Internet Governance

2024

Anita Gurumurthy, Nandini Chami, Amay Korjan, Eshani Vaidya, Sandeep Radhakrsihnan, and Merrin Muhammed Ashraf, prepared inputs that fed into UNCTAD’s Issue Paper on Data for Development. The input comprehensively discussed issues of neo-colonial dynamics of data economy, infrastructural and access challenges, data economy and the green…

2023

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has invited stakeholders to comment on the ‘Consultation Draft: Targeted update of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and their Implementation Procedures’ (Consultation Draft). The OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises (Guidelines) are recommendations…

2020

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 architecture for the new digital era, with very…

2019

Last week, Facebook announced Libra, its new currency based on blockchain technology.

This development that has been met with mixed reactions. Unlike Bitcoin, Libra will be backed by a reserve of a basket of currencies. Both the technology and the reserve are governed by the Libra Association, which includes a host of technology…

2019

Earlier this week, Facebook deleted over 700 pages in India for “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” and “spam”. Most of these pages were related to the Congress and the BJP. The action, evidently with an eye on the upcoming elections, targeted what Facebook described as deliberate attempts to mislead. Facebook’s role in cleaning up mala fide…

2019

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 a few decades of some rapid techno-economic…

2018

On December 20, 2018, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs issued an order authorizing ten central agencies to intercept, monitor and decrypt any information generated from any computer, drawing legitimacy from the Information Technology Act (2000) and associated rules. It is not clear if the order intends to be an executive fiat for blanket…

2018

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 then the Internet industry.The paper defines…

2018

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 and data becoming central to new social and…

2017

Parminder Jeet Singh was invited by the Centre for Policy Studies, IIT Bombay to deliver a talk on 'Digital Data - The New Raw Material in the Globalising Economy' as part of the Development Discourse Series. In the talk, Parminder unpacks data collection, use, and regulation from a political economy perspective; and also delves into the…