Eye in the sky

It’s a development that has been in the works for a while. But if the Indian government has its way, internet based, over-the-top or OTT communication platforms like WhatsApp, Zoom and Google Duo which offer its customers calling and messaging services, might now require licences to operate in India. As per the draft Indian Telecom Bill 2022, OTT has been included as part of telecommunication services. Telecom Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, who made this news public on Twitter, tweeted the link of the draft bill, while seeking the views of the public until October 20.

The new bill is aimed at consolidating three existing acts: the Indian Telegraph Act (1885), Wireless Telegraphy Act (1933), and Telegraph Wires (Unlawful Possession) Act (1950), in a manner fitting of the progress made in the telecom sector over the past few decades. This announcement is being made a month after India concluded its $19 bn 5G spectrum allocation exercise. And PM Modi is set to unveil 5G services later this week in India — the world’s second largest wireless market.

The idea behind bringing OTT telecom services under the licensing regime, is to subject them to the same rules that other telecom operators follow. Telecom operators have been crying foul for many years now, as they have been demanding a level-playing field with OTT apps in areas such as communication services. These include voice calls and messages chiefly.

Their bone of contention is that as operators, they had to incur high costs when it came to acquiring licences as well as spectrum. On the other hand, OTT players that were riding on their infrastructure were offering such services for free. This had sounded a death-knell of sorts for conventional phone calls and SMSs as most of the traffic had been diverted towards apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram, which affected the revenues of telecom service providers as well.

The 40-page draft bill is salient for many reasons, one of them being the vesting of powers with the government to intercept messages being relayed through the internet-powered communication services, in the event of a public emergency or on account of public safety. Only after the nitty-gritties of the draft bill are ironed out after consultation with the public and relevant stakeholders, will we have an inkling how broad this definition of public safety or public emergency will be, and what kind of an implications it holds for the concerns such as privacy of data, and privacy of the individual.

The draft bill also provides immunity to the government in matters relating to the interception of messages. The bill proposes to exempt ‘press messages intended to be published in India’ which pertain to correspondents accredited to the central or state government from interception. It might be too early to take these statements literally, but netizens believe the bill seems like yet another ploy by the government to bring under its ambit the communication that is shared between individuals or groups in India.

If you were to jog your memory, you might remember that one of the world’s biggest instant messaging platforms had proclaimed a few months ago about how its end-to-end encryption guarantees 100% privacy for any communications that passed through the platform. It remains to be seen how private and secured our communications will be in the days to come, especially when one considers that India’s own Personal Data Protection Bill is yet to see the light of the day.