Regulation | SabrangIndia News Related to Human Rights Mon, 21 Sep 2020 08:10:52 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2.2 https://sabrangindia.in/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Favicon_0.png Regulation | SabrangIndia 32 32 NBA suggests making code of ethics binding on news channels to strengthen regulation https://sabrangindia.in/nba-suggests-making-code-ethics-binding-news-channels-strengthen-regulation/ Mon, 21 Sep 2020 08:10:52 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2020/09/21/nba-suggests-making-code-ethics-binding-news-channels-strengthen-regulation/ The self-regulatory body was pulled up by the Supreme Court for not having adequate regulation over electronic media

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The News Broadcasters Association (NBA) has filed an affidavit in response after it got pulled up by the Supreme Court during the Sudarshan News Hearing for not having adequate control over news channels.

During the hearing on September 18, the bench comprising Justices DY Chandrachud, Indu Malhotra and KM Joseph expressed their concerns about lack of effective self-regulation in electronic media.

“NBA says that they have a committee headed by Justice Sikri. They can impose a maximum fine of 1 lac fine and this shows how toothless you are. But NBA is only for members, so Sudarshan News not being a member is not governed by NBA… How can you have self-regulation if NBA is the only body you have,” questioned Justice Chandrachud.

Justice Chandrachud asked Advocate Nisha Bhambhani appearing for News Broadcasters Association (NBA), “One thing you can do is come back to us on a method to strengthen NBA, so that you have a higher regulatory content. You have a few members and your regulations cannot be implemented. You need to tell us how it can be strengthened.”

It is to this suggestion of the court that the secretary General of NBA, Annie Joseph has filed an affidavit on behalf of the Association in order to make NBA more effective. Through the affidavit, NBA said that its “Code of Ethics” should be given statutory status and should be made a part of the Programming Code.

“This court may grant recognition to NBSA (News Broadcasting Standard Association) the ‘independent self-regulatory mechanism’ so that complaints against all news broadcasters, whether members of NBA or not, may be entertained by the NBSA and the orders passed by the NBSA would be binding and enforceable on all news broadcasters,” Joseph said in her affidavit, reported The Print.

The affidavit further states that recognition to NBA will further strengthen the News broadcasting Standard Regulation and that amenability to the NBSA mechanism should be made a term of the “uplinking/downlinking permission for news channels, and the orders made, if any, against any news broadcaster may be considered by the (information and broadcasting) ministry at the time of grant and renewal of such permissions”.

The affidavit has been filed in a petition filed against Sudarshan News for telecasting communally inflammatory and inciteful content in which the Supreme Court has imposed stay on telecast of the rest of the episodes in the series titled “Naukarshahi me Muslamano ki Ghuspaith ke shadyantra ka bada khulasa” (The conspiracy behind Muslim infiltration in UPSC – The Big Reveal). This “UPSC Jihad” series has been running since September 11 and was slated to continue until September 20. However, with the Supreme Court order restraining broadcast, September 14 happens to be the last telecast of the show. The hearing is likely to continue at 2 P.M today.

Related:

Sudarshan News cites NDTV’s ‘Hindu terror’ show, pleads for vacation of stay
Come back to us on a method to strengthen NBA : SC in Sudarshan News case
Sudarshan News defends show calling it investigative journalism; Centre says regulate digital media first
SC restrains Sudarshan News from telecasting “UPSC Jihad” show, calls it ‘insidious’

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]]> Neither Free Not Basic, say over 100 IIT and IISC Professors https://sabrangindia.in/neither-free-not-basic-say-over-100-iit-and-iisc-professors/ Fri, 01 Jan 2016 07:46:03 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2016/01/01/neither-free-not-basic-say-over-100-iit-and-iisc-professors/   In a strong and cogent statement issued to challenge the aggressive campaign by Facebook in promoting its ‘Free Basics’ proposal, over 100 IIT and IISC professors have challenged the ‘lethal combination’ that threatens to control usage, dictate costs and access personal information of millions of Indians, that too by an entity based on foreign […]

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In a strong and cogent statement issued to challenge the aggressive campaign by Facebook in promoting its ‘Free Basics’ proposal, over 100 IIT and IISC professors have challenged the ‘lethal combination’ that threatens to control usage, dictate costs and access personal information of millions of Indians, that too by an entity based on foreign soil

 
The statement rejects Facebook’s misleading and flawed ‘Free Basics’ proposal
 
Allowing a private entity

  • to define for Indian Internet users what is ‘basic’,
  • to control what content costs how much, and
  • to have access to the personal content created and used by millions of Indians

is a lethal combination which will lead to total lack of freedom on how Indians can use their own public utility, the Internet.  Facebook’s ‘free basics’ proposal is such a lethal combination, having several deep flaws, beneath the veil of altruism wrapped around it in TV and other media advertisements, as detailed below.
 

