Internet Governance/Advocacy

The Covid pandemic has starkly visibilized the underlying inequality and injustice of the global economic paradigm. It has not only exposed the cumulative failings of the neoliberal order, but also testified to the inevitability of crisis and catastrophe inherent to it. IT for Change…

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…

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 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…

We need to move towards a new legal framework for surveillance

Over the past decade, we have been witness to many legal, juridical and executive interventions that comprise the highly contentious terrain of surveillance in digital times — from the amendment to Section 69 of the IT Act in…

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. 

Since 2015, IT for Change has been actively engaged in influencing the policy debate on net neutrality in India, undertaking policy research and advocacy. We carried out a field research in New Delhi on patterns of access and use of the Internet that demonstrated the critical importance of…

Between 2015-2017, IT for Change actively engaged in a series of consultations convened by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), on regulation of Over-the-Top services, differential pricing of data, and core principles of net neutrality in the Indian context.
In these responses…