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The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Friday put out a session paper asking if it will be potential for messaging apps comparable to WhatsApp to be introduced beneath a licensing framework, and whether or not such apps could be banned “selectively” in locations the place an Internet shutdown would in any other case have been imposed.
TRAI had beneficial in September 2020 that there was no want to control “OTT communication services,” the time period for such apps that permit calling and texting over the Internet, usually with encryption that makes it tough for anybody to entry the content material of a given message or cellphone dialog.
That advice doesn’t maintain up, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), which is the licensor for telecom operators, advised TRAI final September, in line with a reference revealed by the telecom regulator.
Dindayal Tosniwal, a Deputy Director General on the DoT, cited the “need to holistically look into the various aspects of these [messaging] services including regulatory, economic, security, privacy and safety aspects”.
Telecom operators — individually and thru their associations — have referred to as for messaging apps to be regulated, and demanded that they pay for some of the prices networks incur in operating their infrastructure. “There should be the same norms for lawful interception and encryption for TSPs and OTTs,” Vodafone Idea advised TRAI in a submitting in 2019.
WhatsApp, the most important on-line communications app in India by far, complies globally with requests to share so-called “metadata”, comparable to a given person’s phonebook or the main points of whom they referred to as or messaged in a sure interval. They can not, nonetheless, share the contents of messages exchanged between customers, or recordings of cellphone calls, as these are end-to-end encrypted, and inaccessible to telcos and WhatsApp itself.
Telecom operators, on the opposite hand, are complying with an unlimited quantity of these interception orders, which permit companies to pay attention in on cellphone calls. In 2015, then IT and Communications Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad mentioned in Parliament that 5,000 such orders had been being handed every month. Last 12 months, the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) mentioned that these requests had been “growing exponentially”, and Bharti Airtel even requested the federal government to reimburse it for surveillance requests.
While this session is predicated on references acquired from the DoT months in the past, it assumes particular significance contemplating the continued Internet shutdown in Manipur, which has spent weeks with out cellular Internet or wired broadband after an Internet shutdown was ordered attributable to escalating communal tensions.
The Manipur High Court has appointed a 12 member panel to look into whether or not it will be potential to revive Internet entry whereas leaving social media web sites and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which permit customers to get round web site and app restrictions, blocked.
TRAI’s questions on selective shutdowns seem like alongside these strains, regardless of VPNs. Instead, the regulator has hinted on the chance of a “collaborative framework” between telcos and OTTs. The regulator requested what challenges can be encountered in such a collaboration, together with with respect to Net neutrality, the idea that every one site visitors on a community needs to be handled with out discrimination in pace or pricing.
These proposals could run into resistance from the know-how trade and civil society organisations, who’ve been aligned prior to now on points of privateness of on-line communications and of their opposition to Internet shutdowns.
When the Electronics and Information Technology Ministry notified the IT Rules, 2021, with a requirement that messaging apps present for “traceability” of the unique sender of a forwarded message, WhatsApp approached the Delhi High Court to strike down the requirement, arguing that compliance would require it to weaken its encryption. The case, which can even have wider repercussions for the way on-line communications are regulated, remains to be ongoing.
