrishna — 2015-02-12T01:23:44Z

Every year, Opensource.com awards people from our community who have excelled in contributing and sharing stories about open source.

These stories are about open source as we use it in our everyday lives as well as how it helps to build a better world and future in technology. This year, we present to you the 2015 Opensource.com Community Awards in the following categories.

People's Choice Awards

Subhashish Panigrahi

An educator and open source activist, based in Bangalore, India.

Reader's Choice Awards

Recognizes the community's favorite articles from 2014. Voted on by the community.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/opensource-2015-award-winners

Window on the World

praskrishna — 2012-06-15T05:49:04Z

Subsequent to the publishing of a peer reviewed essay titled Resisting Revolutions: Questioning the Radical Potential of Citizen Action, the Centre for Internet & Society has been listed as one of the global organisations working on issues of participation, citizenship and new technologies along with a list of partner organisations.

Published by Palgrave Macmillan

This issue of Window on the World lists some civil society organizations, networks and research institutes working on issues of participation, citizenship and new technologies.

American Commonwealth Partnership (ACP)

The ACP is a broad alliance of colleges, universities and civic groups, which promotes and develops ‘democracy colleges’ for the twenty-first century. It was launched in the White House convening, ‘For Democracy's Future – Education Reclaims Our Civic Mission’ in association with the Department of Education and the White House Office of Public Engagement.

ACP responds to the civic crisis in America, and the widespread sense of powerlessness. It holds that we must reinvent citizenship for the twenty-first century in the United States and around the world.

ACP develops interest and support for civic agency, including policy, legislation, media and deliberative dialogues. It also highlights several initiatives, which embody principles of civic innovation, full participation, diversity and civic agency.

Arab Forum for Alternatives (AFA)

The AFA is an organization that works for a society in which democratic culture prevails, for a society capable of protecting its rights and defending such rights through a democratic movement. This will be implemented by providing a space for experts, activists and researchers in the field of civil society who are interested in issues related to the reform/change process in the Arab region, and who have alternative visions seeking to put forward in a scientific and practical way aiming to the development of their societies based on justice, democracy and human rights values.

Centre for Internet & Society (CIS)

The Centre for Internet and Society critically engages with concerns of digital pluralism, public accountability and pedagogic practices, in the field of Internet and Society, with particular emphasis on South–South dialogues and exchange.

Through multidisciplinary research, intervention and collaboration, it seeks to explore, understand and affect the shape and form of the Internet, and its relationship with the political, cultural and social milieu of our times.

Civic explorations programme

Inspired by the knowledge explorations, HIVOS, together with Institute of Development Studies (IDS), ISS and CiS, is turning ‘The changing face of citizen action’ newsletter into a longer term ‘civic explorations’ programme. With this programme, it intends to offer a space to reflect on the changing dynamics of citizen action in a globalizing world, through research and dialogue. Its action plan for 2012 includes three regional knowledge explorations (In Central America, East Africa and South America), the continuation of the newsletter and its involvement in a number of innovative research programmes on civic action.

CIVICUS

CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation is an international alliance of members and partners, which constitutes an influential network of organizations at the local, national, regional and international levels. CIVICUS has worked for nearly two decades to strengthen citizen action and civil society throughout the world, especially in areas where participatory democracy and citizens’ freedom of association are threatened. CIVICUS has a vision of a global community of active, engaged citizens committed to the creation of a more just and equitable world. This is based on the belief that the health of societies exists in direct proportion to the degree of balance between the state, the private sector and civil society.

Community Development Resource Association (CDRA)

CDRA is a South African non-governmental organization, which is a centre for organizational innovation and developmental practice.

It values people's ability to organize, and so shape the world. It fosters and promotes innovative organizational forms and practices that seek to transform power towards a just world characterized by freedom, inclusion and sufficiency.

The essence of its work and services can best be described in four words: searching (collaborative inquiry, research and learning); accompanying (consultancy services that accompany organizations through processes of learning and change); sharing (courses through which they share effective organizational practice); and promoting (courageously standing with others to advocate for new organizational forms and practices that work, and challenge those that do not).

Future citizenship

Future Citizenship is a venture to facilitate access to citizenship projects internationally.

Its initiatives include a network of scholars, seminars, conferences and an e-journal. Future Citizenship hopes this will encourage further cooperation and exchange of ideas and insights between its participants, their students and other interested parties. It also hopes to contribute to a better understanding of the problems confronting modern democracies and its growing numbers of various new citizens. Whether such understanding will contribute to addressing and solving those problems in the spirit of basic human rights could in part determine the future course and well-being of modern democracies, and of new forms of political communities.

Global voices online – The Netizen report

Global voices Online frequently produces ‘The Netizen Report’: a regular overview of recent global developments related to the power dynamics between citizens, companies and governments on the Internet. It is hoped that these regular reports can provide Netizens around the world with useful information about who is seeking to influence and shape the digital platforms and networks we increasingly depend upon, and how. Armed with information, people are in a better position to defend their rights, and to make sure the Internet evolves in a manner that is compatible with free expression and dissent.

