India’s new intermediary liability and digital media laws will harm the internet
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
This is also one more of those “all encryption should have backdoors so that the government alone can snoop” (as if the government is always trustworthy, responsible, and is one single, uniform and dedicated being). This playbook has been seen in other countries too, even the developed ones.
The government and authorities don’t even provide any information about random website blocking orders or any way to get incorrectly implemented orders resolved quickly.
It’s one sided to aid those in power and take power from those who are already on the other side of the scale. We don’t need more of this.
If you are a growing company vying to capture one of the biggest internet markets in the world, do you think the govt in that market is just going to sit by and let things happen without some of the afore mentioned privileges coming their way? Thats not going to happen. At all.
I think over the next few years every govt is going to have some laws along same the lines.
I am not sure these laws will solve any problems with the current internet. Some problems which I would like to see solved would be:
1. Tracing people who morph images real people and ruin their normal life. If this is a criminal offence and what's the point if people can easily get away with this. Internet by and large can have a mechanism to trace and banish such bad actors.
2. Too much dependence on twitter/facebook/google. It's fucked up. Why CEO of these companies have so much power over our planet. Twitter can literally cause world war by sending misinformation if it wants. It's scary to just imagine how much power Dorsey has. May be he is a good man, but is it worth to trust one man over the stability of this planet?
3. Manipulation with bots. There should be certain amount of weightage given to verified accounts as well as posts with links to verified articles. I want to see the real votes of real people - not the trends of automated bot armies.
My suggestion to Indian government on these laws would be - Applying hammers won't solve anything in long term. What will be better is to make people question what is right and wrong for internet themselves; Bring this discussion internationally and use the international platform to tell what problems are spread on internet - and tell the options people can choose in long term. Have a vote internationally may be.
Moreover, I am not sure how much manipulation humans are able to detect ; a small misinformation injected into twitter timeline or a small bias in facebook can cause ripples across the world's outlook over time that we can't even notice when it's happening. Social media companies which provide these feeds always get away by saying it's by the algorithm recommendation but who is tuning those parameters? Only a small amount of human population asks 'why' type of question and rest of them just absorb the content and it shapes their mind. I watched the movie Social Dilemma sometime back and slowly this has been dawning on me - wtf we are witnessing. World is falling in hands of these social media companies, they are storing our data, they profile us, they manipulate what we see, they tell us what they want us to see ; it's mind-boggling that the world is sleeping on this much centralisation of power happening in broad daylight.
You can call them bot or paid influencers if you want, but they may double down next elections :D
There is a fear of Islam propagation in general populace of India, and there are valid reasons for it.
When you have uninformed general populace, it's easy to portray yourselves as protector of the culture and they will become fans of you, and defend every action of you. It doesn't matter you make their lives bad, corruption becomes rampant or economy goes shit. All that matters is creating a common enemy for all people.
It has worked well for BJP, because the opposition party was full of nepotism and old tactics such as minority appeasement. They came late to this propaganda game, and as long as they are nepotistic and have this muslim party image they can't do shit.
I don't think all people defending modi here are paid to do that. Let's be real, they are emotionally connected. And the problem cannot be solved by dismissing more than half of the population.
I am willing to be convinced with data that about half of the Indian population support the current events, but haven't encountered any such. Note, only around 60% voted. I will happily agree that at the time of elections around 50% of the 60% that voted was in favor of the BJP led coalition.
A person with a conservative belief system and a IT cell operation coordinator are different things altogether. I have spotted the latter on HN. If you look at their comment stream you will see them claiming that they are hindu in one that they are muslim in another. Yes its possible they converted in the middle but the prior for that is low.
I stand by this. Some of them seem to be seriously emotionally connected.
To be clear I don't hate muslims / christians but the expansionist attitude of few religions. I believe Savarkar's Hindu Atheist ideology, for all his faults, is the way forward for India.
The problem as seen by many right-leaning people is that girls of other faiths (Hindu/Christian) date with low-status-but-high-pretention Muslims, and marry them or if there's opposition by family, elope with them. They also generally get converted into Islam. But the opposite happening (Muslim/Christian getting converted to Hinduism, especially) is very rare in comparison. Also, (non-urban or previous generation mostly) Muslims have multiple wives and have many more children than others. There are anecdotes these women are pressured to have more children by those Muslim families, I don't know how pervasive that is. We can't disagree Islam has some extremist attitudes. (Sadly Hindu leaders also calling their followers to have more children, this doesn't solve the problem)
Due to minority appeasement politics played in last 70 years by Indian National Congress, Muslims also enjoy some more privilege than Hindu counterparts. This despite most of them being ruler/trader class in past (so unlike Scheduled castes). Now the game is majority appeasement and Congress has not caught up. Thus BJP is only player in the town.
