Important Issues of Internet Governance from an Indian Perspective

The WSIS declaration of principles at Geneva 2003 with its focus and commitment to build a ‘people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their quality of life’ aptly sums the concerns that issues revolving Internet Governance can and should address.

Issues of Access, Openness, Diversity, Security and Critical Internet Resources are seen to be the main platforms around which discussions and deliberations on Internet Governance have been organised at the annual Internet Governance Forum at Athens (2006) and Rio (2007) and will continue to be the focus areas at the IGF New- Delhi (2008). This paper will explore the meanings of these themes, look at critical issues within these themes from an Indian perspective and suggest possible courses of action.

1. Access

Access, as articulated in IGF meetings, broadly covers all issues of the physical infrastructure of the Internet, with value being placed on universal availability of the Internet. There are several enabling conditions, the establishment of which are paramount to achievement of universal availability of the Internet. These are

1. Low cost access solutions – The way to achieve this is by ensuring universal deployment of the physical infrastructure (pipes and cables), reduced inter-connection charges (especially for developing countries), ensuring that the routing of content over the Internet which is most likely to be accessed by communities in countries such as India is kept close by as this will bring down the exorbitant charges that developing countries have to cough up to access this content (since most of this content is nested in servers outside the country). A key project which has set out to accomplish some of the issues which have been mentioned above is the Common Service Centres (CSC) scheme by the Government of India. By setting up a 1, 00,000 centres all over the country to serve 6,00,000 villages, the Government is ensuring that disadvantaged communities are getting an equal voice in the development process. While the intentions of the Government are laudable, it must ensure a balancing of issues of social justice and equity along with issues of commercial viability. It is our belief and something which has been amply demonstrated through projects like Akshaya (Kerala) and the Rural E-Seva (West Godavari – Andhra Pradesh), that the former purpose takes care of the latter one.
2. Creating bottom-up and people centric accountability structures – The recent move by the government to grant community radio licences is yet another welcome step, where communities by creating content which is relevant to their development needs are more aware and are in a position to be better empowered. A process wherein more and more government schemes and services are accessible online, the disbursement of which can be vetted by local self governance institutions and community based organisations will go a long way in creating a bottom-up accountability structure.

2. Openness

Openness is a very broad category and includes issues ranging from standards ensuring openness of the Internet, to freedom of expression, and enriching the public domain versus protecting IP, to network neutrality.

1. Enriching the Public Domain: A cursory glance of the knowledge which resides over the Internet reveals that most of it has been created by people whose aim is to enrich public knowledge by putting the information out there. Yet we find that the media (websites, ISPs and so on) which host this content have lock in mechanisms by which they gain the Intellectual property to this content, thereby taking away Intellectual Property Rights from the creators and more importantly, by restricting access to this knowledge through exclusionary processes do a tremendous amount of disservice to development. This urgently calls for the creation of a public domain on which all content which is generated through public monies and which the creators feel should reside in the public domain is hosted. This will mean that more and more content which is currently locked in rent seeking regimes is available for the public access. The Government must also look at collaborative knowledge creation efforts like Wikipedia which will only enrich the public knowledge base and its authenticity.

2. Ensuring Open Standards over the Internet – The increasing emergence of video and audio based content over the Internet is extremely good news. The power of these media to bring about change relatively quickly as they can be understood by even non-literates is what sets it apart from other media. However, the formats over which this content is viewed are varied and proprietary, meaning that unless and until the viewer purchases these formats from those companies which make them, s/he really cannot view any of the content. It goes without saying that the prices of such formats are extremely high and disadvantaged communities would not have the purchasing power to invest in these technologies. Clearly what is required is the mandating of open standards which would allow for content to be shared over multiple platforms.

