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Global Issues, Legal Perspectives, and the Indian Experience with Big Tech Platforms, Democracy, and the Law

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Anshul Rana
Big Tech India

Any illusions that the link between technical innovation and advancement in democratic politics would be most beneficial have been dispelled by recent global political trends. In several ways, digital technology is reshaping world politics. To begin with, it is adding new elements to the authoritarian playbook, making it simpler for governments to control the information individuals consume, keep tabs on dissent, hunt down political opponents, and block communications. Democracies, on the other hand, struggle to find the appropriate balance between encouraging economic innovation and profiting from Big Tech, while also safeguarding user privacy, preventing the abuse of monitoring, and combating hate speech and disinformation. These conflicts have been worse after the COVID-19 controversy.

The epidemic has been used by governments as justification for enacting a new round of restrictions, including emergency orders that forbid public meetings, laws that suppress internet expression, and privacy-invading regulations. States have introduced new tools to stop the disease’s spread, including facial recognition software, contact tracing apps, and digital health passports. Although many of these technologies lack the most fundamental security precautions to preserve data privacy, others of them constitute real attempts to manage the infection. Data gathered from public health programs are being used by certain governments for unrelated law enforcement purposes. States may lift these limitations after the pandemic ultimately dies down, but it’s not certain if that’s the case.

The global internet commons is eroding as rising powers, especially China, gain strength and the United States’ influence declines. Internet governance was originally split into “democratic” and “authoritarian” realms by experts. On one side stood the United States and its allies, who promoted a paradigm based on an “open, interoperable, dependable and secure internet” that stressed personal autonomy, liberal principles, and little government meddling. A smaller group of nations, led by China, Russia, and Iran, stood on the opposing side and presented an alternative model based on “information security” that upheld the idea that a nation’s sovereign interests should determine which rules are in effect.

Although the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden insists that the globe is still split into techno democracies and techno autocracies, fragmentation would be a more realistic term. The globe is increasingly divided into national or regional internets that follow various standards and laws and combine democratic and authoritarian traits.

Big Tech, Democracy, and the Law – A Global Perspective

Democracy

Numerous nations, many of them democratic, have approved stringent digital rules only in 2021 alone. These policies would fit much better in authoritarian administrations. Nigeria, for instance, prohibited Twitter from functioning there in June. President Muhammadu Buhari’s message was taken down by Twitter because it, according to the business, breached its community rules. In retaliation, the government blocked Twitter on the grounds that it was “undermining Nigeria’s corporate existence.” In India, meantime, the government mandated in February that all online media sites and video content providers hire local agents to address any government complaint within a fifteen-day period. Additionally, the law gave state officials the power to ban or remove information that violated specified standards. 

A few months later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered a special forces raid on Twitter’s offices after the social media platform dubbed a tweet from his governing Bharatiya Janata Party as “manipulated media.” The governments of Turkey, Uganda, the Philippines, and Indonesia have all chosen specific regulatory strategies to develop distinctive local implementations of the Internet, whether by adopting onerous content bans or social media fees. Prior to the Duma elections, Russian authorities recently improved a new strategy by requesting that Apple and Google delete applications associated with opposition leaders from their app shops.

Concerns about the future of technology, politics, and governmental power are developing as a result of these tendencies. Can democracies find the right balance between defending their society from potentially divisive internet discourse and upholding obligations to safeguard free expression? Can democratic leaders come to an agreement on how to solve fundamental policy issues like creating clear regulations for the protection of individual privacy rights and personal data, formulating standards for the responsible application of cutting-edge tools like facial recognition, or finally limiting Big Tech’s bloated market and surveillance power? What impact will China have on data governance and technology, and will its efforts to rewrite cyber standards allow for the rise of digital authoritarian approaches? These questions all reflect significant areas of debate; therefore the solutions cannot be predicted in advance.

