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Earlier this month, reacting to a decision by Indias highest court, prominent comedian Kunal Kamra tweeted that Indias Supreme Court is the most Supreme joke of this country.

The following day, local media reported that Attorney General K. K. Venugopal greenlighted court proceedings against the comedian, based on a few tweets criticizing the Supreme Court. The charge levied against him: contempt of court. Kamra has refused to apologize for his tweets and local reports indicate proceedings have yet to begin.

This should be shocking, but unfortunately its not. In India, speaking out on the Internet can be dangerous. Kamra told CoinDesk that public figures can receive threats on social media, noting that users leaked his phone number on Twitter multiple times. They dox people, they release information sometimes. Thats very normal, Kamra said.

With over 700 million internet users, Indias booming digital market collides with internet censorship or outright bans.

A similar dynamic plays out in Indias crypto market. Trade on Indian crypto exchanges exploded earlier this year after the Supreme Court ruled to reverse the decision by the countrys central bank (RBI) to ban local financial institutions from providing services to crypto firms. Now, just a few months later, the federal cabinet is reportedly discussing another potential ban.

While regulators havent clarified their stance on digital assets, they have expressed concern over the fiscal and monetary policy implications of fintech applications, including distributed ledger technology (DLT). Regulators have continued to push for local control over fintech payment platforms like WhatsApp Pay, which received approval from the Indian government only after owner Facebook agreed to store user data locally in India and not offshore.

This is part of a much broader trend. Kamras case is the latest in a series of targeted attacks on internet users in the country. In a 2019 report, Freedom House warned internet freedom in India had declined for the fourth year in a row due to increasing arrests for online activity and frequent internet shutdowns.

Localized internet shutdowns, restrictions on certain content (like pornography) and wholesale bans on select mobile applications are some of the more visible ways in which the Indian government has sought to control the internet. According to a report by local media outlet Mint, in 2017 and 2018 at least 50 individuals were arrested for comments made on social media, largely for posts considered offensive to politicians.

Digital India

Indias digital ecosystems, from cloud computing to digital payments, are expanding. According to a report by consulting firm McKinsey, core sectors of the digital economy could double their contribution to Indias GDP by 2025, adding up to $435 billion.

On Nov. 19, in his inaugural address at the Bengaluru Tech Summit, Indias Prime Minister Narendra Modi said his administrations governance model is technology first citing his Digital India initiative that launched five years ago.

Digital India has become a way of life, particularly for the poor, marginalized and for those in government, Prime Minister Modi said.

Yet, since 2014, government authorities have enforced about 450 regional internet shutdowns, with 134 in 2018 alone, according to a local internet shutdown tracker.

Reasons for the crackdowns range from anticipated public unrest to curbing malpractice in school examinations. This blunt-force approach can also lead to monetary loss for businesses and the disruption of web-based services.

If there is no internet, there is no cryptocurrency, there is no blockchain, there is no technology. The internet is the crux.

The longest internet shutdown ever recorded in a democracy was implemented by the Indian government in the disputed Kashmir region after the Modi government revoked the states semi-autonomous status in August 2019.

Indian officials justified the extended ban by calling it a necessary move to curb anticipated unrest that might have followed the administrative decision. While services were gradually restored, the blackout lasted over seven months and disrupted some 12 million peoples access to the internet.

Qazi Zaid, chief editor of Free Press Kashmir (FPK), a local media outlet, said his newsroom had to be shuttered during the blackout. The primarily online publication halted all coverage and risked losing its online readership of over 300,000 people, Zaid told CoinDesk.

When phone lines were restored, reporters called each other and dictated stories in an attempt to type and publish them, he added.

But then we also realized that our audience is not there, Zaid said.

While FPK managed to gradually come back online in May this year, the blackout had hit local businesses and dried up advertising revenue, Zaid said. He stressed that media censorship in Kashmir hasnt changed so much after last years decision to revoke the regions special status but it may have been further formalized under recent amendments to digital media policy, giving the government regulatory control over digital news and content providers.