Involve

Involve is made up of experts in public engagement, participation and dialogue. It carries out research and delivers training to inspire citizens, communities and institutions to run and take part in high-quality public participation processes, consultations and community engagement. It believes passionately in a democracy where citizens are empowered to take and influence the decisions that affect their lives. Involve has transformed how leading organizations engage, including the OECD, Communities and Local Government, the European Commission, the States of Jersey, the BBC, the UNDP, the Cabinet Office and numerous Local Authorities.

JASS (Just Associates)

JASS (Just Associates) is an International Feminist Organization driven by the partners and initiatives of its regional networks in Mesoamerica, Southern Africa and Southeast Asia. JASS is dedicated to strengthening and mobilizing women's voice, visibility and collective organizing power to change the norms, institutions and policies that perpetuate inequality and violence, in order to create a just, sustainable world for all. Founded as a learning community by a group of activists, popular educators and scholars from 13 countries in 2002, JASS generates knowledge from experience, with the intention of improving the theory and practice of women's rights, development and democracy.

LogoLink

LogoLink, the Learning Initiative on Citizen Participation and Local Governance, is a global network of practitioners from civil society organizations, research institutions and governments created to stimulate and support civil society organizations and networks to engage in citizen participation and social control of public policies at the local level.

LogoLink is engaged in animating a more participatory and inclusive relationship between those who govern and those who are governed. It means, on the one hand, to sensitize and challenge governments to implement innovative and equitable public policies oriented to assuring human rights, and to be more responsive and accountable towards the needs and concerns of citizens. On the other, it means to support citizens and civil society organizations to create participatory spaces, hold their governments accountable and exercise social control.

Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS)

MKSS is a people's organization and part of the growing non-party political process in India. The MKSS works with workers and peasants in the villages of Central Rajasthan. It was set up by the people of the area in 1990 to strengthen participatory democratic processes, so that ordinary citizens could live their lives with dignity and justice. The organization was born out of a struggle for community land held illegally by a feudal landlord. The subsequent struggle for minimum wages made it evident to the people, that transparency and accountability of systems of governance are basic to access any right. It became clear that access to relevant information is a fundamental tool for ensuring transparency and accountability of the government, and of all bodies that affect public interest.

mySociety

mySociety runs most of the United Kingdom's best known democracy Websites. It works with the public, private or third sector, and organizations which try to adapt to the new world of citizens empowering themselves through the Internet. mySociety has helped them by building sites, consulting or helping them to make plans. mySociety has two missions. The first is to be a charitable project, which builds Websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. The second is to teach the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to use the Internet most efficiently to improve lives.

Participation, Power and Social Change (PPSC)

The PPSC team at IDS works in partnership with diverse collaborators from around the world to generate ideas and action for social change. Through research, innovation and learning in rights-based and participatory approaches, it works with people to identify and implement alternative approaches to social change that respond to local situations and bridge operational practice with research and policy change. The team's work intends to help tackle the power inequalities that create crises and sustain poverty and injustices through the suppression of alternative or marginalized voices. Citizenship DRC – resources: http://www.drc-citizenship.org/

Participation research centre

The Participation Resource Centre is a collection of over 5,000 documents, many of them unpublished and practitioner-based, about participatory approaches to development. They include research reports, training manuals, workshop reports and critical reflections on Participation. Information about each document can be searched online.

The Centre particularly promotes Participatory Methodologies, sharing practical examples from development initiatives around the world in the form of case studies, guides and manuals.

The collection is held at the IDS, University of Sussex and incorporates the collection of the International Institute for Environment and Development.

Politeia

Politeia – Participation for Citizenship and Democracy in Europe – is a network of institutions and organizations throughout Europe. The general aim of the association is to promote active democratic citizenship in countries of Europe and, more specifically, political and social participation of citizens and their organizations.

The goals of Politeia are the creation of a structure that will set civic participation and education higher on the European and national agenda, the strengthening of the capacities of the partner organizations by exchanging methods and practices and a stronger presence in the European NGO scene by focusing on the promotion of European citizenship through participation.

Twaweza

Twaweza means ‘we can make it happen’ in Swahili. It is a ten-year citizen-centered initiative, focusing on large-scale change in East Africa. Twaweza believes that lasting change requires bottom-up action. It seeks to foster conditions and expand opportunities through which millions of people can get information and make change happen in their own communities directly and by holding governments to account.

Compiled by Remko Berkhout and Laura Fano Morrissey

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/window-on-the-world

Will the Copyright Law Help the Starving Artist?

praskrishna — 2012-05-29T03:46:23Z

By law, producers are no longer allowed to keep all the royalties to songs, lyrics or other works of arts. Now, these rights will have to be shared with the artist who created them.

This article by Margherita Stancati was published in the Wall Street Journal on May 28, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted in this.

"I remember when Ustad Bismillah Khan" – a legendary Indian classical musician – "came to me and said that he did not have money to pay his rent," Indian Human Resources Minister Kapil Sibal recently told Parliament.

