Internet Governance/Advocacy

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…

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…

IT for Change submitted comments to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on the Consultation Paper on Net Neutrality. We urge the development of "Core Principles of Net Neutrality" based on human rights, equity and social justice.

The…

The Just Net Coalition (JNC) has sent an open letter to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, voicing its objection to World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) official recommendation of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). The use of EME, developed by W3C, poses a risk to billions of people's…

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. 

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-…