Flaw 1:   Facebook defines what is ‘basic’.
The first obvious flaw in the proposal is that Facebook assumes control of defining what a ‘basic’ service is.  They have in fact set up an interface for services to ‘submit’ themselves to Facebook for approval to be a ‘basic’ service.  This means: what the ‘basic’ digital services Indians will access using their own air waves will be decided (if the proposal goes through) by a private corporation, and that too one based on foreign soil.  The sheer absurdity of this (on political, legal, and moral grounds), is obvious.

To draw an analogy, suppose a chocolate company wishes to provide ‘free basic food’ for all Indians, but retains control of what constitutes ‘basic’ food — this would clearly be absurd.  Further, if the same company defines its own brand of ‘toffee’ as a ‘basic’ food, it would be doubly absurd and its motives highly questionable.  While the Internet is not as essential as food, that the Internet is a public utility touching the lives of rich and poor alike cannot be denied.  
 

What Facebook is proposing to do with this public utility is no different from the hypothetical chocolate company.  In fact, it has defined itself to be the first ‘basic’ service, as evident from Reliance’s ads on Free Facebook.  Now, it will require quite a stretch of imagination to classify Facebook as ‘basic’. This is why Facebook’s own ad script writers have prompted Mr. Zuckerberg to instead make emotional appeals of education and healthcare for the poor Indian masses; these appeals are misleading, to say the least.
Flaw 2: Facebook will have access to all your apps’ contents.
The second major flaw in the model, is that Facebook would be able to decrypt the contents of the ‘basic’ apps on its servers.  This flaw is not visible to the lay person as it’s a technical detail, but it has deep and disturbing implications.  Since Facebook can access un-encrypted contents of users’ ‘basic’ services, either we get to consider health apps to be not basic, or risk revealing health records of all Indians to Facebook.  Either we get to consider our banking apps to be not ‘basic’, or risk exposing the financial information of all Indians to Facebook.   And so on.  This is mind boggling even under normal circumstances, and even more so considering the recent internal and international snooping activities by the NSA in the US.

Flaw 3: It’s not free.
The third flaw is that the term ‘free’ in ‘free basics’ is a marketing gimmick.  If you see an ad which says ‘buy a bottle of hair oil, get a comb free’, you know that the cost of the comb is added somewhere.  If something comes for free, its cost has to appear somewhere else.  Telecom operators will have to recover the cost of ‘free basic’ apps from the non-free services (otherwise, why not make everything free?).  So effectively, whatever Facebook does not consider ‘basic’ will cost more.

If Facebook gets to decide what costs how much, in effect Indians will be surrendering their digital freedom, and freedom in the digital economy, to Facebook.  So this is not an issue of elite Indians able to pay for the Internet versus poor Indians, as Facebook is trying to portray.  It is an issue of whether all Indians want to surrender their digital freedom to Facebook.

That the ‘Free Basics’ proposal is flawed as above is alarming but not surprising, for it violates one of the core architectural principles of Internet design: net neutrality.  Compromising net neutrality, an important design principle of the Internet, would invariably lead to deep consequences on people’s freedom to access and use information.  We therefore urge that the TRAI should support net neutrality in its strongest form, and thoroughly reject Facebook’s ‘free basics’ proposal.

