Internet Governance/Advocacy

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…

IT for Change submitted comments to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on the Consultation Paper on Net Neutrality. We urge the development of "Core Principles of Net Neutrality" based on human rights, equity and social justice.

The…

The Just Net Coalition (JNC) has sent an open letter to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, voicing its objection to World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) official recommendation of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). The use of EME, developed by W3C, poses a risk to billions of people's…

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is a free trade agreement whose negotiating partners include the ten member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and India, New Zealand, Australia, China, Japan and South Korea.The RCEP negotiations have been clandestine,…

As part of the Just Net Coalition, IT for Change helped develop draft input text on the human rights obligations of digital TNCs, for an international legally binding instrument on Transnational Corporations. This will be submitted to the Open-ended Intergovernmental Working Group on…

What are the implications for e-commerce issues in the 19th round of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership negotiations?

Parminder Jeet Singh offers a breakdown of the RCEP talks in The Hindu.

In this piece, Prabir Purkayastha outlines the dangers of discrimination against vulnerable and marginalized communities that can arise from automated algorithmic decision making.

Commission for Science and Technology for Development's Working Group on Enhanced Corporation (WGEC) is an important group deliberating on how to develop the required global Internet-related public policies, and the corresponding institutional frameworks. IT for Change is represented as one of…

On June 28, 2017 Anita Gurumurthy joined Nicole Shephard in a tweetchat organized by GenderITorg to discuss the impact of Big Data on gender and women’s rights.

Find the storify here.  

In this piece for The Hindu, Parminder Jeet Singh calls attention to the usurpation of digital issues by the ever increasing ambit of global trade treaties, and discusses possible policy directions for India. 

The nine-judge bench of India’s Supreme Court has just ruled that “privacy is intrinsic to freedom of life and personal liberty” guaranteed in Article 21 of the Constitution of India and qualifies as “a primal natural right”. In this article, Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami reflect on how…

At MC 11, the United States, Japan and European Union are actively pushing for a liberalised e-commerce regime that will reinforce the rules for trade set by the global North. Key to this dominant discourse is the persuasive rhetoric on free cross-…

In our response to the timely consultation paper by TRAI on  Privacy, Security and Ownership of the Data in the Telecom Sector we advocate for a broad spectrum of safeguarded data including 'collective/social data' in light of its commercial value. The paper recognizes that consent based…

Following Face book’s aggressive campaign to gain public support for Free Basics, Parminder Jeet Singh in this article in The Hindu argues how while the campaign utterly failed in its intended purpose, its unintended consequences may have done a lot of good to India in shaping a new level of…

Following TRAI's historic ruling that prohibits the discriminatory tariffs for data services, Parminder Jeet Singh, in this op-ed in the Deccan Herald, discusses how TRAI has asserted its regulatory control over the Internet by ensuring data services are not discriminated based on content and…