Loopholes

When the Indian government wants to shut the internet down, it sometimes invokes a 135-year-old law: the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885. The act was created by the British rulers in colonial India to curb uprisings, Indian journalist Sonia Faleiro said in a recent MIT Technology Review podcast. The law gives the government authority over all forms of electronic communications (in 1885 that meant telegrams) in the event of a public emergency.

In 2017, the law was amended to specify that it allowed the temporary suspension of telecom services, Faleiro said.

One of the many problems with the law, Faleiro added, was it did not specify or define public emergency, thus allowing the government to label any incident as such and shut down communications.

Additionally, a controversial 2008 amendment to The Information Technology Act of 2000, Section 66A, allowed the government to imprison any person sending messages deemed offensive, menacing, false or causing annoyance through any electronic communications device. Using this law, in 2012 the government arrested two women for Facebook posts critical of the government.

In 2015, the Supreme Court of India shot down Section 66A, calling it unconstitutional. However, arrests over social media activity continued: In 2016, a Kashmiri man was charged with sedition for liking and sharing anti-India posts on Facebook.

The security argument

Amid a tense border standoff with China earlier this year, Indias government banned 60 China-based apps, including the popular social media platform Tik Tok.

When border tensions continued, leading to an Indian soldier reportedly being killed by a Chinese landmine, the Indian government restricted 118 more mobile applications from Chinese tech companies in September 2020.

The governments statement alleged it had received several reports of these applications misusing user data and surreptitiously transmitting it to servers located outside India.

Described as a move to ensure safety, security and sovereignty of Indian cyberspace in the governments September statement, the restrictions took aim at apps from WeChat, Baidu, Alipay and the popular mobile game PlayerUnknowns Battlegrounds (PUBG), which had over 33 million active users in India at the time.

While the restrictions could have been a knee-jerk reaction to a geopolitical situation that has since cooled down, concerns about the integrity of user data and government surveillance on the internet have persisted as India works on the proposed Personal Data Protection Bill (2019).

According to Anirudh Burman, associate fellow at Carnegie India, the draft law, introduced in December 2019, deploys an approach quite similar to the European Unions General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Burman explained that although both frameworks are based on a user-consent model, the Indian bill limits data storage outside the countrys borders and also creates compliance requirements that could burden small enterprises.

If there is a medium or small enterprise firm going to get a data protection officer or get an annual data protection audit, its a significant cost, Burman said.

The draft laws requirement to store certain types of data locally or always have a copy of it available on local servers has also stoked fears of increased state surveillance, according to a report by DW. Requiring platforms to store data locally could also afford easier access to local law enforcement which, if stored off-shore, would be subject to a different set of laws.

U.S. law permits the disclosure only of non-content data. So if you want detailed subscriber information or content data, then you have to go through the due process, said Burman. Content data here refers to data, processed or unprocessed, that can convey the substance of a communication.

The draft bill also provides for the creation of a dedicated body, the Data Protection Authority of India, to ensure compliance with the law. A portion of the legislation also grants the federal government the power to exempt any agency of Government from application of the Act, thereby creating broad loopholes for the state to duck requirements levied on private enterprises.

The draft law, Indias first attempt at creating a digital privacy and data management framework at the national level, is currently before a joint parliamentary committee. The committee also recently held discussions on law with representatives from companies including Amazon, Twitter, Mastercard, Visa and PayPal.

Reported to be in the final stages of discussion, the committee is expected to file its recommendations on the bill before the next session of parliament begins.

Sisyphus' boulder

Despite the Indian governments efforts to exercise control over cyberspace, internet policing can only go so far.

Vikram Subburaj and Arjun Vijay launched Indian crypto exchange Giottus in 2018, just a week after the central bank of India published a circular that banned crypto firms from having bank accounts. Confronted by the ban, they pivoted to setting up a peer-to-peer exchange.

In March 2020, the Supreme Court of India overruled the central bank circular and, according to the two founders, Giottus has enjoyed record growth in the last six months.

We have been growing at a phenomenal rate of 400% YTD and have been clocking a monthly trade volume of $33 million, Subburaj told CoinDesk via email.

Vijay doesnt believe internet censorship can stop web-based services from continuing to grow in India.

