GitHub, Mozilla, and Cloudflare Appeal India To Be Transparent About Changes in Its Intermediary Liability Rules (techcrunch.com) 14
Microsoft's GitHub, Mozilla, and Cloudflare have urged India to be transparent about the amendments it is making to an upcoming law that could affect swathes of companies and the way more than half a billion people access information online. From a report: In December 2018, the Indian government proposed changes to its intermediary rules that would require any service that facilitates communication between two or more users and had more than 5 million users in India to set up a local office and have a senior executive in the nation who could be held responsible for any legal issues. The proposal also suggested that any of these services must be able to take down questionable content in within 24 hours and share the user data in within 72 hours of request. Technology giants such as Facebook, Google have so far enjoyed what is known as "safe harbor" laws. The laws, currently applicable in the U.S. under the Communications Decency Act and India through its 2000 Information Technology Act, say that tech platforms won't be held liable for the things their users share on the platform.
Several organizations have shared feedback and expressed concerned about the suggested changes in India's intermediary rules. In an open letter addressed to India's IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Tuesday, GitHub, Mozilla, and Cloudflare requested the Indian government to be more transparent about the final amendments it has drafted for the upcoming law. The Indian government has said previously that it would submit the final draft of the proposal to the nation's apex Supreme Court by January 15. But one of the concerning issues with the proposal is that nobody -- except for the government officials -- knows what is in the final draft.
Several organizations have shared feedback and expressed concerned about the suggested changes in India's intermediary rules. In an open letter addressed to India's IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Tuesday, GitHub, Mozilla, and Cloudflare requested the Indian government to be more transparent about the final amendments it has drafted for the upcoming law. The Indian government has said previously that it would submit the final draft of the proposal to the nation's apex Supreme Court by January 15. But one of the concerning issues with the proposal is that nobody -- except for the government officials -- knows what is in the final draft.
"Someone should be responsible" (Score:4, Insightful)
"Someone should be responsible". Yes, that is true, however it is up to the court system to find that. If you have a fall guy by default (here Wikipedia and other services), it only serves as a chilling effect. And I think that might be the main reason.
For us in Turkey, Wikipedia was banned over three years since they did not like what was written in there. I am pretty sure if they had officers in the country, they would be jailed as well. Unfortunately all world governments want to go in this direction, albeit at different speeds.
Re:"Someone should be responsible" (Score:5, Interesting)
My dad was a family practice doctor. He took a chest x-ray of one of his patients with a cough and noticed some spots in the lungs. He thought might be cancer, but he's not licensed as a radiologist so he's not allowed to make that diagnosis. He recommended the patient see a specialist and said he'd forward the x-rays to the specialist to save him some cost. The patient said not to worry, those spots always showed up in his x-rays. The patient did nothing for months, but the cough persisted so he eventually went to see the specialist (without telling my dad). The x-ray technician screwed up the exposure settings, so the x-rays the specialist saw didn't show any spots and he told the patient everything was normal. A year later he died of lung cancer. His spouse sued my dad, the x-ray technician, and the radiologist for failing to spot the cancer in a timely manner. My dad had the best defense, but the technician had no insurance, and the specialist had a minimal insurance policy. My dad had a top of the line insurance policy with really high maximums. The spouse's lawyer dropped the lawsuits against the technician and specialist, and sued only my dad. His insurance company estimated it would cost more to defend against the lawsuit than to settle, so they settled out of court.
Finding who is responsible plays little to no part in all this. It's all about who has money they can take away.
Block India. It would destroy tech there. (Score:5, Insightful)
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that is false, everyone worked in the internet before github, facebook, slack and people will work after they disappear. If a service is missing, others will fill the hole or people will adapt and use other tools (see how excel is used as main windows tool for many tasks because windows have almost no useful tools bundled in and the few that exist a very plain and basic)
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Some local company that can work with the nations laws can fill the emerging market opening.
100% legal, language support, staff in same time zone, police request ready, holiday aware...ads, payment systems, networking...24/7 staff
Why import some US, UK global portal when local experts can do the same and so much better?
The more distant global bands demand a "change" to laws, the more complaint and work ready local services look great again.
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It seems to me that a service or website could stay under the limit of five million users in India by charging a small fee, better for them than letting that money go to VPN companies.
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The laws dont read like the USA? Then dont invest.
Stay in the USA and invest in nations that have US like internet/publication laws.
India gets to keep its laws. The USA gets to enjoy its freedoms.
The internet brand can invest in nations that are more easy to stay in.
Why try to change laws in India? Its their nation, their gov, their internet systems to comment on.
They get to set limits on speech, what a publication is, who approved that "publication" when
it's probably time to recognize (Score:4, Insightful)
Better Approach (Score:4, Interesting)
Hopefully Microsoft's GitHub, Mozilla, and Cloudflare all give two middle fingers to Modi's oppressive illiberal regime.
Here's a better idea. If India is like all the other democracies I know then politicians love to get hired by companies as expensive "consultants". So get Microsoft et al to each pick a politician in Modi's party, hire them as consultants and let them be the "responsible" person in India especially since politicians always argue that these consultant positions are real, important jobs. When the first one gets taken to court things should get interesting...
The inevitable is here (Score:1)
Good news for decentralized services (Score:2)
It's time to move back to real decentralized services. Time to use things like Mastodon, PeerTube, Matrix, ... where you can have your own node or be part of smaller communities like librairies nodes, chess club nodes, ... This way, no government will be able to completely block services (at least, not as easily) and laws like what India want to have will apply to no one. No central company. No central servers.
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