The Srikrishna Committee report on data protection (2018) is based on the fundamental belief that a legal framework for the protection of personal data is imperative for empowerment, progress and innovation in the 21st century.
In the words of Justice Chandrachud in Justice KS Puttaswamy…
This policy brief deals with the principles and framework to govern aggregate non-personal data as 'common pool resources'. Such an intervention is necessary in view of the large dividends acquired through the use of such data, the widespread de facto collection of data and its potential as a…
IT for Change responded to the Department of Telecom’s (DoT) consultation paper on the Artificial Intelligence Stack released by its AI Standardization Committee in September 2020.
Read the full submission here.
ITfC appreciates the DoT’s initiative in taking steps in artificial…
In October and November 2018, during the Great Indian Festival season in India, online retail giants — Amazon, Flipkart and Paytm Mall — sold goods worth $4.3 billion (Rs 29,947 crore), 43 percent higher than the last year.
Traders in physical retail must now reckon with the rather…
On March 24, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued an advisory to States, asking them to treat e-commerce as an essential service. A few days before, industry body CII had urged the Centre to exempt e-commerce (delivery and shipment) from Covid-…
Recently, governments in France and Australia have introduced measure to make news aggregators such as Google pay for re-use of news. The move will benefit news publishers struggling to navigate the platform-mediated digital era. While the competition regulator in France has effectively pushed…
The tourism industry across the world is staring at bleak prospects in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. In India, the sector is staring at a potential loss of Rs 1.25 trillion over the next two quarters while 38 million jobs stand in grave danger in the coming months.
In 2019, we…
The advent of a digital society is fundamentally transforming our social and economic relationships. The nature of the dominant model of digital society means that global digital corporations – based in the US, and some in China – are dictating the terms and shaping the global socio-economic…
This report was produced as part of the research project ‘Policy frameworks for digital platforms - Moving from openness to inclusion’.The report provides evidence from the Nigerian context to complement the global debate on designing appropriate regulatory frameworks for platforms that ensure…
The Data Governance Network (DGN) was established by the IDFC Institute in 2019 to bring together some of India's leading policy think-tanks. It identifies policy gaps in data governance and seeks to bridge them through policy interventions, research and advocacy. IT for Change was selected to…
This policy brief reviews current trends in the regulation of data collection and analysis with a focus on platforms. In particular, it interrogates emerging regulatory frameworks that shape, constrain, or advance citizens’ control over personal (and related) data. In doing so, it points to…
There are two ways to look at the digital economy. One is just as progressive automation of production processes that has been going on for many years, now hitting a whole new level. Another is to see it as a distinct discontinuity, much like the industrial revolution was. The latter, within…
The United States’ blacklisting of the Chinese company Huawei — since reversed — represents an important milestone as the world splits digitally around its two digital superpowers, the US and China. Last year, the US disallowed Alibaba’s takeover of Moneygram and later embargoed US supplies to…
A global Internet with unrestrained global flow of data has been held up as the ideal. However, while there is great value in it, there are also other, often competing, imperatives of ensuring rule of law over the internet and data, and using local and national data for encouraging domestic…
For long, Internet activists considered the Internet as being beyond law, politics and governments. J.P. Barlow made the famous Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace in 1996. It was fine when this phenomenon was just shaping up and challenging established institutions. But with the Internet…