The Great Debate (India)

Finns have legal right to broadband – should India follow suit?

In a first of its kind legislation by any country, Finland has made broadband internet access a legal right for all its citizens.

As per the new law that came into effect from July 1, Finnish telecom companies will have to provide its citizens broadband lines with a minimum speed of 1Mbps.

Media reports say up to 96 percent of Finland’s population is already online and only about 4,000 homes will need to be connected to comply with the new rule.

Finland may have set a precedent for other governments to follow. But does this mean India could also get such a legislation in the near future?

In India, the world’s second-biggest and the fastest-growing mobile market with more than 600 million users, the broadband penetration (connections per 100 people) in the country is extremely low at 0.74.

Only 71 million of India’s billion-plus population claimed to have used the internet in 2009, according to an I-Cube report.

India has only recently come up with a legislation promising the right to education to all its children.

from The Great Debate:

Advancing global Internet freedom

-- Leslie Harris is the president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, DC. The views expressed are her own. --

In the wake of troubling reports as recently as last year that Western companies were assisting China with Internet censorship and the unmasking of cyber-dissidents, governments around the world seemed poised to regulate the conduct of Internet companies. Lawmakers appear to have stepped back from those efforts, but the challenges of advancing global Internet freedom remain.

The Global Online Freedom Act, drafted in the U.S. Congress, would have made it a crime for Internet companies to turn over personal information to governments in cases where that information could be used to punish dissent. The bill produced a firestorm of controversy. Human rights groups campaigned for swift passage, while the tech industry scrambled to stop the bill, which they viewed as a global eviction order from many difficult but emerging markets. At the same time, several members of the European Parliament proposed a European version of the measure, taking the accompanying controversy global.

Now policymakers seem far less certain that global Internet freedom will be served by imposing harsh mandates on Internet companies that provide crucial services to customers in repressive regimes. The bill has not been reintroduced in the U.S. Congress this year, and earlier this month, a top European regulator, European Union Telecommunications Commissioner Viviane Reding, dismissed the notion of Europe passing its own Global Internet Freedom Act, saying that she was not convinced that "hard law" was the best way to address the issue.

For Internet executives who feared that hard-line regulatory mandates might force them out of many countries, Reding's comments came as welcome relief. But celebration is premature. Threats to Internet freedom are growing and lawmakers’ concerns about industry's role remain rightly high.  Those who choose to misconstrue Reding’s remarks as a free pass on this important issue do so at their peril.

Now is the time that Internet and technology companies must step up and take on the very challenges that the Global Internet Freedom Act was intended to address in order to ensure that their services and technologies do not become tools for surveillance and oppression.

Lest companies argue that the problem is too big and complex for any one company to make a difference, there is a responsible way forward. Late last year, a diverse coalition of leading information and communications companies, major human rights organizations, academics, investors and technology leaders launched the Global Network Initiative, which seeks to provide a framework to help information and telecommunications companies chart an ethical and accountable path forward through the growing demands from countries to take actions that infringe on the freedom of expression and privacy rights of their users.