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2 Foreign Web firms face India
clampdown By Indrajit Basu
KOLKATA - Until now, Internet censorship
in India has been limited to blocking a few
websites and weblogs. But there's bad news. If the
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) - the
main regulatory authority - has its way, soon the
country will exercise a plethora of controls over
the Internet.
These will not only force
foreign (mostly based in the United States)
Internet companies to cease their money-spinning
Internet telephony services in India - unless of
course they register
themselves with the
Department of Telecommunications (DOT) - but could
also force them to move their servers into the
country, and even dilute a portion of their India
investments in favor of a local partner.
In a move to enable the government to get
a tighter grip over the Internet, the TRAI
recommended last week that the DOT ensure that all
global Internet companies that are operating VoIP
(voice over Internet protocol) telephony services
move their servers to India and obtain a license
from the authorities, while those that run Indian
websites (such as Google and Yahoo) should also
move hosting of their websites to within the
Indian domain.
Although the TRAI did not
specify the names of the foreign companies,
according to one of the authors of the
recommendations, this includes all global names
such as Yahoo, MSN, Skype, Dialpad, Amazon, Euro,
and Net2Phone.
"Most entities located
abroad offering unauthorized Internet-telephony
services in our country for making calls to and
from abroad are unlicensed companies," said the
TRAI, "which are neither registered nor licensed
to provide such services in India."
Consequently, according to the TRAI, the
Internet-telephony call facility they provide not
only results in revenue losses to the government
but such calls escape the eyes of law enforcement.
"Since these companies are neither
licensed nor registered in India, it is difficult
to regulate such companies under [the] existing
telecom licensing framework," said the TRAI, which
then makes "the legality of Internet-telephony
service by such companies questionable".
Officials at the DOT are tight-lipped over
the recommendations. "It is too early to comment,"
said an official with the director general's
office. "We are still studying" the TRAI
proposals.
But he added that TRAI has
raised some pertinent issues and the DOT is
concerned about "a few aspects" of Internet
services in the country. "This is evident from the
fact ISPs [Internet service providers] have
already been instructed to install advance
screening systems at their landing stations. A
committee too has been set up to recommend
appropriate Web-monitoring methods," he said.
Observing that 100% foreign direct
investment (FDI) in Internet companies is also
making monitoring difficult for the DOT - a few
foreign companies were not found to be resident at
the addresses filed at the time of obtaining their
licenses - the TRAI said FDI in Indian Internet
ventures should be reduced from the current 100%
to 74%. "This will ensure induction of local
partners in all fully owned foreign Internet
companies, [which] can then be easily monitored,"
said a TRAI source.
Indeed, even as India
continuously claims that the country favors a fair
and free Internet environment, control over this
medium, which the authorities prefer to term "just
regulation", is increasingly emerging as a
sensitive - and hot - issue with the government.
The Indian government has been trying to
expand its control over the Internet for several
years, but measures taken have been temporary. For
instance, since 2001, the Computer Emergency
Response Team (CERT-IN) has blocked many
pornographic and anti-establishment political
websites, and occasionally even some Western news
sites. But because of public pressure, and partly
because some did not prove effective enough, most
censorship measures have become diluted over time.
Over the past 12 months, however, efforts
have intensified. In December, for instance, the
DOT formed a committee to examine technical
measures for blocking websites that the department
considers undesirable. That committee has the
mandate to examine the technical aspect of website
blocking, and
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