A COVID19 superspreader event was an Islam religious event which also villain-ized them more in the eyes of majority.
Lastly, there are always communal fights in many parts of India and each side sees the other as enemies that must be extinguished. (There are statistically exceptional states like Kerala, but again Kerala is very educated state).
Doesn't help some of the practices of Muslim citizens irritate everyone else, like high sounds in mosques and "atther" or whatever that's called smell in public transport.
All this can be used to create a common enemy for majority of youth and boomers today.
Modi is a lot like Trump, but also intelligent enough.
This has been called very strongly by the supreme court as malicious and politically motivated and government supported propaganda.
> like high sounds in mosques
Those last 2 to 3 minutes each and aren't on in the night. Hindu celebration pandals violate noise norms for weeks at stretch playing loud Bollywood songs and drums incessantly through out the night. Complaints result in Hindu right wing goons sent to rough up the one who complained. Its hard to take your reasonings in good faith if you make those one sided.
Many of the appeasement complains are also I'm bad faith. Many economic programs target those that are badly off. Turns out there is a significant overlap with that population and Muslim and lower caste Hindu population - which is not to claim all Muslims or all lower caste are economically backwards.
What is offensive about itar ? Its a traditional perfume/deodorant. Eberyone can see wjat this is - just institutionsl Muslim hatred of the hindu right. What's the logic here ? Gajra perfume is good itar perfume is some sort of a national politics issue.
The guy who used to grovel in apologies to the Brits is a hero now. Golwalkar the fountainhead of Hindu right wrote that Muslims are the real problem and it'd them who have to be fought not the colonizing British forces yet its Nehru who is branded Brit loyalist.
The contention is whether India should be modeled with values of liberalism and plurarism or insular right wing and fascist ideas
They are on EVERY day of the year, 5 times a day and start at 5 am. Festivals aren't daily. Why hide that fact?
That said, I would like to see no loudspeakers used in residential areas at all - by anyone.
I am bothered more by the pandal loudspeakers because they disrupt night sleep for multiple stretches of a week at a time. Ajaans are not aired during my sleeping hours so they don't bother me (except for the 5 am one at times). Neither do church bells. There are many mosques around where I stay, thankfully they seem to obey noise ordinances that pandals do not.
In contrast there is always some festival every month with a pandal and there goes my sleep for a week.
Totally agree that noise ordinances should be uniformly applied. Same applies to construction noise.
Attar is a fragrance, that several Hindus also use. Maybe you should check if the person applying it is hindu or Muslim before generalizing .
The so called super spreader event was organized before the lockdown, at about the same time as modi Trump rally involving more than 100K people. Instead of locking down the mosque, the administration forced everyone out of the mosque to help spread covid outside the mosque all over India! The media is absolutely silent about various hindu temple superspreader events being held such as the khumbu mela. Nobody is clutching their pearls.
The land owning muslims moved to Pakistan and the Indian muslims primarily occupy a lower socio economic class. The so called appeasement that one hears about all the time is never actually spelt out in clear detail. It is taken as an article of faith. Congress appeasement of Hindus, such as in the case of ram mandir or hindu joint family tax exemptions are conveniently ignored.
Yes indeed, Modi is a smarter version of Trump.
Displeasure with attar is just a thinly veiled feelings of hatred towards members of another religion.
Indeed. I was just explaining general attitude against muslims.
Unilateral uninformed criticism with no understanding of realities on the ground have converted me from a critic to an admirer.
Most of the West does not realise the appeasement, corruption, and tyranny of previous rule by a single family for over 70 years.
https://in.news.yahoo.com/congress-to-hire-5-lakh-social-med...
For people outside India, here's what you can expect to see in terms of comments in this thread:
- New accounts defending the government
- People saying things like "stop interfering in India's business you Western people"
- Badmouthing Mozilla with dysfunctional arguments against things
- People bringing up examples like "but XYZ did the same, I don't see why this government gets all the blame"
- Outright saying racist things against non-Indians
Basically anything and everything to justify the actions Mozilla thinks are bad.
