That the means of production are best kept in public rather than in private hands was an ideology’s main pitch for economic testing in the 20th century. By the 1990s, its failure was evident in a cavernous Soviet economy, whose model of shared ownership – with all chips held by party rulers rather than private parties – saw itself not as the equalizer of the people, but as a was revealed. power promoters. America’s infotech revolutionaries had their own winning story, a decentralized digital tool that helped break free markets ahead of a shutdown command run by a central command. Either way, while the triumph of private enterprise as an economy dynamo was undeniable, the role of open markets in overall prosperity was also evident. So, when the Internet emerged as the next big enabler of production, its independence from state control was essentially taken for its success. With business freedom widely accepted as a good policy, online markets were expected to remain free from entry barriers. This relaxation was badly shaken by the recent release of a draft bill for India’s telecom sector by the Center. If enacted in its current form, online services of all kinds that ride ‘on the top’ of state-respected airwaves will face a license raj with all its rules, bars and puzzles.
Who owns what is not a trivial matter? In imperial times, a telegraph law was enacted for the British to claim “exclusive privileges” over emerging equipment of telecommunications. Today’s draft bill proposes to extend that empire to ‘telecommunications services’, which is broadly defined as the state having to decide which players are allowed in which online space and on what terms. If license barriers for telecom network operators do not raise any eyebrows, it is because a public resource called spectrum cannot be shared safely on a free-for-all basis. In the telecom sector, in fact, the bill is good for codifying the licensing process in such a way that it can reduce the scope of rules made on the fly, even as critics point to a gap of central discretion over violation of licensing norms. It is this dominance that has been sought beyond what we think of as ‘telecom’ that has no justification and needs a rollback. An easier option would be to exempt app-based services from the purview of this law, but that would not soften state control over web space as a default setting. Only complete reversal can ensure that the path of startups does not stand still. Think of a startup that wants to provide privacy to users. Even though this may take away the cost of the bill’s license rule proposals, it could entail verification of user IDs, denial of user anonymity and ease of dialing user data to state agencies. Unless an overriding privacy law is enacted that duly protects personal data in accordance with constitutional rights, such an enterprise may fail to win user trust by more than a point. The draft bill also does not match with other accepted freedoms. It offers Internet snap-off, which has already been done very easily, legal cover of a due process that to create fear of the Internet set to retreat behind a ‘Great Firewall of India’ Seems pretty heavy.
As another Cold War rages on, the state’s long shadow on the markets will probably prove to be as big an economic downturn as it was last time. History has yet to find an ‘end’ point in either model, but market freedom is a safe bet. Granted, some online places need better regulation. But we could do this without tightening the hold of the Indian state to such an extent that it becomes a hindrance to personal success.
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