– Sujith K G
The history of human communication began with the oral or spoken tradition and since then there have been attempts of censorship of the speech of the multitude by various agencies across all societies. To put it in the simplest way, no medium was ever free in the absolute sense. And that applies to the Internet too. Just as through the course of history, the modes of dissemination of messages have progressed from oral tradition, to script, print, wired electronics and finally digital communication, so too have the instruments of regulation.
The moves to curb internet freedom and the freedom to utilize the data that we buy in whatever way we want, and the long lasting repercussions of such curbs, are becoming more visible in India. As this is something that pertains to the freedom guaranteed by democracy and the Constitution, it needs to be debated and contested. Internet today is a freedom: it is a right.
The combination of curbs and selective facilitation of the internet have been fought under the banner of ‘net neutrality’, i.e., neutrality of the internet service with respect to paying power, with respect to geographical and subjective location of the user, and with respect to the content posted on the internet. The following are some of the issues to be considered:
Economic Curbs
One move to curb internet freedom is motivated by the corporate agenda to regulate data as their product, at their will. Under the proposed scheme or situation the companies not only can adopt discretionary pricing for the data they sell, but they can also regulate the availability of that data for various purposes. They can take away the freedom of user in deciding and selecting the amount of data he wants from an application and charge for the overall scope of the medium. It not only limits the customers’ right of choice but also tests their spending power. It eventually leads to a situation in which social media like Facebook or Twitter would work in a differentially regulated, unevenly facilitated, unequally powered framework according to the paying capacity of people.
Different rates for different services are effectively a curtailment of freedom in using a resource that a customer has paid for. Making a medium that is fast becoming a basic necessity into a commodity traded for profit is undemocratic, and eliminates all scope for human sharing and well being. If these policies are widely implemented, they would challenge the fundamental historical bases on which the medium has grown.
In the United States, net neutrality has been an issue of contention among network users and access providers since the 1990s. Until 2015, there have been no clear legal restrictions against practices slowing down net access. In 2005 and 2006, corporations supporting both sides of the issue spent large amounts of money lobbying Congress. Between 2005 and 2012, five attempts to pass bills in Congress containing net neutrality provisions failed. Each sought to prohibit Internet Service Providers from using various variable pricing models. These models based upon the user’s Quality of Service level, were described as ‘tiered service’ in the industry and as ‘price discrimination’ by some economists. Projects such as Facebook’s internet.org sparked a new debate as they offered free access to a bouquet of websites on the internet.org platform. The move was criticised and opposed for the reason that selective promotion like selective censoring thwarts the neutrality of internet.
The crisis of regulatory policy
In digital communication, time has been compressed by reducing the effective distance between different points in space and this sense of newly defined space has led people to feel that the differentiation between local, national, and global spaces are obsolete. In addition, digital media can now reach everyone, instead of a limited audience. In older media forms, content and propagation are controlled through either a censor board, or self imposed regulation, where media organizations comply with the rules of the land and are accountable for the content disseminated on their platform. But for the new (social) media, the ownership of the content is the trickiest and toughest part to deal with. Social media giants like Facebook seldom create their own content. Social media is a volatile communication medium because an individual user may generate whatever content he or she pleases and is free to let it go on cyberspace without any agential or state mediation. This dynamism of new media has been raising issues regarding the breach of law and codes of conduct – mandatory and optional – in societies or spaces that they operate in.
Digital media, a) which converge rapidly (e.g., Skype with Microsoft); are interactive (e.g., as in Facebook); use hypertexts that allow a user to transparently follow links to different programmes; and the fact that all these are all virtual excursions without a physical presence are unique traits of digital media, making monitoring and regulation very difficult. Because the new media is characterized by a many-to-many message transmission, which is only recorded virtually in a digital form, it ceases to follow the scope envisaged by the primary material. As Manuel Castells puts it, the emergence of the global network has contributed to the construction and formulation of a new life experience all together for human beings. This in turn will lead the transformation of economic activities, cultural patterns, interactional styles, and other aspects of human society. The invisible world of digital networks induces a gap between reality and the virtual, facilitating the free alteration of one’s gender, personality, appearance, and occupation.
The digital media forms a virtual community that crosses the possible physical boundaries and operates at a level that is beyond the scope of traditional media propagation. In the international electronic exchange culture, new media play a significant role in affecting the process and outcome of the interaction at various levels. It is thus to be expected that like any other cultural message, messages disseminated over any digital platform will have takers and opponents. The message and the cultural context of its communication may dictate the use of media and this aspect is most prevalent in the debates pertaining net neutrality. Thinking patterns, expression styles, and cultural context of the media user determine the use of media and messaging, and as these are subjective, their effects will be multidimensional.
