Technology policy making in India needs more nuance

The draft telecommunications bills needs to be refined. It’s one-size-fits-all approach will have unintended, and adverse, consequences. (Representative image)

The road to hell is paved with good intentions—it’s an adage that is all too familiar to technologists like me. Technologies that we create out of idealism inadvertently take directions that we never imagined, more so, when in our excitement, we neglect to pay attention to nuances and first principles when designing them.

On this note, the sweepingly broad definition of “telecommunication” in the draft India Telecom Bill 2022, which applies to all machine-to-machine communication, compels me to think that its formulation was similarly inadvertent. It cannot be intentionally so broad as to encumber pretty much all modern technologies in use with licensing and compliance norms, contradicting the spirit of initiatives like Digital India, Startup India, and Atmanirbhar Bharat. This is especially so given that India is one of the very few countries in the world with a strong, robust net neutrality policy that ensures an open and neutral internet for everyone. An unfettered internet, which is built on machine-to-machine communication, is what has enabled India to grow exponentially in technological innovation and proliferation in just a decade.

The broad definition in the draft could not only refer to the entirety of all internet technologies, but everything from electronic toys to health devices to ATMs to pretty much all consumer apps in existence. It has to be inadvertent because a technology policy cannot be intentionally aimed at encumbering a teacher setting up a video platform for their students in a school in a remote village; a young entrepreneur building remote sensors for farmlands; or a small vendor conducting commerce over a messaging app. Millions of people use internet technologies every day pushing our society forward one tiny innovation at a time. It has to be inadvertent because it cannot be intentionally aimed at a license raj like system hindering the ease of doing business and open innovation, affecting countless users, learners, innovators, and entrepreneurs.

If that is not the intent as I would like to believe, then these nuances have not been accurately captured in the policy language.

The language and its implications, from a purely technical perspective without even touching upon matters of fundamental and constitutional rights, leave a lot of ambiguity. The provisions in the bill pertaining to end-to-end encryption, again, stand in contrast to the push for increased cyber security and resilience via much needed initiatives like Cyber Swachhta. End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is the foundation on top of which all secure machine-to-machine communication is built. It is what enables the secure flow of information globally including personal, institutional, and governmental communication, payments, banking, commerce, and trade. Without the security that E2EE provides, there would be no online privacy, commerce, or a thriving financial ecosystem as we know it today. Any inadvertent attempt to weaken E2EE means to end it completely, undermining the safety of critical data transmissions over the internet. Instead, we ought to protect E2EE in the national interest, setting a strong global precedent like we did with net neutrality.

As a technologist, this lack of technical nuance in a slew of technology regulations and policies in  recent years have surprised me. Governments around the world have been inevitably ramping up their efforts in technology policymaking to catch up with the Cambrian explosion of technological industrialisation. However, often, it seems that policy makers do not have ample support from experts with a strong human-centric, objective understanding of technological nuances. Such lack of nuance in policy making can have significant inadvertent adverse impacts, which once codified in technology deployments, may be impossible to unwind.

“Technical debt” created by legacy systems is already a hard reality that plagues the technology world. Any techno-legal debt may be far more dire. An example is the well-intended “cookie law” under EU’s GDPR and ePrivacy Directive that mandates websites to seek consent from users before collecting their data. This policy has resulted in millions of websites showing cleverly designed popups that annoy and confuse users into consenting to give away their data, but now in a compliant manner, backfiring on its original intent. The damage is already done.

On the other hand, there are good examples of technology policy making to look up to, too. SEBI in capital markets, for instance, has been emerging as a gold standard for this with not only its approach of collaborating with technical expertise from civil society and industry, but incorporating human-centricity—protection of the rights and interests of retail investors and the sanctity of the capital market ecosystem—as the ultimate guiding principle in policy making. With SEBI, I have witnessed firsthand that the policies drafted in this manner contain significantly reduced probability of ambiguity and errors, saving valuable time, effort, and most importantly, diminishing the possibility of any inadvertent effects on the people and principles it aims to protect. And in cases where things do not go as planned, SEBI is willing to incorporate new learnings and rationale and amend directives.

It is imperative that policy makers foster technological capacity by collaborating with expertise from civil society, industry, and academia to imbibe a human-centric, nuanced technology approach in policy making so as to not only protect citizens’ rights, but strengthen the entire technological ecosystem and allow unimpeded innovation for public good. This is the same spirit on which the free and open source ecosystem has flourished, giving birth to the most advanced of technologies that have benefited each of us immensely, be it the Linux backbone of the internet or Android on mobile devices that connects billions of people. It is essential that this spirit and nuance that drives technological innovation also drives technology policy making.

Kailash Nadh is Chief Technology Officer at Zerodha. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.