Censorship doesnt work with respect to the internet. With VPN and sorts, it just makes it more difficult for you to access something, but it doesnt prevent someone who wants to access it, Vijay told CoinDesk.

Even in Kashmir, where students had to make do with government-imposed low-speed internet for their online classes during the coronavirus pandemic, people found workarounds. According to an Al Jazeera report, two applications (Filo and Wise) created by educators Mubeen Masudi and Imbesat Ahmad helped students access the Internet.

Indias government seems to understand the Internet is essential for the countrys growth. While authorities sometimes lean toward stringent controls, the government will not completely stamp out digital innovation. This is good news for the crypto industry.

As Neeraj Khandelwal, co-founder of local crypto exchange CoinDCX, told CoinDesk, If there is no internet, there is no cryptocurrency, there is no blockchain, there is no technology. The internet is the crux.

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In India, a Clash of Digital Innovation and Internet Censorship - CoinDesk - Coindesk

WASHINGTON U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz set conservative Twitter on fire as he tore into Jack Dorsey, the platforms CEO, during a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, creating the sort of viral moment senators crave from such high-profile exchanges.

Facebook and Twitter and Google have massive power. They have a monopoly on public discourse in the online arena, Cruz told Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whom the Texas Republican and other GOP members of the committee had subpoenaed to address what they view as censorship and suppression by Big Tech during the 2020 election.

Your policies are applied in a partisan and selective manner, Cruz said, demanding that Dorsey and Zuckerberg produce data showing how often they flag or block Republican candidates and elected officials as opposed to Democrats.

What a moment, right-wing commentator Dinesh DSouza tweeted, sharing a clip from the hearing with his 1.9 million followers.

This is almost TOO GOOD, tweeted Dan Bongino, another conservative commentator, urging his 2.7 million followers to Watch Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey absolutely squirm in his chair as Ted Cruz goes full trial lawyer on him.

IN-DEPTH: Cornyn, Cruz not holding out much hope for Trump to pull off re-election

As social media companies cracked down on misinformation during the election under pressure to prevent a repeat of 2016s Russian meddling they found themselves increasingly targeted by conservatives such as Cruz, who call it censorship when Twitter flags President Donald Trumps posts that falsely claim he won re-election, or when Facebook tries to stop its users from sharing a debunked story about President-elect Joe Bidens son.

Its a sign of how an area of bipartisan agreement the need to reform Big Tech has become increasingly politicized, worrying experts that it will be yet another effort mired in congressional bickering.

The fundamental question is what right does a social media platform have to label something posted on it as potentially untrue, said Chris Bronk, an expert in cyber geopolitics who is an associate professor at the University of Houston.

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Bronk said its become increasingly clear that reforms are needed to counter domestic hate groups and hostile foreign governments that use social media to ply the American public with disinformation.

But when the same politicians who regulate the industry are also being flagged for making false or misleading statements, Bronk sees little room for agreement.

I got a tweet this morning at seven whatever, the president put out there and it just said, I won the election. Is that true? said Bronk, a former foreign service officer with the State Department. The internet has allowed us to divorce ourselves from some sets of facts.

The debate centers on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which offers legal protections to online platforms that publish and circulate content created by others.

Cruz, Trump and Biden agree those protections need to go. But the reasons they cite couldnt be further apart.

Democrats such as Biden say social media platforms arent doing enough to combat misinformation and harmful content such as hate speech.

I recognize the steps theyre really baby steps that youve taken so far, and yet destructive, incendiary misinformation is still a scourge on both your platforms, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told Dorsey and Zuckerberg during the committee hearing a proceeding that Blumenthal deemed a political sideshow, a public tarring and feathering.

Republicans, including Cruz, say Twitter and Facebook have already gone too far.

Theyve had unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter virtually any form of communication between private citizens or large public audiences, Trump said this year as he signed an executive order targeting the protections in place. Trump said fact-checking attempts by the platforms are one of the greatest dangers (free speech) has faced in American history.

Experts say theres actually little evidence that social media platforms unfairly target those on the right and that available data actually indicates that conservative social media tends to get more traffic online. For instance, the New York Times reported that Trumps official Facebook page got 130 million reactions, shares and comments over a 30-day stretch in the final leg of the presidential race, compared with 18 million for Bidens page.

