Recipe for killing Internet in India!

NEW DELHI: There is a clear and present danger to internet in India. If the recommendations of the parliamentary standing committee were to go through, you might as well pull the shutters down on the net in the country, because the committee seeks to raise the liability of internet service providers for any third party content in a manner that it will become difficult to run the service and stay away from jail.

This isn't an exaggeration. Over 85% of internet deals with third party content. This includes search engines, mail services, messengers, blogs, communication and community sites. If they were to be held responsible for the sites searched, mails sent, blogs filed or scraps on community sites then service providers would be hauled up by the police for acts they are not even faintly responsible for.

Why, then, is the committee proposing this insanity? The answer is simple — the committee has failed to understand the internet. Frankly, there's no difference between the phone and the postal service and the net — it's just that one delivers voice or post and the other data. Both deal with third party content which is impossible to verify.

How would a mail service know, for instance, if two friends exchange copyright material? Or, how would a search engine track if someone accesses sites spreading hatred, or worse, promoting terror? It's all out there — the responsibility of who fetches what should be that of the individual, not the service provider. Therefore, what the standing committee is seeking to do is something like making a postal service responsible for every mischievous mail it delivers — perhaps by a drug dealer giving details of a consignment or a student sending photocopies of a book and hence infringing on copyright. Or, something like making a phone service, such as MTNL or BSNL, responsible for every bit of dirty talk or criminal conspiracy over its wires.

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