Internet governance

The Data Governance Network (DGN) was established by the IDFC Institute in 2019 to bring together some of India's leading policy think-tanks. It identifies policy gaps in data governance and seeks to bridge them through policy interventions, research and advocacy. IT for Change was selected to be one of the four research nodes in the DGN for…

The advent of a digital society is fundamentally transforming our social and economic relationships. The nature of the dominant model of digital society means that global digital corporations – based in the US, and some in China – are dictating the terms and shaping the global socio-economic architecture for the new digital era, with very…

The tourism industry across the world is staring at bleak prospects in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. In India, the sector is staring at a potential loss of Rs 1.25 trillion over the next two quarters while 38 million jobs stand in grave danger in the coming months.

In 2019, we undertook a study, with support from Bread for the World…

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…

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…

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…

How are booking platforms changing  the global tourism industry and the tourism value chain? Who are the big winners in the platformization of the Indian tourism industry and who is missing out? Does the integration of local tourism businesses into digital booking platforms democratise and  balance economic power structures by allowing for a…

Since at least 2012, tech firms have consistently topped the list of companies in terms of market capitalisation, indicating the enormous financial power that the business of data wields. At the same time, governments around the world – including in South Asia – have been harvesting their citizens’ personal data and perfecting methods of…

Four centuries after the East India Company set the trend for corporate resource extraction, most of the world is now in the grip of unbridled corporate power. But corporate power is on the cusp of achieving ‘quantum supremacy’ that social movements in the digital age need to understand in order to shift gears in their struggles. The quantum…

Anonymisation of data is neither a corollary of privacy protection nor is it an oxymoron to the idea of privacy. Instead, it is more likely a gateway to a possible privacy breach which has not been addressed in the government’s Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 .

The Bill which is heralded as a much-needed safeguard to rein in the…