At the time, Mr. Sibal said he solved the problem by writing him a check.

The government hopes that changes introduced to India’s 1957 Copyright Act will allow composers and other artists to do away with such acts of charity. Parliament passed the bill amending the copyright act last week.

By law, producers are no longer allowed to keep all the royalties to songs, lyrics or other works of arts. Now, these rights will have to be shared with the artist who created them.

Earlier, "artists would typically give all the rights to the producer. It was called a work for hire," says Anish Dayal, a Supreme Court lawyer who specializes in media and entertainment legislation.

The amendments to the act means that "even if they want to give rights to producers, they can’t," adds Mr. Dayal.

The way the law phrases this is a little confusing. An amendment to section 18 of the act says that authors of literary or musical works featured in movies shall "receive royalties to be shared on an equal basis" with others who have copyright over the work (such as producers.) It’s not clear whether "equal basis" means 50% or whether it depends on the number of people with whom the royalties are shared.

The amended law also makes it compulsory for radio and broadcasters to pay royalties every time they air a recording.

The biggest impact of these changes will be on India’s film industry, especially on the lyricists and composers of Bollywood music, who have long lobbied for rights over their work.

Before the amendments were given a green light, Bollywood lyricist Javed Akhtar described the condition artists worked in as "bonded labor." Recently addressing lawmakers in the upper house of Parliament, where he holds an honorary seat, Mr. Akhtar shared a long list of cases of famed Indian musicians and composers who lived and died in penury. He named Shailendra, a popular 1950s Hindi lyricist, and Omkar Prasad Nayyar, a composer of movie scores.

For Paromita Vohra, a Mumbai-based documentary filmmaker, said changes to the law mark a first step towards making art production “more equal” by giving artists more rights over their work. "It’s about time," says Ms. Vohra, who last year made a film on copyright in the world of art.

"Those who have the money are more powerful than those who make the arts. The act recognizes this, it addresses a power balance," she adds, describing this as a "philosophical change" in the law.

But she says this alone is not enough. "Lawyers are good at circumventing the law," she claims. Still, artists willing to fight for their rights "now have the law to fall back on," she adds.

Stronger labor unions, Ms. Vohra says, would make it easier for artists to make the most of the new legislation. "When that happens, I think the law will be very helpful."

Not all were pleased with the changes on royalties. Adarsh Gupta of Saregama, a music production company, said the law is "extremely unfair to the film and music industry" and that it paves the way to litigation.

Other changes introduced in the act include tighter regulations on cover versions, including a clause that raises the time period after which covers are legally allowed from two to five years.

Critics say these restrictions are excessive and at odds with art produced in the digital era.

"This ignores present-day realities," Pranesh Prakash of the Centre for Internet & Society wrote in his analysis of the amended copyright bill. He used the example of the hit tune Kolaveri Di, which was covered countless times. "The singers and producers of those unlicensed versions could be jailed under the current India Copyright Act, which allows even non-commercial copyright infringers to be put behind bars," he adds.

The act also removes copyright requirements for Braille or for other works of art adapted for people with disabilities.

What the amended law does not include is a clause that many in the Indian publishing industry feared may have made them redundant. The proposed amendment would have allowed non-Indian publishing houses distribute their books in India, removing the territorial exclusivity of local publishers. This clause did not make it in the final version of the law.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/will-copyright-help-starving-artist

Will open access replace costly commercial publishing models?

praskrishna — 2012-02-23T09:12:10Z

Cost of research journals going up while funds available are coming down, writes Vasudha Venugopal in an article published in the Hindu on February 19, 2012.

Technology has inherently changed the way science education is propagated. Digital libraries, wikis, webinars, videoconferences, open access and repositories — all seem to be excellent tools for sharing scientific knowledge.

Download the PDF

But with the escalating cost of research journals and the economic and logistical challenges that often accompany attending a conference, the open access model is increasingly being recognised as an alternative to expensive commercial publishing models.

Consider the situation at, say, a biological sciences research firm in Chennai. At least 16 per cent of its total budget is spent on the subscription of journals; more than 50 per cent of that going to the two largest publishing companies. Experts say the cost of journals is increasing at an average of eight per cent a year. Further, many academics do not consider work to have been adequately shared if it has been merely published in over-priced journals.

Boycott

Incidentally, last week, more than 5,700 researchers started boycotting Elsevier, a leading publisher of science journals, amid growing concerns at cost and accessibility. More than 3,000 academics have signed a petition that claims the publisher charges “exorbitantly high” prices for its journals and criticises its practice of selling journals in ‘bundles,' forcing libraries to buy a large set with many unwanted journals, or none at all.

"Since 1950, the volume of research results started getting too large for the scientific societies, leading to the entry of commercial publishers into the field. The cost per journal and the number of such journals are proliferating, while the funds available are coming down,” says Francis Jayakanth, who has been instrumental in creating an institutional repository, ePrints@IISc, which has more than 32,000 publications by researchers.

India has nearly 53 registered open access repositories that allow users to download and use documents free.

