Ready for e-volution

After years in limbo, India.com is finally ready to go into business, long years after its tremendous potential was first identified. The ...

After years in limbo, India.com is finally ready to go into business, long years after its tremendous potential was first identified. The IT Bill, which has been introduced in Parliament, is intended to remove the last and crucial stumbling block in the way of the information industry: the lack of laws governing electronic transactions.

The proposed amendments to the Penal Code, the Evidence Act and other laws are especially welcome, because they will, in effect, achieve what no government has even attempted update colonial law that was written in a period when no one, not even George Orwell, could have imagined the state of civilisation at the end of the twentieth century. By moving from paper to digital media, it will effectively end the tyranny of files and red tape by instituting modern means of data storage and retrieval. By validating digital signatures, it will make it possible to transfer authenticated documents at the click of a mouse, doing away with the systems and protocols that the governmenthas installed over the decades, and bringing much relief to the public. The right to information would have been completely nugatory in the absence of this Bill. Even with the best of intentions, a paper-based government cannot cater to the information needs of India8217;s population. The logistics are far too daunting.

However, the Bill could use a bit of debugging. The idea of putting a government controller in charge of all certification, in particular, is quite misguided. Given the astonishing eagerness shown by the government to improve service while it held the Internet monopoly, there is no reason to expect more efficiency this time round. The nation8217;s authentication service will be crucial to e-commerce. Any delay would slow it down and by definition, it cannot be slow if it is to work at all. Also, the controller8217;s right to decrypt coded information and intercept traffic on any network needs to be qualified. The Internet is an open medium and its usefulness to business is contingent upon the degree ofprivacy it supports.

If people get the impression that the State has an untrammelled right to snoop, the digital revolution that the government is seeking will never take off. The right to snoop certainly has to be accorded in the national interest, but its conditionalities should be clearly laid down and it should never be in the hands of a single authority.

But the proposal to route all Internet-related cases to a single legal authority must be welcomed. One of the oldest chestnuts about digital commerce concerns a lawyer who spent a long while making his opening plea in a New York court. At the end of his spiel, the judge had only one question for him. quot;What,quot; he asked, quot;is the Internet?quot; Serious e-commerce will lead to a slew of lawsuits and special courts seem to be the only way out.

However, the government should ensure that it does not have to reinvent the wheel. It should, rather, try to learn from the pioneers in cyberlaw, in the West. The futility of trying to impose rigid censorship on theNet has been proven repeatedly, for instance, but we seem to be headed for yet another tryst with that experiment. In a global medium, local laws rarely make sense.