India Proposes Chinese-Style Internet Censorship - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/technology/india-internet-censorship.html
NEW DELHI — India’s government has proposed giving itself vast new powers to suppress internet content, igniting a heated battle with global technology giants and prompting comparisons to censorship in China.
Under the proposed rules, Indian officials could demand that Facebook, Google, Twitter, TikTok and others remove posts or videos that they deem libelous, invasive of privacy, hateful or deceptive. Internet companies would also have to build automated screening tools to block Indians from seeing “unlawful information or content.” Another provision would weaken the privacy protections of messaging services like WhatsApp so that the authorities could trace messages back to their original senders.
Hum, pas forcément très différent de l’Article 13... quand les Le Pen (équivalent français de Narandra Modi) seront au pouvoir... Pas simple tout ça. Et puis si la Chine n’est plus la seule a devenir le repoussoir universel, où va-t-on ?
Working independently as well as through trade groups, Microsoft, Facebook and dozens of other tech companies are fighting back against the proposals. They criticized the rules as technically impractical and said they were a sharp departure from how the rest of the world regulates “data intermediaries,” a term for companies that host data provided by their customers and users.
In most countries, including under India’s existing laws, such intermediaries are given a “safe harbor.” That means they are exempted from responsibility for illegal or inappropriate content posted on their services, as long as they remove it once notified by a court or another designated authority.
In a filing with the ministry last week, Microsoft said that complying with India’s new standards would be “impossible from the process, legal and technology point of view.”
Officials have offered little public explanation for the proposals, beyond a desire to curb the kind of false rumors about child kidnappers that spread on WhatsApp a year ago and that incited angry mobs to kill two dozen innocent people. That wave of violence has since subsided.
The coming national election has added urgency to the proposals. India’s Election Commission, which administers national and state elections, is considering a ban on all social media content and ads aimed at influencing voters for the 48 hours before voting begins, according to an internal report obtained by the news media. To buttress its legal authority to order such a ban, the commission wrote to the I.T. ministry last week asking it to amend the new rules to specifically prohibit online content that violates election laws or commission orders.
C’est comme si ça me rappelait quelque chose...
Et puis, le Alibaba local est dans la boucle. Y’a que les européens qui n’ont pas champion local à opposer aux GAFAM.
One of the biggest cheerleaders for the new rules was Reliance Jio, a fast-growing mobile phone company controlled by Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest industrialist. Mr. Ambani, an ally of Mr. Modi, has made no secret of his plans to turn Reliance Jio into an all-purpose information service that offers streaming video and music, messaging, money transfer, online shopping, and home broadband services.
In a filing last week, Reliance Jio said the new rules were necessary to combat “miscreants” and urged the government to ignore free-speech protests. The company also said that encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp, “although perceivably beneficial to users, are detrimental to national interest and hence should not be allowed.”
Entre les architectures toxiques des plateformes et la toxicité des lois liberticides, on est malbarre.