Open access advocates say Indian papers appear in both Indian and foreign journals, roughly in equal proportions, but most Indian journals have a very poor circulation, many of them below 1,500; and most Indian papers appear in low-impact foreign journals. “Most scientists in India are forced to work in a situation of information poverty. Others are unable to access what Indian researchers are doing, leading to low visibility and low use of their work. Thus, Indian work is hardly cited. Both these handicaps can be overcome to a considerable extent if open access is adopted widely, both within and outside the country,” says Subbiah Arunachalam, an open access advocate.

Experts say many U.S. universities, including Princeton, MIT and Harvard, have their own repositories. Institutions in India, too, need to set up open-access repositories to ensure their work is available to the public even if it ends up being published in an expensive journal. Even if these are made available in different repositories, one can still access them all if all the repositories are interoperable.

Trustworthy

The established method for an academic to circulate his work is to publish in a peer-reviewed journal of repute, and the reader, too, places some degree of trust in the quality of the work being presented. So will open access, with the huge volume of papers, change that? “Not at all, open access is not vanity publishing or self-publishing or about publications that scientists expect to be paid for. Since every paper is peer-reviewed, the quality is never compromised,” says Dr. Jayakanth.

Read the article in Hindu. Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam has been quoted in it.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/will-open-access-replace-costly-commercial-publishing-models

Will Only Legal Backing For Aadhaar Suffice?

praskrishna — 2016-03-16T02:31:52Z

Aadhaar is set to become mandatory, but the opponents of the scheme are not amused. Concerns about privacy of the Aadhaar number and the authenticity of the biometric data being collected have been expressed by people right from the beginning. But the government has not done much to address these issues.

The article was published in New Indian Express on March 14, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

“It does not matter what legislative backing they give it, it is still a surveillance programme. How can you have a privacy Bill for a surveillance programme? Legislative backing would be band-aid. I do not agree with it,” says Sunil Abraham, Executive Director of The Centre for Internet and Society. The society is a Bengaluru-based organisation looking at multi-disciplinary research and advocacy.

Abraham says that ever since the Aadhaar scheme was implemented, there was a massive degradation of civil liberties. “It is an opaque technology. Why should the government have such a database?” he asks.

Abraham says that the keys to the data should not have rested with the government where it is vulnerable. Instead, the government should have explored the concept of introducing smart cards issued to the citizen with the data stored on it.

Access to this data could not be had without the permission of the citizen, he says. At present, if something goes wrong or if the data is compromised, the government can always blame a lapse in technology, Abraham adds.

He questions the government’s logic where it assumes that only the poor section of society can misuse the benefits and says that it is well known that the problem exists in the supply chain and that the government has done nothing to address this.

Mathew Thomas of The Fifth Estate, an NGO, wonders what advantage the BJP suddenly found that they decided to pursue Aadhaar rather than send it to the trash bin as they had promised before the general elections.

Thomas says Aadhaar is flawed and is a fraud on the Constitution and the government has taken the money bill route simply to avoid a debate on it.

“Just passing a Bill is meaningless. This is radically wrong and we all know that protection of privacy is nonsense. How do they plan to plug the leakages? Have they even conducted a study, because there is no evidence of it. The correct beneficiary can get an LPG cylinder, but what is stopping the person from using it for an auto or for his car? That the government can lie to its own people is terrible,” he says.

A five-judge bench of the Supreme Court, which is hearing the matter on privacy concerns about Aadhaar, is expected to have a hearing by the end of this month.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/new-indian-express-march-14-2016-will-only-legal-backing-for-aadhaar-suffice

Will India win net neutrality battle?

praskrishna — 2016-01-11T02:28:44Z

There is more than what meets the eye in Facebook’s ‘noble mission’ of providing internet for all.

The article by Pratap Vikram Singh and Taru Bhatia was published by Governance Now on January 5, 2016. Sunil Abraham gave inputs.

India is gearing up for an era of startups and entrepreneurship and the man pushing it as one of his biggest development and self reliance agenda is none other than prime minister Narendra Modi, who launched the ‘Startup India, Standup India’ campaign this year. Few technology giants, led by the likes of Facebook and some telecom service providers, however, have thrown a technology spanner. It is important to note that a significant number of the startups in India are internet-based – next only to the US and China in having maximum number of tech startups, according to industry body NASSCOM.

For these to flourish and for India to have next Facebook or Google it is important to have an open and neutral internet, believe digital rights experts. A network which doesn’t discriminate between the data packets (smallest unit of information sent in binary format over a network) and provides level playing field for all. “It is critical for the Startup India campaign. If we let the principles of net neutrality be compromised, then it makes it very difficult for entrepreneurs and startups to compete against established players, who can close off the market for upstarts by schemes like differentiated pricing and zero rating (toll free access to websites or apps),” said Vishal Misra, associate professor, department of computer science, Columbia University.