I don't know how it looks like from outside, but things have been pretty bad. Google "IT Cell" with the country name.
TLDR: It almost feels like a dystopia, and this is another step to make that happen.
Modi is doing exactly what Trump did in US. But Modi playing the same game intelligently.
I used tor to create this account because I'm afraid of this govt. This govt is a classic fascist one. On the same lines of NSDP of Germany. Those who are dissing Mozilla for shining the light on what is obviously an attempt to censor critical voices on internet, should also point out that India has enacted laws which allow Police to incarcerate people without trial, without bail for years. So many of our intellectuals are in jail and they have not faced a single day of trial.
There is so much to talk about what is going on in India. Let me just lay out a few points: 1. We have enacted a set of laws which will lead to loss of citizenship for Muslims. 2. We have enacted laws prohibiting marriage between interfaith couples (Nuremberg laws anyone).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Jihad
3. Thugs of ruling party are roaming the streets catching couples belonging to different faiths, especially if the boy is muslim and girl is hindu. A young muslim boy is still in jail because he attended the birthday party of a hindu girl.
4. A hindu girls pregnancy from her muslim husband was forcibly aborted.
Shame on Indian diaspora for supporting all of this. You guys should know that the endgame is wholesale genocide of muslims here
Automated Filtering, Social Media User Verification, Traceability of Encrypted Content are all complex on both a technical & practical level. As I understand, setting up a basic mastodon instance or even just an IRC server could be in violation of these rules. (IRC might not count itself but hosting IRC and a web IRC gateway probably is).
Some interesting parts (scroll down in the PDF to get the English version):
> `social media intermediary‘ means an intermediary which primarily or solely enables online interaction between two or more users and allows them to create, upload, share, disseminate, modify or access information using its services;
This means that a lot of this law applies to basically any communication platform. Not just the big ones.
> Provided also that where the first originator of any information on the computer resource of an intermediary is located outside the territory of India, the first originator of that information within the territory of India shall be deemed to be the first originator of the information for the purpose of this clause.
This puts enormous liability on tons of services & businesses. Running a tor relay and many other 'network over a network' type technologies will become problematic. Forget about running a tor exit node - unless you can just say that this IP is the originator.
> where an intermediary collects information from a user for registration on the computer resource, it shall retain his information for a period of one hundred and eighty days after any cancellation or withdrawal of his registration, as the case may be;
So now you have to wait 180 days for your information to really be removed. So much for privacy. It's also a bit weird in that it is exactly 180 days and not up to or at least which makes it a bit confusing in what its goal is.
> The intermediary shall prominently publish on its website,mobile based application or both, as the case may be, the name of the Grievance Officer and his contact details as well as mechanism by which a user or a victim may make complaint against violation of the provisions of this rule or any other matters pertaining to the computer resources made available by it, and the Grievance Officer shall [...]
So you'll need about 3-5 employees just for hosting a image board, etc.
> [Section 4] [...] appoint a nodal contact person for 24x7 coordination with law enforcement agencies and officers to ensure compliance to their orders or requisitions made in accordance with the provisions of law or rules made thereunder.
> [Section 6] The Ministry may by order, for reasons to be recorded in writing, require any intermediary, which is not a significant social media intermediary, to comply with all or any of the obligations mentioned under rule 4, if the services of that intermediary permits the publication or transmission of information in a manner that may create a material risk of harm to the sovereignty and integrity of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States or public order.
So the government can basically force any communication platform/service to have a 24/7 contact/staff for cooperating with law enforcement. Essentially, any low moderation platform could be forced overnight to higher additional staff or more likely; shut down since it would be no longer economical or worthwhile to operate.
"Up to 180 days" can result in data being deleted sooner. If data retention is a cost centre rather than a profit centre, the data will be deleted immediately.
"At least 180 days" can result in data never being deleted, for the same reasons as above.
180 days exactly gives the appearance that there's a balance that has been struck between data retention and privacy. Determining whether or not this is actually meaningful is dependent on what the data is used for, etc. and I don't have enough knowledge of the subject to make an educated guess.
> More generally, however, a higher overall level of regulation in a country can benefit larger incumbent firms that have the resources to shoulder compliance costs while their smaller competitors falter in the face of an increasing regulatory burden.
1. Traceability of Encrypted Content
2. Harsh Content Take Down and Data Sharing Timelines
3. User Directed Take Downs of Non-Consensual Sexually Explicit Content and Morphed/Impersonated Content
4. Social Media User Verification
5. Automated Filtering
6. Digital Media Regulation
Except point 3. Read each sentence with "Do not do" and see if it makes sense for internet.
