India’s Internet Bill Is Straight Out of Beijing’s Playbook October 1, 2022
Analysis by Andy Mukherjee | Bloomberg https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/indias-internet-bill-is-straight-out-of-beijings-playbook/2022/09/29/4287b6c8-404b-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html
The telecom bill wants to retain sweeping powers of state surveillance, and apply them even to encrypted internet messages. Activists, dissidents and whistleblowers will find themselves particularly exposed; pressure will build on services like Meta Platforms Inc.’s WhatsApp, which has sued the Indian government for asking it to break end-to-end encryption, to fall in line. The anticipated telecom law is actually all about the internet. It seeks to bend the industry to the government’s will by imposing a license requirement on everything from Gmail to FaceTime and Skype. Licensed services will have to “unequivocally identify” their customers. Senders of messages will have to be similarly identifiable to the recipients. “These provisions essentially strip away the user’s right to stay anonymous,” said the New Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation, a think tank.
Both the public and the private sector are happy to see everything from banking services to state subsidies linked to a controversial national repository of biometric identification. Monitoring the daily lives of 1.4 billion Indians with databases — to extract profit or wield power — is a leaf taken straight out of Beijing’s playbook.
When it comes to wanting to control the worldwide web, India is already something of a world leader: There have been more than 660 instances since 2012 when mobile or fixed-line internet was shut down in one part of the country or the other, according to the Software Freedom Law Centre, an advocacy group.