Advocacy

2020

Recently, governments in France and Australia have introduced measure to make news aggregators such as Google pay for re-use of news. The move will benefit news publishers struggling to navigate the platform-mediated digital era. While the competition regulator in France has effectively pushed Google into negotiating a remuneration deal with…

2020

On March 24, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued an advisory to States, asking them to treat e-commerce as an essential service. A few days before, industry body CII had urged the Centre to exempt e-commerce (delivery and shipment) from Covid-19 preventive measures. Being listed as an…

2020

In October and November 2018, during the Great Indian Festival season in India, online retail giants — Amazon, Flipkart and Paytm Mall — sold goods worth $4.3 billion (Rs 29,947 crore), 43 percent higher than the last year.

Traders in physical retail must now reckon with the rather disconcerting reality of e-commerce. The press note…

2020

Statement of the APRCEM S&T Constituency on COVID-19.

The world is presently facing a global health pandemic as many countries battle the widespread transmission of COVID-19 that has already cost the lives of almost 42,000 and afflicted nearly 858,000 people. The healthcare community across nations is engaged in desperate attempts to…

2020

IT for Change's Nandini Chami appeared on BBC Newshour on the 31st birthday of the World Wide Web to talk about the scale of online gender-based violence and the ways in which the web seems to be failing women and girls. The highlights of the discussion were as follows:

As IT for Change's previous research has already demonstrated, women…
2020

This policy brief deals with the principles and framework to govern aggregate non-personal data as 'common pool resources'. Such an intervention is necessary in view of the large dividends acquired through the use of such data, the widespread de facto collection of data and its potential as a raw material for the development of Artificial…

2020

The Srikrishna Committee report on data protection (2018) is based on the fundamental belief that a legal framework for the protection of personal data is imperative for empowerment, progress and innovation in the 21st century.

In the words of Justice Chandrachud in Justice KS Puttaswamy (Retd.) vs Union of India (2017), the “(f)…

2020

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-governance, national security mechanism, to be achieved…

2019

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 the mobile company ZTE. Amazon and Google recently…

2019

Technologies that map women’s bodies and reproductive choices are a site of patriarchal control and surveillance while simultaneously creating an illusion of choice or autonomy for users. This report recognizes and examines the ways in which the absence of safeguards for sensitive and personal data and information disproportionately targets…