Keep scrolling for the English translation
Seems to me this will be a lost opportunity to be a leader (equal leader) in BRICS.
Or do they think that they can be self-sufficient?
They want to allow multi-national corporations to exist in the country because removing them in the near future is going to cause a dent in their own operational policy. But rather, they clearly want to control these companies so they peddle only their own approved messaging.
The approved messaging however is not to toe to any standards of tolerance or deceny. The ruling party has an active social media campaign with tens of thousands of people actively spreading hate and lies through WhatsApp and Facebook.
https://www.firstpost.com/india/massive-tweet-volumes-comple...
They prosecute citizens who stand up against them under sedition charges, which are non-bailable offences. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-56068522
They most recently started another WhatsApp Hate Factory group. https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/02/15/we-infiltrated-the-te...
This government is not shy about their right-wing communal leaning. They want to create a country that is hospitable to only one majority religion, and within that they do not allow free expression that goes against their wishes.
This is just another step in the direction, and the times are dark indeed.
Regardless of political/social viewpoints, I don’t think it matters if you consider your political views left, right, up, down, a, b or start... for the most part these views are compatible with free expression and “lowercase l” liberal democracy. Notwithstanding notable exceptions such as capital F Fascism or capital N Nazism, where being authoritarian is literally part of the political philosophy.
So how do we resist this trend? I’m not talking about rallies and counter-protesting, that won’t help shit when it’s happening in other countries. How do we make liberty and democracy better so that people want it enough to say no to the continuing pressure towards alternatives... ?
> the stream of evolution will wash the greedy and lazy out
Are there ways to speed up this tens of thousands of years of evolution? I can think of some things
On the other hand, is there a risk that instead this species gets stuck for millions of years, in a "local maximum" with somewhat bright sociopath dictators, and a huge crowd of clueless people (if there's evolutionary pressure against being a bright person? Are there such tendencies?, e.g. bright women just working, working, no babies, or political dissidents disappearing in prison?), with regularly occurring massacres of minorities, so that eventually anyone who looks slightly different is at risk? ... Well, until a 3rd world war with nukes, mostly puts an end to all of it
I'm in the west so probably better to updoot someone from india that has better insight. This is just my observation.
If what mozilla is saying is true this is a very obvious power grab that only applies to law abiding people. Internet protocols don't care about laws, you can try to enforce origin IP's and ban E2E encryption but bad actors can use these regardless of the law. It's all simply math and basic network packets.
Any software cryptographer or experienced programmer can tell you that. Meaning the intentions of this legislation cannot be honest, and therefore it's not for good.
As for social media regulation - by creating special regulations you lock in the current market. For example the reason why you can't compete with youtube in western markets is because youtube has to have very advanced processing heavy algorithms for content detection because copyright infringement, illigal material, etc. But japan has all their own ecosystem of social media and video.
The government also isn't somehow the good guys when trying to regulate big social media. If you give them the power to do that then they can also be the ones to shut down alternative social media with fines, police, and guns.
The problem with crying wolf is that, when the wolf does really emerge people would ignore your cries.
India is one of the most corrupt countries in the world so people complaining is not exactly crying wolf.
I have personally faced the full brunt of Indian governments maniacal control over the internet. Since 5 August 2019 till February 2020 I had 0 internet. Then after that, only "whitelisted" websites of around 300. That number was gradually increased. High speed mobile internet was only started like last month so from March 2020 till say February 2021, around 8 million people had to endure 2g internet speeds. Why? Because they dont want dissent be heard. If noone cries wolf, "assume the wolf didnt come ".
For the last 2-3 years, WhatsApp news groups have been forced to get themselves "registered" with police. Aim being to stop flow of any news that does not work with the narrative of the government and punish those involved. I can show you people on twitter who after being humiliated and tortured by police for "instigating anti national sentiments" aka criticising the govt. I can share posts by journalists who have been harrassed and tortured because of their anti govt news just because they wrote ground reports.
Look up last years Pulitzer prize winning photo. That was from this place, a hooded guy, in the air with a stone in his hand in front of a police truck, David vs Goliath in real life. I have not seen anything more raw in a long time. Read about it how it was literally "smuggled out" because the govt does not want its crimes to be known.
