Internet Governance/Advocacy

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…

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…

The article critically examines US government's withdrawal from direct oversight over ICANN, and argues that the jurisdictional controls over ICANN that the US retains means that ICANN can hardly be said to have become independent of the US state.

The article suggest…

The Telecom Regulating Authority of India (TRAI) released a consultation paper to gauge public sentiment over differential pricing of data services. The paper evoked intense reactions in the media especially on Facebook's 'Free Basics' initiative with Reliance, which was widely publicised. You…

In light of the growing media focus on Facebook's 'Free Basics' and the overwhelming response to the TRAI consultation paper on differential pricing, Parminder Jeet Singh argues how differential pricing will invert the basic egalitarian design of the Internet in this article in Deccan Herald.…

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…

ITfC has made submissions to Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) in response to the two consultation papers it released, one on free data and another a more general pre-consultation on net neutrality.

On the consultation paper on free data TRAI sought comments on alternate…

Article 19 called for a public consultation on Principles on Privacy and Freedom of Expression. IT for Change submitted comments to the Draft Principles. Our inputs emphasized: the need to re-formulate the concept of personal data in times of Big Data analysis, algorithms and…

Statement issued by 8 Indian civil society organisations, supported by two key global networks, involved with Internet governance issues, to the meeting of ICANN in Hyderabad, India, from 3 rd to 9 th November, 2016