Minister of State Rajeev Chandrasekhar. File
“We have squarely defined three boundary conditions around which we believe everyone should operate on the Indian internet,” Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology mentioned on March 4.
Among these circumstances was that “the internet should be open; it should certainly not be like the Chinese internet. It should be a safe and trusted space”. Mr. Chandrasekhar was talking at a Raisina Dialogue 2023 session on “Protecting Our Technology Futures”.
‘No country can dominate semiconductor’
On de-risking world provide chains from over-reliance on Chinese semiconductors, Mr. Chandrasekhar mentioned that no nation can do that end-to-end with out collaborating with ‘like minded nations’, a view he had expressed in a session on March 3 as effectively.
“There’s a reordering of the semiconductor world,” Mr. Chandrasekhar mentioned, in an obvious reference to the U.S.’s CHIPS Act, and India’s efforts to draw investments in manufacturing high-tech tools. “No country is going to be able to do this alone.” Countries shouldn’t “delude” themselves into pondering they’ll be the “king of the hill” in localising the complete provide chain, he warned.
IT Rules and disinformation
Mr. Chandrasekhar dismissed criticism across the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 on freedom of expression, arguing that the principles had been put in place to make sure accountability for platforms and a “safe and trusted” internet.
In January, the federal government proposed an modification that will bar platforms from permitting posts which were flagged as pretend information by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s fact-check unit, which has up to now repeated authorities denials of articles as a debunking of reporting.
On internet shutdowns
Responding to a query on internet shutdowns, Mr. Chandrasekhar mentioned that whereas India had a numerically excessive variety of them, the proportion of the impacted inhabitants was low, and that these shutdowns had been imposed in a lawful method.
India had 75 shutdowns in 2022, in accordance with a tracker by the Software Freedom Law Center. Starting with the abrogation of Section 377 of the Constitution revoking the particular standing of Jammu and Kashmir, the federal government imposed an 18 month internet shutdown within the Union Territory for what it mentioned had been safety causes.
