Regulating the internet - India's e-conundrum

A tricky balancing act for the government. It cannot undermine either the abuse of liberty or freedom of expression

The battle for freedom of speech in the cyberspace is taking divergent turns in different parts of the world. Last week the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that users who make use of the ‘like’ feature on Facebook to show their support for a political party or candidate will be legally protected under the law. This ruling came after a former sheriff claimed he lost his job because he ‘liked’ the Facebook page of a candidate who was running against his boss for the city sheriff’s post. 
 

The ruling reversed a lower court verdict which had stated that liking a Facebook page was insufficient speech to merit constitutional protection. Civil rights groups hailed the verdict as positive as they felt the lower court decision unduly restricted freedom of expression of police officers.  Courts have granted First Amendment protection in the past to written posts on Facebook as well, according to the Wall Street Journal quoting Judge Raymond A. Jackson who had dismissed the lawsuit last year. 
 

Across the Pacific in China meanwhile, the Supreme Court this month did something quite the opposite. It sent out a warning saying anyone who spreads a rumour online will face a 3 year prison term if the ‘rumour’ gets reposted 500 times or is seen more than 5000 times on the internet. This ‘gossip’ law as it is being called, has come in for widespread criticism as activists believe it gives authorities more powers to arrest anyone seen as opposing them. 
 

The first arrest has already been made according to the UK’s Telegraph newspaper which quoted Zhou Ze, a rights lawyer on Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter as saying that he was “ really scared now that any whistle blowing might lead to an arrest." 
 

The two developments come in as interesting but conflicting paradigms for India as it tackles growing cases of social media abuse on one hand and the misuse of the section 66 (A) of the IT act – a law dealing with internet freedom, on the other. A PIL challenging the constitutional validity of section 66 (A) is now before an apex court bench, but the debate around how exactly India must deal with the apparently conflicting goals of upholding an individual’s right to free speech while curbing content that is seen as offensive and defamatory is getting louder. 
 

Just this morning Prime Minister Manmohan Singh raised critical concerns at the National Integration Council’s meeting about how social media is being used to ‘fan communal violence’ in the wake of the Muzzaffarnagar riots where wrong videos originating in the Af-Pak depicting violence were allegedly put on social networking sites. Singh said the social media was also used to trigger violence of people in the North-East earlier and said we need to find ways to stop the misuse. 
 

But the arrests late last year, of two girls who posted and liked a status message which criticized the shutdown of Mumbai due to Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray’s death brought to light the many problems with Section 66 A of the IT Act that’s used by the government to stop such misuse, raking up a storm of protest in the media and among social activists. Cyber law experts who’ve been asking for an amendment to the act have called the framework of the section too broad and vague and say it is very easily open to misuse. High profile arrests under 66 (A) of cartoonist Aseem Trivedi, Jadavpur University Professor Ambikesh Mahapatra and a Pondicherry based businessman for tweeting about the assets of Finance Minister P Chidambaram’s son Karti have led to the allegations that the law is being abused by politicians wanting to curb dissent. 
 

Reports by organizations like Freedom House show how India has recently fallen in the charts(6 positions among 47 countries that were assessed) on the basis of free and unrestricted access to the internet. Others like media watchdog Reporters without Borders has put India under surveillance as government pressure on intermediaries like Google, Twitter and Facebook to monitor content intensifies. The number of takedown requests Google received from India were only 2nd to the US and increased by 90% in the July to December 2012 period compared to the previous reporting period according to their transparency report. 
 

Clearly, with India’s online population set to grow to half a billion in the years to come, the challenge of regulation is only going to get tougher. The government will have to do a tricky balancing act as it sets to confront this e-conundrum. It cannot afford to undermine either the abuse of liberty or freedom of expression.