Highway without road rules

Though people aren't feeling the tremors just yet, the future may remember 1997 as the year in which India actually became a card-holding me...

Though people aren8217;t feeling the tremors just yet, the future may remember 1997 as the year in which India actually became a card-holding member of the communications revolution. The monopoly of Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd VSNL over Internet access fell to the pressure of public opinion, and that was just the beginning. The government helped the process along, realising that it stands to gain more than it can possibly lose. Prices fell dramatically and promise to drop further to more realistic levels. The Department of Telecommunications DoT monopoly over telephone services remains the only barrier keeping India from becoming a major player in cyberspace.

Cyberspace, in its turn, has taken due note of the changes here. Policy changes in Indian telecommunications have been widely reported in the electronic publications of the Ziff-Davis media group, besides old stalwart Wired magazine. The liberalisation was discussed online by entrepreneurs in countries as widely separated as Australia and England.

India8217;s new standing is visible in Internet services, which were earlier quite unaware of its existence. In 1996, an Indian filling up a form online had to identify his country as Other8217;. India didn8217;t feature on the list, though Peru and Bulgaria did. For citizens of a once and future world power, it was an ego-bruising experience. In 1997, however, India was a very visible option. At the same time, we got our very own search engine, Khoj, and ICICI Bank is set to offer India8217;s first online banking service.

So the revolution is here. That8217;s the good news. The bad news is that it will hit the up ramp this year, and catch us flat-footed.

In the years since the Internet came to India, no one has developed the professional and ethical protocols that should guide online services. In the US, these were rather painfully developed through a faceoff between political interest groups and the user community. In India the core of that user community, the people who ran local bulletin boards as a communityservice long before the Internet came, appears to be burned out. These forerunners of the revolution have either fallen by the wayside or gone into purely commercial services 8212; and therefore cannot afford to rock the boat.

It is a sobering thought that this medium, which is set to go critical and mainstream comes without an adequate dispute redressal mechanism. Current Indian law on publishing is inadequate in dealing with a medium that has dismantled the divide between the creator and consumer of content. The Net8217;s core competency is interactivity. In effect, it makes every reader a potential writer. Besides, by savagely slashing production costs, it makes all writers equal. Quality does not remain an assurance of credibility. A rank pamphleteer with good communications skills can deliver content as impressive as that of a major media house.

Imagine the sort of libel case that is regularly brought against newspapers and arbitrated by the courts according to established precedent. Then imagine the samecase brought against a publication on the Net. To award damages accurately if the paper is found guilty, the court has to assess the credibility level of the content provider, how many people are likely to have seen his product, to what extent it can affect their choices and where they are physically located whether in India or Alaska. At some point, the judge is likely to throw up his hands in despair and appoint a committee to address a very basic question: quot;What exactly is the Internet?quot;

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Perhaps that8217;s carrying the argument a bit too far, but the example does convey an idea of the level of complexity electronic publishing will bring to media-related law.

Judicial solutions cannot be evolved overnight. It took America two years of debate to get anywhere near a functioning law on the Internet, and then they found that the most valuable inputs were coming from the user community, not established institutions. This year, India is faced with limited options. It can either reinvent the wheel 8212; something India is depressingly good at 8212; or accept hand-me-down law from the West. But it would be more useful to bring users, government institutions and lawmakers closer together, improvise on the findings of the West and forge a law appropriate to India.

That should be the agenda for the information business in 1998.y