A prerequisite for startups

A few months from now, country’s telecom regulator, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), is going to decide whether internet would remain neutral and whether it will continue to foster innovation. A major threat to net neutrality, according to civil society and digital rights experts, comes from zero rating – toll free access to a few selected websites or apps, a strategy adopted by internet service providers or internet platforms to hook users to those select few sites. For telecom and internet service providers zero rating is a new stream of revenue, a way to secure optimal return on investment from their existing subscriber base – without requiring additional investment. The ISPs are arguing that they should be given more flexibility in managing their network – in a way they should be allowed to assume the role of gatekeeper of the internet.

For ISPs, net neutrality is an obsolete and utopian idea. Facebook, which has grown into a mammoth internet platform since its inception in 2004, has recently joined this bandwagon. Under its Free Basics initiative (erstwhile internet.org), the internet giant provides toll free access to a set of websites (including Facebook obviously!) handpicked by itself to the users. In India so far it has partnered with Reliance Communications.

Facebook by far is the most audacious and aggressive proponent of ‘zero rating’ scheme. From lobbying the prime minister to giving back-to-back ads in television channels and two-page ads in national dailies to circulating a vaguely written letter in support of Free Basics on its social media site, Facebook is pitching for ‘digital equality’ by giving access to 'basic internet’ or say a slice of the internet.

Cautioning against zero rating, Prabir Purkayastha, chairperson, Society for Knowledge Commons, said the way zero-rating is being discussed, it seems Indians are only the consumers of internet, which is not true. “Indians are also the innovators on internet,” said Purkayastha. “Internet has given the innovators the right to connect to the users without having a huge amount of money. This is the character that will be destroyed if zero-rating will be implemented,” he says.

That’s true. Be it US-based Facebook or Google or Indian Flipkart or PayTm or SnapDeal, had it not been for open and neutral internet they wouldn’t have become what are today.

Raman Jit Singh Chima, global public policy director, Access Now, a New York-based firm working for digital rights, said the idea is to prevent a telco or an internet platform from assuming a role of a gatekeeper and control access. Misra, too, has written extensively on the counter-productiveness of zero rating: stifling of innovation and service providers loosing incentive to improve service and keep prices low. Both Misra and Chima testified their views on net neutrality to the standing committee on IT in August after the department of telecommunications submitted an expert committee report on the neutrality issue.

Whither public consultation

To formulate a regulation on how internet will shape up, the TRAI has come out with two consultation papers concerning net neutrality in the last nine months. The first consultation paper on ‘regulatory framework for over the top players (OTTs)’, which came in March, was written in favour of telecom and internet service providers. “It was embarrassing,” said Purkayastha. Over 1.2 million people wrote to the regulator. This was result of the savetheinternet.in campaign ran by free internet activists and lawyers, who were later joined by All India Bakchod (AIB) whose video on net neutrality went viral on YouTube (the video has received three million views in last eight months). This was unprecedented in the history of TRAI consultations. However, the fate of those responses is still unclear.

In December the regulator brought another paper. This time it was titled ‘regulation on differential pricing’. Contrary to the initial paper, this paper is far more objective and reasonable, said Nikhil Pahwa, founder, MediaNama portal and a key volunteer behind savetheinternet.in campaign. The regulator has sought comments on its second paper by December 30 and counter-comments by January 7. Till the time a final call is taken, the telecom regulator has instructed Reliance Communications, Facebook’s India telecom partner, to put Free Basics on hold.

The savetheinternet.in campaign has formulated the responses to the new consultation paper and has made it available for everyone favouring net neutrality to send it to the TRAI. The AIB team has released another video titled ‘Save the Internet - 2 – Judgement Day’, which has been viewed close to one million times in just four months.

The neutrality debate started in India in December 2014 when Airtel, country’s largest telco, announced – although it later backtracked – that the company would charge consumers more for using VOIP services, on top of the data charges. Later, it went on to launch Airtel Zero, wherein it struck deal with online services providers for user access at zero rate. Facebook had already introduced internet.org by then. While it was initially led by civil society, the debate was later joined by politicians – Naveen Patnaik, M Chandrashekhar, Jay Panda, Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal – who strongly came out in support of net neutrality.

Facebook has termed its zero rating platform as a philanthropic activity intended to connect billions of unconnected population so that they can access education, health and employment related information. It has urged users to sign a petition, cautioning them against "a small, vocal group of critics" lobbying to prevent 1 billion people from accessing 'affordable internet'. Under Free Basics, Facebook claims, it doesn't charge app developers and includes them if they comply to its 'objective tech specs'.

Free Basics: A camouflage?

Critics, however, call it a walled garden. In providing free access to close to a hundred websites it continues to play the role of a gatekeeper. It is not the poor who decide what to access but Facebook! While it says that it is not making money out of Free Basics as it doesn't display ads in the Free Basics version of Facebook, it keeps the option of monetisation open in the future.

“It [Free Basics] has been camouflaged as charity," said a senior TRAI official, in an off the record conversation. While speaking to the Guardian on Facebook’s zero rating in December, Tim Berners Lee, founder of world wide web (www), said, “In the particular case of somebody who's offering... something which is branded internet, it's not internet, then you just say no. No it isn't free, no it isn't in the public domain, there are other ways of reducing the price of internet connectivity and giving something... [only] giving people data connectivity to part of the network deliberately, I think is a step backwards.”