Trump similarly eclipsed Biden on Instagram, and the gaps on both sites widened as the race came to an end, the Times reported.

Part of the tension on Capitol Hill is the Republicans continue to push this false narrative that tech is anti-conservative, said Hany Farid, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has testified before the Senate and advised congressional offices on potential legislation. There is no data to support this. The data that is there is in the other direction and says conservatives dominate social media.

Farid said some important if small steps are being taken. The Judiciary Committee this year passed a bill that would amend Section 230 to allow federal and state claims against platforms hosting content that sexually exploits children.

Farid said the relatively narrow bill targets a very serious problem, but its one of many, many really bad problems on the internet, including hate speech and terrorism. Once those other issues are brought up, Farid said, Republicans start to push back.

Its easy to be supportive of legislation that protects 4-year-olds from being sexually assaulted, Farid said. When it comes to things outside of child sex abuse, the Republicans have a problem, because a lot of their folks live on the side of white supremacists. When we start talking about cracking down on hate speech, they hear Republicans.

But Farid also questioned the wisdom of scrapping Section 230 altogether, as Biden has advocated, and said regulations on the algorithms that platforms use to decide what content gets promoted to their users would be a better approach.

Part of the problem, he said, is that few lawmakers have a deep understanding of the industry, and even some of their more tech-savvy staffers dont seem to have a firm grasp on the issue.

Unfortunately a lot of these hearings are not substantive, Farid said. They are for show. Theyre like flexing muscles.

Cruz, a former Texas solicitor general, was flexing at the hearing with Dorsey and Zuckerberg.

CRUZ STEPS INTO RING WITH TWITTER CEO, HITS HIM WITH 5 LEGALLY DEVASTATING FINISHING MOVES, read the text on a video the conservative Washington Examiner shared, with clips from Cruzs questioning of Dorsey.

In the past, Cruz has called for a criminal investigation into Twitter, accusing the social media company of violating U.S. sanctions on Iran by providing social media accounts to Iranian leaders.

He has urged the top U.S. trade official to scrap language in trade agreements that Cruz said offers near-blanket legal immunity to technology companies.

And he has accused Google of abusing its monopoly power in an effort to censor political speech with which it disagrees.

Cruz, like many Republicans, has also joined Parler, a social media network catering to conservatives.

At the hearing, Cruz vowed to put Twitters policies to the test by tweeting out statements about voter fraud, including findings from the Commission on Federal Election Reform, a bipartisan organization founded in 2004 by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker.

After the hearing, Cruz tweeted to his 4.1 million followers:

Twitter Test #1: Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.

Twitter Test #2: Voter fraud is particularly possible where third party organizations, candidates, and political party activists are involved in handling absentee ballots.

Twitter Test #3: Voter fraud does exist. This is just one example, linking to a news report about a woman charged in Texas.

None of the tweets was flagged.

ben.wermund@chron.com

twitter.com/benjaminew

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Ted Cruz digs in for congressional battle over censorship on Twitter, Facebook - Houston Chronicle

The Internets domain name system is not the place to police speech. ICANN, the organization that regulates that system, is legally bound not to act as the Internets speech police, but its legal commitments are riddled with exceptions, and aspiring censors have already used those exceptions in harmful ways. This was one factor that made the failed takeover of the .ORG registry such a dangerous situation. But now, ICANN has an opportunity to curb this abuse and recommit to its narrow mission of keeping the DNS running, by placing firm limits on so-called voluntary public interest commitments (PICs, recently renamed Registry Voluntary Commitments, or RVCs).

For many years, ICANN and the domain name registries it oversees have given mixed messages about their commitments to free speech and to staying within their mission. ICANNs bylaws declare that ICANN shall not regulate (i.e., impose rules and restrictions on) services that use the Internets unique identifiers or the content that such services carry or provide. ICANNs mission, according to its bylaws, is to ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems. And ICANN, by its own commitment, shall not act outside its Mission.

Buttheres always a but. The bylaws go on to say that ICANNs agreements with registries (the managing entities of each top-level domain like .com, .org, and .horse) and registrars (the companies you pay to register a domain name for your website) automatically fall within ICANNs legal authority, and are immune from challenge, if they were in place in 2016, or if they do not vary materially from the 2016 versions.

