Internet Governance/Research

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 research details how Indonesians working in the tourism sector are included or excluded from the travel platform economy. It investigates why these actors are choosing to use travel platforms and how they express the benefits and constraints in this context. Inclusion in the platform…

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…

IT for Change has responded to the Government of India's consultation white paper for the Strategy for National Open Digital Ecosystems (NODE), by recognising the role and potential of NODE(s) not just as a much needed digital evolution of governance in India, but as also providing an…

During a global discussion led by Brazil in 2014, India maintained that the internet is not merely an open, free, global commons that should remain untouched by major governmental control, but also a resource that needs to reflect the values of an ‘Equinet’ – a platform for commerce, e-…

IT for Change's paper on 'Breaking Up Big Tech: Separation of its Data, Cloud and Intelligence Layers' for the Data Governance Network argues that traditional competition frameworks are inadequate to addressing the rapidly building digital power concentration. These need to be combined with…

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…

This report aims to investigate the current gaps in protection suffered by users of the platform economy in Europe and to propose legal solutions. The research particularly focuses on the inequalities (understood as information asymmetries affecting the weak party) and unfair practices…

Progress towards every single sustainable development goal (SDG) of Agenda 2030 also hinges on the effective deployment of digital technologies. In Global Governance Spotlight 4|2019, Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami from IT for Change explain the importance of so-called digital ecosystems to…

Digital and data technologies are not merely tools or enablers of development; they are the scaffolds of a new social paradigm. As data flows through a more and more interconnected planet, the capture of network-data spaces by corporate and state interest recasts opportunity structures,…

Most people still see data as ordinary knowledge or information best subject to 'open access' regimes. This is also the moral basis for the advocacy of free global flows of data. It is an argument that many, if not most, civil society activists worldwide often fall prey to.

This research…

This article was first published in Firstpost.

A mass exodus from Twitter over to open-source microblogging community Mastodon is in the news, and it’s not the first time that users have responded to social media’s opaque content moderation policies in this way. Calls to #deletefacebook …

This document puts forth a research framework for ‘Policy Frameworks for Digital Platforms - Moving from Openness to Inclusion’. It outlines and clarifies the key concepts invoked in this project and offers a broad meta research framework for the project. This framework has been constructed…

Reorienting "data for development"

"Data for development" enjoys high currency in global policy circles. It has come to stand for the idea that developing countries need to acquire the capacity to produce "quality, accessible, timely and reliable…

The paper, developed for the Commonwealth Secretariat, London, examines, the nature of digital economy in a developing country context, focussing the study partly on Bengaluru, often called the Silicon Valley of the South. It distinguishes digital industry from the earlier software industry and…