Speaking in favour of zero rating, Payal Malik, associate professor, economics, Delhi University, said that it is wrong to assume that all consumers will get hooked to zero rated sites. “In a way you are saying that all humans have same preferences and likes and dislikes, which is very unlikely,” said Malik.

Experts representing telecom industry argue that the net neutrality regulation should be geography specific and the telecom players should be given more flexibility in dealing with the network. Mahesh Uppal, a senior telecom consultant and director, ComFirst India, while speaking at a round table discussion in Delhi, said that a majority of population in the West including countries opting for strict net neutrality – including Netherlands, Slovenia and the US – are already connected. "The data connectivity is primarily through fixed lines - copper, co-ax cable or optical fibre wired — wherein it is easier to add capacity to meet traffic growth. However this is difficult to do so for wireless networks," said Uppal. In developing countries, including India, mobile telephony and internet majorly runs on wireless. Hence, he argued, telecom and internet service providers should be given flexibility to zero rate. For Uppal, if zero rating or sponsored content is implemented properly “it can be one of the ways to scale up internet access” to the unconnected regions.

Neutrality proponents, however, differ. “It is basic economic theory, and zero rated sites get a price advantage. There are studies that show customers stay within the world of zero rated sites and never venture outside or are aware of the full internet,” professor Misra said.

Zero or equal rating?

So is there a middle ground? Are there ways to increase access without tampering with open and neutral character of the internet? Experts believe there are. Some of the solutions are not completely black and white, but in between. While there is a fierce opposition to zero rating, it might work, according to Sunil Abraham, executive director, centre for internet and society (CIS), if provided with an amount of equal rating (giving free data pack to users so that they can access any site or app they want).

Mozilla Foundation advocates equal rating. The foundation has sought to create such an alternative in Bangladesh and countries in Africa within the Firefox OS ecosystem. The foundation has tied up with telecom operator Grameenphone in Bangladesh to provide 20 Mb data per day for free to users, in exchange for viewing an advertisement. The model could be easily replicated in India, said Pahwa of MediaNama.

For African countries, the foundation has partnered with Orange. Both allow Africans to purchase $40 Firefox OS smartphones that come packaged with free three to six months of voice calling, text, and up to 500 Mb of monthly data. Purkayastha of Knowledge Commons said that zero-rating plan by telecom operators only makes sense when government services are provided for free through it. “That is the form of zero-rating I would support.”

There are a few platforms which are reimbursing data in megabytes to users accessing partnering apps. The user can then use the free data pack to access any other site or app. Some of them include: mCent, Gigato and DataMi. mCent, owned by Boston-based firm Jana, is a pioneer in this area. It is being used by 30 million users cross 98 countries. In India, according to Jana, one out of every 10 internet users has subscribed to mCent.

Yes, it does violate neutrality as it puts those app providers not having enough money at a disadvantageous position vis-à-vis to those having deep pocket to reimburse data to users. “I think it’s a grey area,” said professor Misra. On the surface it seems to be just like Free Basics, however, Gigato (or mCent) is making no pretense that what they are doing is philanthropy of increasing access, said professor Misra, adding that it is still acceptable as user will have the data to venture out of the walled garden. The senior TRAI official too finds it acceptable. “In my opinion, Facebook should become like Gigato,” he said.

If the regulator is going to protect consumers’ right and also not stifle startups and entrepreneurism, it will have to ensure some broad, core principles of the internet. It will have to prevent both the ISPs and the internet platforms from becoming gatekeepers. It must not allow any throttling, blocking, fast and slow lanes, discrimination based on price or quality of service and distortion of level playing field. How and whether TRAI is going to do these would be clear in a few months.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/governance-now-pratap-vikram-singh-and-taru-bhatia-january-6-2015-will-india-win-net-neutrality-battle

Will Facebook, Twitter relocate servers to India?

praskrishna — 2016-04-23T15:26:39Z

The debate to relocate offshore servers of internet and social media firms including Google, Facebook and Twitter has revived.

The article by Taru Bhatia was published in Governance Now on April 23, 2016. Pranesh Prakash gave inputs.

Home minister Rajnath Singh has requested the social media companies, located outside India, to maintain servers in the country, in order to expedite the process of getting information on accounts which spread mischievous messages posing a threat to law and order situation. The move has come in the backdrop of delayed or no response to the government’s requests to these companies, for extracting information of some of its users on security grounds.

In February, the minister claimed Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Saeed’s involvement in the anti-national slogans that were allegedly raised in the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). The claim was based on a tweet that appeared on a fake twitter account of Saeed (@HafeezSaeedJUD), which was later deactivated by Twitter. But the US-based social media company has still not replied to the Indian government as to who was running the account.

It is interesting to note here that India shares mutual legal assistance treaty with the US, wherein, the duo can share information for the purpose of criminal investigation, via judicial route. The process, however, is lengthy.

