The Internet, as anyone who has ever experienced the wonder of going online would know, is a very different communication platform from any other that has existed before.
The Internet, as anyone who has ever experienced the wonder of going online would know, is a very different communication platform from any other that has existed before. People who would never have any chance of being published in a newspaper now have the opportunity to have a blog and provide their thoughts to the world. This also means that thoughts that many newspapers would decide not to publish can be published online since the Web does not, and more importantly cannot, have any editors to filter content. For many dictatorships, the right of people to freely express their thoughts is something that must be heavily regulated. Unfortunately, we are now faced with the situation where some democratic countries are also trying to do so by censoring the Internet.
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Activists of the Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena hold placards and roses outside the residence of communications and IT minister Kapil Sibal in New Delhi on December 7, 2011. Sibal on December 6 asked Facebook and Google to screen content that is uploaded on various sites, triggering a major uproar against u00a0the move.u00a0Pic/ AFP Photo
In India, the new ‘Intermediary Guidelines‘ Rules and the Cyber Cafe Rules that have been in effect since April 2011 give not only the government, but all citizens of India, great powers to censor the Internet. These rules, which were made by the Department of Information Technology and not by the Parliament, require that all intermediaries remove content that is ‘disparaging’, ‘relating to… gambling’, ‘harm minors in any way’, to which the user ‘does not have rights’. When was the last time you checked wither you had ‘rights’ to a joke before forwarding it? Did you share a Twitter message containing the term “#IdiotKapilSibal”, as thousands of people did a few days ago? Well, that is ‘disparaging’, and Twitter is required by the new law to block all such content. The government of Sikkim can run advertisements for its PlayWin lottery in newspapers, but under the new law it cannot do so online. As you can see, through these ridiculous examples, the Intermediary Guidelines are very badly thought-out and their drafting is even worse. Worst of all, they are unconstitutional, as they put limits on freedom of speech that contravene Article 19(1)(a) and 19(2) of the Constitution, and do so in a manner that lacks any semblance of due process and fairness.
We, at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, decided to test the censorship powers of the new rules by sending frivolous complaints to a number of intermediaries. Six out of seven intermediaries removed content, including search results listings, on the basis of the most ridiculous complaints. The people whose content was removed were not told, nor was the generalu00a0public informed that the content was removed. If we hadn’t kept track,
it would be as though that content u00a0never existed.
Currently, the government can either block content by using section 69A of the Information Technology Act (which can be revealed using RTI), or it has to send requests to Internet companies to get content removed. Google has released statistics of government requests for content removal as part of its Transparency Report. While Mr Sibal uses the examples of communally sensitive material as a reason to force censorship of the Internet, out of the 358 items requested to be removed from January 2011 to June 2011 from Google service by the Indian government (including state governments), only 8 were for hate speech and only 1 was for national security. Instead, 255 items (71 per cent of all requests) were asked to be removed for ‘government criticism’. Google, despite the government in India not having the powers to ban government criticism due to the Constitution, complied in 51 per cent of all requests. That means they removed many instances of government criticism as well.
Mr Sibal’s more recent efforts at forcing major Internet companies such as Indiatimes, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, to ‘self-regulate’ reveals a desire to gain ever greater powers to bypass the IT Act when censoring Internet content that is ‘objectionable’ (to the government). Mr Sibal wants Internet companies to ‘self-regulate’ user-uploaded content, so that the government would never have to send these requests for removal in the first place, nor block sites officially using the IT Act. Given the clandestine manner in which it sought to bring about these new censorship measures, the motives of the government are suspect. Yet, both Mr Sibal and Mr Sachin Pilot have been insisting that the government has no plans of Internet censorship, and
Mr Pilot has made that statement officially in the Lok Sabha. This, thus seems to be an instance of censoring without censorship.
Further, since the government cannot bring about censorship laws in a straightforward manner, is is trying to do so surreptitiously, through the back door. Mr Sibal’s latest proposed amendment to the Copyright Act, which is before the Rajya Sabha right now, has a provision called section 52(1)(c) by which anyone can send a notice complaining about infringement of his copyright. The Internet company will have to remove the content immediately without question, even if the notice is false or malicious. The sender of false or malicious notices is not penalised. But the Internet company will be penalised if it doesn’t remove the content that has been complained about. The complaint need not even be shown to be true before the content is removed. Indeed, anyone can complain about any content, without even having to show that they own the rights to that content. The ultimate effect will be the death of the Internet as we know it. Bid adieu to it while there is still time.
Pranesh Prakash is with the Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, which first published this article
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.u00a0
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