Microsoft’s GitHub, Mozilla, and Cloudflare have urged India to be transparent about the amendments it is making to an upcoming law that could affect swathes of companies and the way more than half a billion people access information online.
In December 2018, the Indian government proposed changes to its intermediary rules (PDF) that would require any service that facilitates communication between two or more users and had more than 5 million users in India to set up a local office and have a senior executive in the nation who could be held responsible for any legal issues. The proposal also suggested that any of these services must be able to take down questionable content in within 24 hours and share the user data in within 72 hours of request. Technology giants such as Facebook, Google have so far enjoyed what is known as “safe harbor” laws. The laws, currently applicable in the U.S. under the Communications Decency Act and India through its 2000 Information Technology Act, say that tech platforms won’t be held liable for the things their users share on the platform. Several organizations have shared feedback and expressed concerned about the suggested changes in the intermediary rules. In an open letter addressed to India’s IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Tuesday, GitHub, Mozilla, and Cloudflare requested the Indian government to be more transparent about the final amendments it has drafted for the rules. The Indian government has said previously that it would submit the final draft of the proposal to the nation’s apex Supreme Court by January 15. But one of the concerning issues with the proposal is that nobody — except for the government officials — knows what is in the final draft. “We understand and respect the need to ensure the internet is a safe space where large platforms take appropriate responsibility. However, the last version of these amendments which were available in the public domain suggest that the rules will promote automated censorship, tilt the playing field in favour of large players, substantially increase surveillance, and prompt a fragmentation of the internet in India that would harm users while failing to empower Indians,” the organizations wrote. The organizations argued that safe harbour liability protections have been fundamental to the growth of the internet in India — which has emerged as the last great growth market for internet companies. Imposing the obligations proposed in these new rules would “place a tremendous, and in many cases fatal, burden on many online intermediaries — especially new organizations and companies. A new community or a startup would be significantly challenged by the need to build expensive filtering infrastructure and hire an army of lawyers,” they said. More to follow…