“Given the nature of the content, sometimes the government cannot afford to wait. The process of issuing direction to get information or blocking certain content from public view is lengthy. The Indian government under the IT law is empowered to ask these companies to maintain servers in India,” says senior advocate, supreme court, and cyber law expert, Pavan Duggal, terming it as a legitimate concern related to national security. As India is a big market for all these companies, it shouldn’t be a problem for them to have servers in India, he says.

“If the police or security agencies want information from these companies, it becomes tall orders since they are not operating from India. They step back and say they are not accountable,” says Virag Gupta, a senior supreme court lawyer, adding that ministries of telecom and finance must join the home ministry in its request and spearhead the matter.

Gupta has filed a petition in the Delhi high court asking such offshore companies to register themselves under the Indian law. On the other hand, Pranesh Prakash, policy director at center for internet and society (CIS), a non-government research organisation supported by Google, feels that instead of requesting these companies to maintain servers in India, it is best for the government to figure out ways to speed up judicial process of the treaty, when it comes to internet governance.

From July to December 2015, India issued 141 requests to Twitter to retrieve information of its users’ accounts for criminal investigation purpose, as per the company’s transparency report. But the compliance rate was only 42 percent, the report says.

While India seeks information on national security grounds, the law here does not clearly define national security, which is still vast and ambiguous.

“I do believe that there is a need for a much clear definition of national security. If the government really wants to have servers of these companies in India then appropriate guidelines must exist, so that companies should not be taken by surprise,” says Duggal.

Security concerns

Data localisation is witnessing a growing trend among many countries. Last year, Russia enforced law to mandate internet companies to store its citizens’ data within the country. The move is generally taken in fear of losing country’s data to hackers. It also means that it would be easier for the government to get information from these internet companies.

And so protecting data and privacy of individuals within the country is also a matter of concern. Not having a strong data privacy law in place could lead to violation of internet rights of citizens.

“Privacy is a legitimate concern but at the end of the day the government is well empowered in the interest of protecting cyber security under the IT Act. But it is necessary for the government to look at the issue from a holistic perspective. There is a need for balancing privacy and security of an individual on one hand and national security on the other hand,” adds Duggal.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/governance-now-april-23-2016-taru-bhatia-will-facebook-twitter-relocate-servers-to-india

Will domain dot भारत spur the growth of Indian languages on the internet?

praskrishna — 2014-09-08T05:50:11Z

Modi's effort to promote the use of Hindi and e-governance has given hope to those who want to see more vernacular content online, but many challenges have to be overcome.

Rohan Venkataramakrishnan's blog post was published in Scroll.in on August 29, 2014. Sunil Abraham gave his inputs.

For most of its short history, the internet has been the English speaker’s playground. Though English is the world’s third-most spoken language (after Mandarin and Spanish), it is by far the most commonly used language on the internet. If you wanted to make sense of most of what’s on the World Wide Web, you had to be able to read and write English.

This is slowly changing. The launch of Devanagari script web addresses on Sunday, allowing people to use .भारत domain names, was another step in the slow effort to bring about a multilingual Web. Already, Indian languages like Hindi – one of the most commonly-spoken languages on Earth – lag far behind. The move gels well with the new government’s effort to promote the use of Hindi, and its push to increase digital services available to all citizens. The next few years could well see a spurt in vernacular content online.

But first many challenges have to be overcome. “At present, not a single Indian language figures in the top 10 languages prevalent on the Internet, though Chinese, Arabic and Russian feature in the list,” said a McKinsey report on the internet's impact on India. “The next wave of internet adoption in India will be dominated by local language speakers, which underscores the need for much more content and applications to be offered in local languages.”

Vernacular internet
Early studies of the internet attempted to quantify how much of the web was in English. A 1997 estimate put the number at 80% of all websites, while the Online Computer Library’s study in 2003 concluded that 72% of all online content was in English. Today that number is much lower.

W3Techs, which conducts surveys of the internet, now estimates that about 55% of content on the Internet is in English, followed by German, Russian and Japanese. Indian languages don’t crack the top 35.

The analysis is by its nature imprecise. The internet is vast and mostly uncharted. Estimates suggest search engines have indexed only 40% of Web content, leaving much off the mainstream radar. Measuring language becomes even harder because, in the early years, when fonts were harder to render, most non-English content on the internet was spelt out in Roman letters.

Indian Wiki
The rise of multilingual scripts has changed that, and made it easier to evaluate the diversity of the internet. Yet even the best approach relies more on sampling than measurement. There is one section of the Web, however, that does allow for comparisons of absolute numbers.

Relative to other tongues, Indian language-articles still comprise a minuscule portion of Wikipedia. English, Spanish and French are perhaps expected, but even languages like Vietnamese have nearly 10 times the number of pages that Hindi does. Waray-Waray, the fifth-most commonly spoken language in the Philippines, appears to be an outlier because of an automated translation method that creates pages in that language.