3. Freedom of Expression: What goes undisputed is the fact that the Internet has great power to organise protest rallies, to galvanise pro-democracy activists and to give the world a perspective of life within closed societies. Over the past few months, one has come across various cases where the Internet has been increasingly been used to report cases of human rights violations and pro-democracy movements. In majority of these cases, the regimes of these states have managed to suppress these demonstrations, arrest activists who have reported such violations over the net and have cut off Internet connections to prevent activists from grouping through the Internet and prevent the outside world from knowing what is happening in that country.

In fact within the IGF, many countries (which face allegations of human rights abuses) have gone as far as saying that they would walk out of that space (IGF) and create their own Internet if issues of human rights are even brought up for discussion. Clearly, this is one issue which has been a tight-rope walk. Given this delicate state of affairs, what is required is a call for consensus and the establishment of a broad framework of principles for governance of the Internet especially looking at convergences between Human Rights and the Internet which countries will adhere to. GOI should play an active part of this process. Also at a national level, there is need for an urgent dialogue to see whether the tenets of the Indian Constitution in the fields of freedom of expression are robust enough to deal with the emergence of the Internet or whether there is a need to enhance the scope of the Constitution to be more encompassing and understanding of issues like freedom of expression especially when seen through a medium such as the Internet.

3. Diversity:

The issue of diversity is significant in the context of hegemonic cultural and linguistic tendencies of the global Internet, and highlights the importance of development of a culturally diverse Internet the reflecting the cultural diversity of the world.

1. Linguistic Diversity: It is well established that the Internet is the medium over which knowledge is being organised and more importantly has the power to influence development in very powerful ways. Content over the Internet has till now been restricted to languages which follow the Latin script mostly English. This has meant that communities which do not have knowledge of these languages and scripts are loosing out on opportunities. The Government must actively encourage research and development for content development in traditional Indian languages over the Internet.

4. Security

Security is an important issue as more and more activities shift to the Internet, and involves issues like cyber-crime, spam and privacy.

1. Cyber Security: As India moves towards a culture of e-governance, and where more and more critical installations are connected through online means, it is extremely important to secure the safety of these cyber – installations from cyber-attacks. The recent case where Estonian (which is the most e-connected country in Europe) cyber-space was allegedly attacked by Russian hackers[1] points to the urgent need to work towards and develop a global framework towards cyber-security.

2. Privacy: And while the Indian government should go about strengthening its cyber defenses, it will come across gray areas where issues of national security will clash with areas of free expression and human rights. Issues of security are paramount, so are issues of privacy and free expression. The area of electronic eavesdropping is a slippery slope and one must be careful in this regard.

5. Critical Internet Resources

Critical internet resources (CIRs) include all those ‘logical’ resources which are at the very heart of the working of the Internet, and without which the Internet cannot function at all – for instance IP address, domain name allocation and other such issues.

1. Depletion of IPV4 addresses and the need to move to IPV6 addresses: An IP or Internet Protocol Address is the unique address which is given to any computer terminal which is connected to the Internet. The current system of IP number allocation is termed as IPV4 where each terminal has a 4 point numbering pattern (eg. 192.168.1.3). The number of IP address under this current system is limited and is expected to run out in the year 2010. The US alone controls 55% of the world’s IP addresses with the top 15 developed nations controlling 90% of the IP addresses.[2] The current level of Internet penetration in India is extremely low and the threat of IP addresses running out in the near future will be a major stumbling block in our plans to increase Internet connectivity. The solution to this impending problem is through implementing IPV6 standards, which allows for a vastly larger amount of Internet connections and which can accommodate the demand for IP address most of which will primarily emerge from developing economies.

However the magnitude of this threat does not have seem to sunk in and there have been no policy deliberations either at the global or the national level to move from an IPV4 regime to an IPV6 regime. The governments of developing nations should take this opportunity and take the lead in initiating such a dialogue, lest there arises a situation that people from India are not able to connect to the Internet because there are no more Internet connections available.

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[1] http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/15-09/ff_estonia

[2] http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/arc/governance/2008-01/msg00003.html