It’s time for the federal government to regulate digital apps.


The new telecommunication Bill seeks to expand the definition of what constitutes a telecom service, bringing apps like WhatsApp, Zoom, and Netflix under its ambit. This would require these services to obtain a licence, and be subject to greater regulation. The Bill has been met with criticism, with many fearing it will stifle innovation and impede the growth of the digital economy.


The Government has released a draft of the new legal framework for dealing with the realities of the 21st century; however, it disappoints on the counts of user rights, privacy, and transparency. The Government needs to upgrade its thinking on users and privacy, and this draft needs to go back to the drawing board.
In other words we can say It is all well to state, as the Government has done, that the country requires a new legal framework, and not the existing one that is based on the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, to deal with the realities of the 21st century. But, it is not just technology that has evolved in over a century but also a democratic society’s understanding and expectations of user rights, privacy and transparency. Not long ago, the highest court in the country acknowledged a citizen’s right to privacy as a fundamental right. This draft, however, disappoints on the above counts. According to it, for instance, the Government has the powers to prevent a message from being transmitted “on the occurrence of any public emergency or in the interest of the public safety”. Another clause in the draft Bill requires an entity that has been granted a licence to “unequivocally identify the person to whom it provides services”. A similar clause under the IT rules brought in last year — requiring messaging apps to “enable the identification of the first originator of the information on its computer resource” — has been challenged in the Court. There are enough valid reasons to doubt whether this is even technically possible without breaking encryption and making all communications vulnerable. While this is not to underplay the mounting challenges for ensuring security, the repeated attempts by the Government to be able to tap into all kinds of communication, without making sure the common man has a legal armour in the form of a data protection law, is extremely problematic. The Government needs