The Big Tech Regulation in India

Big Tech

Big Tech is being scrutinized across the world for anticompetitive, antisocial, and anti-consumer behavior. Two parliamentary committees in India have been questioning Big Tech businesses. Similar grilling processes have occurred in the United States and the European Union. China has likewise been active in controlling technology behemoths. The goal is to promote more economic democracy in digital marketplaces. The White House recently outlined six reform principles:

  • promoting competition in the technology sector;
  • implementing robust privacy protection;
  • strengthening privacy protection for children;
  • removing special legal protections for large tech platforms;
  • increasing transparency about platforms’ algorithms and content moderation decisions; and
  • putting an end to discriminatory algorithmic decision-making.

These six concepts can help India improve its regulatory design. 

But what has triggered such an investigation? Money is used by large corporations to control systems. Amazon’s legal counsel, for example, reportedly ‘influenced’ government authorities in India. They have financed lobbying groups in the United States to persuade Congress to weaken technology rules. Lately, numerous opaque and immoral practices of Big Tech have been brought to light by whistle-blowers. Google was recently exposed for paying billions of dollars to Apple, Samsung, and other telecom providers to keep their search engines as the default choice on their phones. The problem is that Big Tech is not just doing enough but is actively working against society’s broader interests. The dominance of a few players is adding to market concentration and distortions, mainly due to the non-adherence to platform neutrality. Big Tech businesses’ challenges to economic and political democracy make them more powerful than many sovereign states.

It is no secret that Big Tech platforms have achieved a stranglehold on information transmission, giving them great influence. The country is in a state of flux as a result of the election of Donald Trump. The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica controversy is well-known. Hate speech on social media platforms can potentially have an influence on election results. They tend to adopt regulations that violate fundamental rights after establishing a strong presence in the digital realm.

Privacy invasion has become the norm, and states lacking effective data protection regulations are frequently at a disadvantage. Consider WhatsApp’s take-it-or-leave-it terms of service and privacy policy, which are designed to let it share data with its parent company, Meta. While it was not implemented in the European Union (EU), which has the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it was implemented in India. The Competition Commission of India (CCI) intervened, and WhatsApp’s appeals to the Delhi High Court were also rejected.

Big Tech also presents economic issues, which are another aspect of the socio-political challenges it faces. Price setting in non-digital markets is governed by market forces. But in the digital world, the big platforms set the rules. Although customers contribute to the digital economy by giving data, they are not compensated for doing so. In actuality, consumers are the goods. Self-regulation is failing, necessitating a more aggressive strategy. Competition is being killed by ideas like winner-takes-all and network effects, as well as gatekeeping by Big Tech companies and a breach of platform neutrality.

Conclusion

The most alarming aspect of such platforms, though, is how efficient they have gotten at pleasing the authorities. The Internet Freedom Foundation claims that Twitter deleted the “manipulated media” tag from a BJP spokesperson’s tweets after receiving a simple request to suspend fact-checking from India’s IT ministry. Following the submission of two right-to-information requests and a subsequent appeal, the IFF discovered that the IT ministry had acknowledged that the two letters it had sent to Twitter had “no legal foundation.” The group then urged Twitter to release its communication with the IT ministry on this subject for public viewing in the interest of transparency. 

At the height of India’s terrible second wave of the epidemic, IT companies went above and beyond this overt surrender by supporting and promoting ties to a Hindu right-wing charitable group. Sewa International, an organization that promotes a Hindu nationalist philosophy in India through its local affiliate Seva, received donations from Twitter, Microsoft, and Google. Big Tech’s commitment to Indian democracy looks to be eroding day by day, and it appears that things will only get worse. 

In the event that a country’s laws are selectively applied to its leaders, and indeed, its people—what role do tech companies play in protecting democracy? As recommended by the Internet Freedom Foundation, social media services immediately need to be open and honest with all Indians about the reasons tweets and postings are taken down. But a more comprehensive approach is required to protect Indians’ rights. Antonio Guterres, the secretary-general of the UN, advocated for international regulations to control dominant social media corporations like Twitter and Facebook in January. That would be a place to start.

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