Therein lies the mischief. Since 2013, registries have been allowed to make any commitments they like and write them into their contracts with ICANN. Once theyre written into the contract, they become enforceable by ICANN. These voluntary public interest commitments have included many promises made to powerful business interests that work against the rights of domain name users. For example, one registry operator puts the interests of major brands over those of its actual customers by allowing trademark holders to stop anyone else from registering domains that contain common words they claim as brands.

Further, at least one registry has granted itself sole discretion and at any time and without limitation, to deny, suspend, cancel, or transfer any registration or transaction, or place any domain name(s) on registry lock, hold, or similar status for vague and undefined reasons, without notice to the registrant and without any opportunity to respond. This rule applies across potentially millions of domain names. How can anyone feel secure that the domain name they use for their website or app wont suddenly be shut down? With such arbitrary policies in place, why would anyone trust the domain name system with their valued speech, expression, education, research, and commerce?

Voluntary PICs even played a role in the failed takeover of the .ORG registry earlier this year by the private equity firm Ethos Capital, which is run by former ICANN insiders. When EFF and thousands of other organizations sounded the alarm over private investors bid for control over the speech of nonprofit organizations, Ethos Capital proposed to write PICs that, according to them, would prevent censorship. Of course, because the clauses Ethos proposed to add to its contract were written by the firm alone, without any meaningful community input, they had more holes than Swiss cheese. If the sale had succeeded, ICANN would have been bound to enforce Ethoss weak and self-serving version of anti-censorship.

The issue of PICs is now up for review by an ICANN working group known as Subsequent Procedures. Last month, the ICANN Board wrote an open letter to that group expressing concern about PICs that might entangle ICANN in issues that fall outside of ICANNs technical mission. It bears repeating that the one thing explicitly called out in ICANNs bylaws as being outside of ICANNs mission is to regulate Internet services or the content that such services carry or provide. The Board asked the working group [pdf] for guidance on how to utilize PICs and RVCs without the need for ICANN to assess and pass judgment on content.

EFF supports this request, and so do many other organizations and stakeholders who dont want to see ICANN become another content moderation battleground. Theres a simple, three-part solution that the Subsequent Procedures working group can propose:

In short, while registries can run their businesses as they see fit, ICANNs contracts and enforcement systems should have no role in content regulation, or any other rules and policies beyond the ones the ICANN Community has made together.

A guardrail on the PIC/RVC process will keep ICANN true to its promise not to regulate Internet services and content.It will help avoid another situation like the failed .ORG takeover, by sending a message that censorship-for-profit is against ICANNs principles. It will also help registry operators to resist calls for censorship by governments (for example, calls to suppress truthful information about the importation of prescription medicines). This will preserve Internet users trust in the domain name system.

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ICANN Can Stand Against Censorship (And Avoid Another .ORG Debacle) by Keeping Content Regulation and Other Dangerous Policies Out of Its Registry...

It should be noted that books about trans people are among the most censored books in the U.S. Of the books the American Library Association identified as the top 10 most challenged in 2019, the majority either explored trans issues, featured trans characters, or were written by trans peopletitles like Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out and the picture book about a trans girl, I Am Jazz. Trans writers and trans organizers alike have been censored in the ways Shrier believes she is being censored, though those stories rarely attract the level of attention from the same writers now defending her.

In those cases, the demands to censor trans books may not necessarily be coming from the government itself. But the demands are in alignment with the governments broader aims to suppress trans peoples rights. They share a common goal: restrain, if not remove, trans people from our shared civic life. Strangio is cognizant of this power dynamic. As he wrote in comments to Greenwald that were not included in his story but tweeted by Greenwald in full, I believe in fighting the central premise of these arguments and building support for what every major medical association has made clearthat care for youth is safe, effective, and life savingand ensuring that trans youth dont die as a result of these criminal bans. Anti-trans suppression leads, too, to the death of free speech. It may also lead to the death of trans people.