Hindi content has been growing on the internet encyclopedia, from no pages in 2003 to more than one lakh in 2011, but it still falls far behind the languages that are spoken as commonly as it, like Spanish and Arabic, let alone those with much smaller reach. Of course in many countries English is not spoken at all, so Internet users need web pages in their own language. In India, because of the language-class association, the majority of Internet users are at least conversant in English.

Obstacle Course
The impediments to further growth are all too apparent. For one, internet infrastructure still leaves much to be desired. Though India has the third-largest internet user-base in the world, only 10% of the country is actually online. Even by 2015, when internet access is expected to reach 28% of the population, the equivalent rural figure is likely to be just 9%, according to estimates.

“A lot of the core infrastructure that is necessary for language computing is missing,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet & Society. “There’s no mandate by the government that these languages must be supported, no comprehensive dictionaries, no thesauri, no machine translation capabilities, no optical character recognition capabilities. Because our market is so insignificant for proprietary software makers, they haven’t done enough to develop these. Meanwhile, the free software community is too small and mostly English-speaking.”

The government has launched some initiatives in this regard, like a National Translation Mission aimed at machine translating text from English into Indic languages, as well as banks of fonts that are free to use. But Abraham said that while the government is clear this should be a priority area, it underestimates the scale of the problem.

“We need large scale investment by the government into each language,” he said. “We’re looking at maybe even Rs 100 crore per language, to bring each of our traditional languages into the internet age.”

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/scroll-in-rohan-venkataramakrishnan-will-domain-dot-bharat-spur-the-growth-of-Indian-languages-on-the-internet

Wikiwars.xls

praskrishna — 2010-02-11T05:42:42Z

Programme highlights

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/research/conferences/wikiwars

WikiSym + OpenSym Participants

praskrishna — 2013-08-29T05:20:29Z

WikiSym + OpenSym Participants

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Panigrahi.png

WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 in Hong Kong

praskrishna — 2013-08-29T05:31:59Z

WikiSym + OpenSym took place in Hong Kong on August 5-7, 2013. The event emphasized the open collaboration aspect of WikiSym both for researchers as well as practitioners. The event was organized by the International Symposium on Open Collaboration. T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, Access to Knowledge and Subhashish Panigrahi participated in this event.

See the event details posted on wikisym.org and also read the blog entry posted by Dirk Riehle on opensym.org.

A Short Report on WikiSym + OpenSym 2013

WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 took place at Hong Kong’s Cyberport facility. 98 registered participants from around the world enjoyed a two-track program centered on the common topic of open collaboration. Four keynotes and invited talks covered topics of open access, open educational resources, Wikipedia research, and open science. Open access, open source, and traditional wiki research contributed several sessions. A main thread was Wikipedia research, which was strongly represented at the conference, perhaps not surprisingly given that we had co-located WikiSym with Wikimania, the Wikipedia user conference. Social media coverage was strong, as can be seen from Twitter and Google Plus searches.

A host of community events, including demos, posters, and workshop on the topic of open collaboration rounded out the program. Even though most participants were international’s, events on open data in business and the GLAM sector added a local flavor to the event. Participants also got a taste of the richness of the city of Hong Kong, for example through the conference banquet at Top Deck, a restaurant ship that provided an enjoyable mingling opportunity and an excellent food to conference participants.

All tracks and events are supplemented by an open space track. Open space is a technique for organizing events to allow otherwise passive participants to become an active part of the conference. Open space is like an “unconference”, just more organized and much more effective. Open space has a long and distinguished history at WikiSym. Using open space, WikiSym + OpenSym activates not only traditional speakers but every participant, creating the desired synergy between all strands of open collaboration researchers and practitioners.


Some of the event participants, photo by Subhashish Panigrahi

Finally, a few links of WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 reporting from this blog:

The proceedings are available from the event’s website.

Sponsors of WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 were the Wikimedia Foundation, Google, InvestHK, Cyberport, and EuroCham Hong Kong. The event was held in-cooperation with the ACM SIGWEB and SIGSOFT and was fiscally sponsored by The John Ernest Foundation.

Next year’s conference, OpenSym 2014, will be held in Berlin, Germany, on August 27-29, 2014. Please see here for the initial call for submissions (papers).

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/wikisym-opensym-2013-hong-kong

Wikisource Certificate

praskrishna — 2017-03-28T15:34:11Z

Wikisource Certificate

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/WikisourceCertificate.png

Wikipedian Pavan Santhosh says Telugu Wikipedians are creating Knowledge revolution (in Telugu)

praskrishna — 2016-12-17T01:35:04Z

Pavan Santhosh said that Telugu Wikipedians are creating a knowledge revolution in Telugu. On Sunday, December 12, 2016, in Golden Threshold, Abids, Telugu Wikipedians celebrated Telugu Wikipedia day. Telugu Wikipedians Pranay Raj and Meena Gayathri who successfully completed 100 Wikidays challenge successfully were given mementos and cut a cake on this occassion.

Clipping of the article that appeared in Andhra Jyoti on December 12, 2016:

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/andhra-jyoti-december-12-2016-telugu-wikipedians-are-creating-knowledge-revolution