IGovernment of India as Wayne process of overhauling Its legal framework to regulate technology, the geopolitical environment is becoming complex. On the one hand, the battle over the leadership of high-end technology is becoming increasingly contentious and competitive. There is a growing competition for dominance between the US and China which will have implications for countries like India. On the other hand, countries such as India, parts of Africa and regional blocs such as the European Union are increasingly recognizing areas of mutual cooperation to learn and adopt scalable and useful technology in cross-border payments, public health systems and e-commerce.
A concurrent trend is the adoption of digital privacy norms that are getting stronger around a core set of privacy principles such as privacy-by-design, objective boundaries and user rights to their personal data. While there remains some room for debate on these issues, discussions on privacy principles have progressed rapidly to specific designs and implementation mechanisms of data protection laws. However, other issues relating to the transfer of personal data across nation-states, and national security’s access to personal data remain controversial.
Countries like India not only have to manage the challenges posed by increasing competition, they also have to ensure that the spillover effects of such competition do not hinder cooperation. Finally, both competition and cooperation can potentially increase or decrease domestic regulatory autonomy in areas such as personal data protection.
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competition
On October 7, the U.S. export control introduced Designed to thwart China’s efforts to acquire or manufacture advanced computer chips. Last month, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan guessed this shift By identifying three key technologies in the policy – ”computing-related technologies, biotech, and clean technology” – as “force multipliers”, and that leadership in each is a US national security imperative. a recent piece foreign policy have argued That the move to limit semiconductor exports to China “guarantees a continued march toward broad-based technological decoupling.”
High-end technologies, as highlights of the US move, will increasingly be the subject of strategic competition, and will affect India and other countries’ choices regarding them. Technology-importing countries have to strike a balance between continuing their dependence on those countries and developing a degree of self-reliance. From the perspective of the global South, it should be mindful of the spillover effects of this competition into areas of cooperation.
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help
There is a tendency to increase cooperation on digital technologies, co-existing with strategic competition. One such area has been health. The COVID-19 pandemic saw the increasing use of technologically enabled detection systems used for prevention of transmission and for vaccine delivery. India’s COWIN platform was a precursor to the latter. This experience has intensified discussions on adopting such systems for future epidemic prevention and for public health systems in general.
High levels of convergence, dissemination and adoption are possible in the areas of digital infrastructure supporting data-enabled services such as public health, payments and e-commerce. In India, this infrastructure was built on the back of a digital ID system (Aadhaar). This enabled subsequent changes in payment systems, vaccine delivery, etc.
Even before the pandemic, UN report on digital cooperation The idea was to universalize access to digital networks to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. One of the results of the report has been the idea of a “digital public goods”, or DPG. DPG There are open-source software, data, standards and models that by design incorporate privacy and help implement the United Nations SDGs. Digital Public Goods Alliance Registers DPGs which are then promoted by governments and multilateral organizations.
India has been keen to promote global adoption of its own public digital infrastructure. Aadhaar, IndiaStack and UPI are being showcased as examples of successful DPGs whose underlying infrastructure can be adopted by other jurisdictions as well. Also, the mechanisms through which such technologies are deployed, their use cases, and their costs and benefits in different contexts need to be carefully tested and understood. DPGs may have the character of public goods, but their adoption should still be based on market preferences and incentives rather than government authority.
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data regulation
Discussions on global data regulation increasingly focus on the free flow of data as well as localization and data access issues for law enforcement. Countries are divided on whether to ban the free flow of data. more than 60 countries Now there is some kind of restriction on the data flow. India has such restrictions in telecommunications and finance and is exploring additional localization requirements.
The country has the leverage to influence the international approach to the free flow of data as it is a big data market. This may limit this leverage by not clarifying the position when the opportunity exists.
However, the focus on the free flow of data assumes that most other parts of the Personal Data Regulation have been given – focusing on consumer consent, objective limitations, security and storage requirements, etc. Domestic discounts will be harder to create and carve—as these principles strengthen, especially as global cooperation and competition form, both believe that countries should make similar design choices in their domestic structures. For example, the DPG Registry requires confidentiality by design as a basic requirement before agreeing to register a software, product or design as a DPG. This can be a good thing, but it adopts a standard that is hard to deviate from. The absence of a well-crafted and clear domestic position on many contentious issues in global data regulation could potentially hurt India as more such norms and standards come into force.
As the politics of global technology policy become more complex, India will have to do both – manage any negative spillover effects of US-China rivalry in technology and take advantage of the growing potential offered by such competition. In the area of technology collaboration, India has created standards and products that it can take advantage of, provided questions about use cases and deployment mechanisms are answered. Lastly, India should take advantage of the emerging situation to take a well prepared position on the contentious issues surrounding data regulation.
Anirudh Burman is a Fellow and Associate Research Director at Carnegie India. Thoughts are personal.
The article is part of a series examining the geopolitics of technology, the subject of Carnegie India’s 7th Global Technology Summit (20 November to 1 December), co-hosted with the Ministry of External Affairs. Click Here to register. ThePrint is the digital partner.
(Edited by Anurag Choubey)