Why am I boring you with these details? Well if I am forced to "verify" my identity everywhere, this means the govt has immediate access to this handle and my physical body because my phone is actively pinging my location. This means I can write a keyword the govt finds problematic and I will be picked up. This is not even an issue on WhatsApp or telegram or signal because your mobile number is the unique key and it works on that and I personally know people who have been picked up for sharing anti govt stuff on WhatsApp.
My hand is being forced to set up private invite only network of activitypub compatible services because then I will be sort of in control but even then its a problem because Indian ISPs like Jio have been using DPI for a long time to filter and control people but I have to try to stay alive
Been in the situation once when I was transiting through India. Getting SIM card in India as a non-resident is a huge pain
Back then, there were always people hanging around airports selling SIM cards for cash.
Wholesale, data-only M2M cards are also said to be quite easy to get, with many resellers.
On the other hand, if you are required to disclose your identity when your anonymity clashes with the policies and procedures of governments, this is unfair since it stands in the way of freedom of expression and hints at fascistic intimidation tactics.
https://www.thequint.com/news/india/disha-ravi-charged-with-...
Having said that India have some actual activists responsible for creating forests single handedly with their own money[2][3]. Incidentally present "fasist" government honoured them while previous liberal progressive government fail to notice them. These life long activists get no coverage while faker like Greta and Disha rules the headlines.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-asia...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jadav_Payeng
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saalumarada_Thimmakka#:~:tex....
> while faker like Greta and Disha rules the headlines.
They are armchair activists.
The point is not about who is a true activist but using federal bodies to put people under arrest under trumped up charges for political agenda. This as weaponized use of federal bodies that India has witnessed in 50 years.
Disha's toolkit gets an arrest but toolkits by bjp activists openly calling for violence against muslims get a wink wink nod nod
I think you know that there are people blocking highways for months blocking entrance to Capital. If people don't have right to protest how this is hapenning.
> Disha's toolkit gets an arrest but toolkits by bjp activists openly calling for violence against muslims get a wink wink nod nod
BJP worker doesn't habe a toolkit. He runs a telegram group with open membership. You can join it too.
Disha Ravi had to retract and replace the toolkit with a sanitized version because toolkit is more about disrupting the "chai and yoga" image of India than protest against policies of the Government.
And ofcourse we can't forget Muslims. They are the proverbial victims with no extremism. Be it France, Sweden, UK, Banglore or Delhi. Across time and place, all the rioting is someone else's fault across time wink wink nod nod
It's the police that has barricaded the borders to stop them from entering Delhi. Protesting is not a crime. This is how we won our independence by peaceful protests and noncooperation movement. These are perfectly legitimate political actions.
By not calling it a toolkit you are playing semantic games. Disha's 'toolkit' was a document that instructed volunteers how to get more visibility and how to make #tags trend. It was a sketch of a plan for an entirely peaceful protest with absolutely 0 call for violence. This called for multiple arrests and many are still languishing in jail in spite of no shred of evidence linking them to violence.
On the other hand anyone can search for Kapil Mishra, and Ragini Tiwari on youtube to find recordings of their hate speech asking for killing and riots. Even inciting the rioters while they are rioting -- all captured on camera.
These people continue unarrested.
https://youtu.be/668EaVxdqwk?t=484
The following links will show more of the double standards used by the government.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBVc51TFEsM&t=58s
https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/02/15/we-infiltrated-the-te...
As long as the hatred and call to arms is in line with BJP politics they see the other way.
There is asymmetry in information warfare.
The media giants are not exactly neutral and are already involved in content vetting.
India still has an independent judiciary, and the democratically elected government has the mandate to regulate.
That’s highly questionable depending on the level of the judiciary being discussed. The highest court (Supreme Court) has sided more often with the executive and takes years to start hearing cases of national importance. Some of the High Courts are better.
These laws are likely to be enforced against Big Tech but the real losers are going to be users.
They hide behind the tech that these laws are threatening to take down.
It's going to hurt everyone, regardless of their political loyalties or faith.
Casteism is worse than Racism; Casteism = Racism + Slavery;
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_(Hinduism)
Let us give Brahmin a separate country; They're just 3% in India; https://archive.is/8JsAm
And Modi is privy/proxy to Pyramid schemes run by Ambani/Adani;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_riots
Continued presence of Narendra Modi will break India
https://www.quora.com/Should-only-Hindus-be-elected-to-publi...
"Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first" --Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
Coroptations put shareholders interst above anything else, from environment to human beings.