India Internet Engineering Society (IIESoc) & Industry Network Technology Council (INTC) will be organizing the 6th iteration of Connections as a joint fully online event on Feb 5-8 2024.
Internet Technology and Governance with talks from Amrita Choudhury and Simone Basso
Intersection of Tech and Policy from Indian Perspective
We are living in a digital age where technology has become an integral part of our lives. While technology has transformed our lives by ushering in new opportunities, we are also witnessing new challenges, which regulators are grappling to address. To keep up with the times, even in India, we are witnessing several new regulations that have been brought in (such as the Digital Personal Data Protection Act. The Telecommunications Bill 2023) and discussions underway to overhaul or bring in new regulations (such as the Digital India Act, Digital Competition Bill, Broadcasting Services Bill 2023, Cybersecurity Strategy, etc.). Additionally, there are ongoing discourses to address the challenge of misinformation and fake news (deep fakes), governance of AI, discussions on network usage fees, encryption, etc.
The talk would highlight these regulatory changes and trends and why all stakeholders especially the technical community must participate in such discourses so that India can come up with nuanced, implementable robust, forward-looking regulations. The talk would also discuss how the technical community can engage meaningfully in these discourses.
How Internet censorship changed in Russia during the 1st year of military conflict in Ukraine
As of today, last year, Russia started its military operation in Ukraine. This was followed by increased levels of internet censorship, as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Russia started blocking access to several news media websites. In early March 2022, OONI published a report documenting these blocks, as well as the blocking of a site (200rf.com) that shares information about captured and killed Russian soldiers in Ukraine. OONI also reported that Russian ISPs started throttling access to Twitter on 26th February 2022, and switched to blocking it by 4th March 2022 – at which point, they also started blocking access to Facebook. Information controls are known to occur during conflicts, and the increased censorship events in Russia suggest an attempt to control the narrative surrounding the conflict in Ukraine. But has internet censorship changed in Russia over the last year? In this report, we attempt to answer this question through the analysis of OONI measurements collected from Russia between January 2022 to February 2023. We supplement our findings with information from relevant legal analysis and desk research provided by Roskomsvoboda.