The new media not only provide a space in which people of different cultures can freely express their opinions and establish relationships. More, they may also challenge the existence of human communication in intra-cultural and inter-cultural contexts because of their specific characteristics that are significantly dissimilar to that of in the traditional media. The impact of new media on aspects of cultural communication such as intercultural relationships, intercultural dialogue, and intercultural conflict is crucial to the discussions on net neutrality.
Political challenges
Net neutrality: the phrase has been everywhere, in campaigns, discussions, writings, canteen chats, court cases and what else not! The concepts of the netizen and netizenship are deeply dependent on the state of internet, its regulations and freedom. The question that is most widely circulated regarding this most volatile medium of our time, with its multiplicity of scopes and possibilities, is whether this entropic medium should be brought to order as has been the cinema or any other medium that is censored by the state. This was the fundamental thought behind the hue and cry for and against the idea of net neutrality. The turmoil, mostly on the new media forums settled down as the Supreme Court of India struck down the much contested internet censorship law.
This decision ended the ‘section 66A’ enactment that made posting information of ‘grossly offensive or menacing character’ punishable by up to three years in jail. There have been numerous cases where people have been arrested for posting derogatory material or insult regarding government, community or person. The apex court decided to scrap the law after a two-year campaign by free speech activists, led by a law student, Shreya Singhal, one among the first to challenge it in the Supreme Court. The court observed that section 66A, an amendment to India’s Information Technology Act was unconstitutional and restricted freedom of speech. Quoting Shreya, “Nobody should avoid putting up something because of the fear of going to prison. The court has upheld the rights of all citizens today”. Obviously the drafting committee of Indian constitution never had the internet under consideration while drafting clauses on freedom of expression. When things started falling out of frame, amendment section 66A was born.
Most nation states are paranoid and are fearful of their people being free – most importantly when they write and speak uncensored in public. Most nation states and systems of governance thrive on a multitude of fears they induce in people. These fears are numerous and vary across any regulated society: the fear of being imprisoned on a post of dissent on the internet is just one among many: be it in a democracy like the Republic of India or a totalitarian regime like the Peoples Republic of China—the only thing that varies is the reason for fear, the enforcement of Censorship and the penalty for breach of the code of conduct. The Indian government’s proposal to boost or reduce the visibility of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or availability of a web site was one way to bring in an indirect policing where the platform could be asked to censor the content and not let it go public. However this does not mean that the government would not prosecute and persecute writers, film makers or bloggers. In the case of publishing what it mostly does is to act through one of its agencies to get the material withdrawn before or after printing.
Things went several steps ahead when the Government of India considered empowering ISPs to regulate the visibility and traffic of a website at their discretion. This is an extremely tricky issue in which the critical question is, who is to be approached in case of a dispute in this regard? Is it the ISP? Given the way corporate organisations in India work, they are not answerable to public or even to the government (in practice). They are neither under the purview of RTI or any other similar regulations. And the only way to pin them would be a duel in the court of law, and a layman fighting corporate power in courts would be like wrestling with a pig in the mud.
Authoritarian states like that of North Korea never even went this way; the strategy was simple – people speak of curtailment of freedom only when there is a bit of it which permits protesting curtailment, so let’s not even have a bit of freedom, not on the internet or traditional media or word of mouth. However in India, one thing is for sure, the government is any day an easier target for civil societal challenge and contest than a private sector corporate organisation which can afford to fight cases in the courts of law for sport.
Facebook has reported that 5,832 pieces of content were restricted between July and December 2014 following requests from India, “primarily by law enforcement agencies and the India computer emergency response team including anti-religious content and hate speech that could cause unrest and disharmony”.
“The public’s right to know is directly affected by section 66A,” said Justice R F Nariman, reading out the judgment. The law, which received presidential assent in 2009, makes posting information of “grossly offensive or menacing character” punishable by up to three years in jail. Campaigners claimed that it was repeatedly misused by police. Sometimes in India, among the agencies of governance, the court of law and (very rarely) the government throw a little hope in cases like these. For the time being the debate is off the cards and we can continue using the bandwidth that we pay for the way we like it. However it’s not as simple as we think. What about the firewalls installed by organisations like universities and companies that restrict the content to the community that it serves? The debate is set to be there forever at multiple levels.
Sujith K G is a Doctoral Researcher,
Department of Film Studies, EFLU, Hyderabad.