In his defense of Shrier, Greenwald does not acknowledge that the far more common censorship scenario in the U.S. is for trans peoples speechtheir gender expression itself, tooto be targeted. He is familiar with Strangios legal work, he writes, noting the fight it took for Chelsea Manning to be treated with dignity, including being allowed access to hormones, when she was in military prison at Fort Leavenworth (where she was sentenced after being put on trial for leaking critical documents about the Iraq War). Trans people still face incomparable societal hurdlesincluding an epidemic of violenceeven when they enjoy networks of support in the middle of progressive cities, Greenwald wrote in 2017, after Manning was released. But to do that while in a military brig, in the middle of Kansas, where your daily life depends exclusively upon your military jailers, is both incomprehensibly difficult and incomprehensibly courageous.

Chelsea Manning is an extraordinary example of an ordinary circumstance: Institutional gatekeepers stand between trans people and their self-determination, and those gatekeepers still have more power than trans people have. It is in that context that Strangio raises questions about the harm a book like Shriers can doabout the true, complex boundaries of speech. Is a rude email to the people at Spotify who pay Joe Rogans bills, which allows him to host a long chat with Shrier and put it in front of millions of people, at all comparable to that institutional gatekeeping? What about when the argument made in that chat empowers the gatekeepers, and at trans peoples expense?

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The Dangerous Inversions of the Debate Around Trans Censorship - The New Republic

Its easy to forget what a recent phenomenon freedom of expression is, even in this country. Until 1959, British publishers could be sent to jail for producing books deemed to have a tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.

Back then, the things that couldnt be said were largely sexual. James Joyces masterpiece, Ulysses, was banned indeed burned on the grounds of obscenity. A single line in Radclyffe Halls The Well of Loneliness (And that night they were not divided) convinced a magistrate that all copies must be destroyed, because it could induce thoughts of a most impure character and would glorify the horrible tendency of lesbianism.

The bravery of successive generations of publishers, their mischievous insistence on thumbing their nose at the censors, helped bring about the sexual revolution, enabling us all to live and love and read more freely. The obscenity trial, 60 years ago, of Lady Chatterleys Lover (or more accurately, of its publisher, Penguin Books), is widely recognised as the moment when the gates of artistic and sexual freedom were finally blown open.

Now, though, there are those who wish to drag them shut again. This time it isnt the grey elderly ones, as Lawrence described his censors, having apoplexies over the written word. Today, the blue pencil hovers in the hand of young progressives some of them, astonishingly, publishers themselves.

Staff at Penguin Random House tried this week to block the publication of a new book by Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic whose contempt for identity politics has earned him a huge following on the Right. At a town hall meeting at Penguins Canada office, employees argued that the publisher should not give a platform to an icon of hate speech. According to one of those present, people were crying in the meeting about how Mr Peterson has affected their lives, with one employee fretting that the publication of the book would negatively affect their non-binary friend.

To Penguins great credit, it is pressing ahead with publication. But as the social justice generation moves up the media hierarchy, this bizarre sight publishers protesting against their own publishing house for publishing a book will only become more common.

Earlier this year, the US firm Hachette dropped its plans to publish Woody Allens memoirs after staff staged a walkout. The American journalist Abigail Shrier has described how her latest book, an investigation into the rise in transgender identification among adolescent girls, was dropped by her first publishers following protests by staff. When another publisher picked it up, newspapers refused to review it. When the podcaster Joe Rogan interviewed Shrier about her book, staff at Spotify, the podcast platform, threatened to walk out. Censorship is once more in the ascendant.

They are so easily rattled, these new inspectors of literary hygiene. No sensible critic of Peterson would claim that his books constitute hate speech. (Unlike Mein Kampf, which Penguin, quite rightly, continues to publish on the grounds of public interest.) The argument against Peterson seems to be that, even if he isnt a neo-Nazi, some of his fans are. But since when did we judge a book by its readers?

If reading has any moral purpose, it is that it broadens our understanding of the world by exposing us to different ideas. This is what makes publishing an exalted profession: its whole purpose is to find ideas and set them free. A publisher should be a liberator, not a jailer.

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The attempt to censor Jordan Peterson shows the intolerance of the social justice generation - Telegraph.co.uk