 
Signed by:

  1. Krithi Ramamritham, Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay
  2. Bhaskaran Raman, Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay
  3. Siddhartha Chaudhuri, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay
  4. Ashwin Gumaste, Associate Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay
  5. Kameswari Chebrolu, Associate Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay
  6. Uday Khedker, Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay
  7. Madhu N. Belur, Professor, EE, IIT Bombay
  8. Mukul Chandorkar, Professor, EE, IIT Bombay
  9. Amitabha Bagchi, Associate Professor, CS&E, IIT Delhi
  10. Vinay Ribeiro, Associate Professor, CS&E, IIT Delhi
  11. Niloy Ganguly, Professor, CS&E, IIT Kharagpur
  12. Animesh Kumar, Assistant Professor, EE, IIT Bombay
  13. Animesh Mukherjee, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIT Kharagpur
  14. Subhashis Banerjee, Professor, CSE, IIT Delhi
  15. Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay
  16. Saswat Chakrabarti, Professor, GSSST, IIT Kharagpur
  17. H.Narayanan, Professor, EE, I.I.T Bombay
  18. Vinayak Naik, Associate Professor, CSE, IIIT-Delhi
  19. Aurobinda Routray, Professor, EE, IIT Kharagpur
  20. Naveen Garg, Professor, CSE, IIT Delhi
  21. Amarjeet Singh, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIIT-Delhi
  22. Purushottam Kulkarni, Associate Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay
  23. Supratik Chakraborty, Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay
  24. Kavi Arya, Associate Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay
  25. S. Akshay, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay
  26. Jyoti Sinha, Visiting Faculty, Robotics, IIIT Delhi
  27. Joydeep Chandra, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIT Patna
  28. Parag Chaudhuri, Associate Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay
  29. Rajiv Raman, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIIT-Delhi
  30. Mayank Vatsa, Associate Professor, CSE, IIIT-Delhi
  31. Anirban Mukherjee, Associate Professor, EE, IIT Kharagpur
  32. Pushpendra Singh, Associate Professor, CSE, IIIT-Delhi
  33. Partha Pratim Das, Professor, CSE, IIT Kharagpur
  34. Dheeraj Sanghi, Professor, CSE, IIIT Delhi
  35. Karabi Biswas, Associate Professor, EE, IIT Kharagpur
  36. Bikash Kumar Dey, Professor, EE, IIT Bombay
  37. Mohammad Hashmi, Assistant Professor, ECE, IIIT Delhi
  38. Venu Madhav Govindu, Assistant Professor, EE, IISc Bengaluru
  39. Murali Krishna Ramanathan, Assistant Professor, CSA, IISc Bangalore
  40. Sridhar Iyer, Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay
  41. Sujay Deb, Assistant Professor, ECE, IIIT Delhi
  42. Virendra Sule, Professor, EE, IIT Bombay
  43. Om Damani, Associate Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay
  44. V Rajbabu, Assistant Professor, EE, IIT Bombay
  45. Hema Murthy, Professor, CSE, IIT Madras
  46. Anupam Basu, Professor, CSE, IIT Kharagpur
  47. Sriram Srinivasan, Adjunct Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay
  48. K.V.S. Hari, Professor, ECE, IISc, Bengaluru
  49. Shalabh Gupta, Associate Professor, EE, IIT Bombay
  50. Suman Kumar Maji, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIT Patna
  51. Udayan Ganguly, Associate Professor, EE, IIT Bombay
  52. Rahul Banerjee, Professor, CSE, BITS Pilani
  53. R K. Shevgaonkar, Professor, EE, IIT Bombay
  54. S.C. Gupta, Visiting Faculty, CSE, IIT Delhi
  55. Ashutosh Gupta, Reader, STCS, TIFR
  56. V Krishna Nandivada, Associate Professor, CSE, IIT Madras
  57. Ashutosh Trivedi, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay
  58. Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Associate Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay
  59. Amit Patra, Professor, EE, IIT Kharagpur
  60. Jayalal Sarma, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIT Madras
  61. Rajesh Sundaresan, Associate Professor, ECE, IISc Bangalore
  62. Deepak Khemani, Professor, CSE, IIT Madras
  63. Vinod Prabhakaran, Reader, TCS, TIFR
  64. Saroj Kaushik, Professor, CSE, IIT Delhi
  65. Kumar Appaiah, Assistant Professor, EE, IIT Bombay
  66. Bijendra N Jain, Professor, CSE, IIT Delhi
  67. Aaditeshwar Seth, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIT Delhi
  68. Nupur Dasgupta, Jadavpur University
  69. C.Chandra Sekhar, Professor, CSE, IIT Madras
  70. Pralay Mitra, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIT Kharagpur
  71. Krishna Jagannathan, Assistant Professor, EE, IIT Madras
  72. Venkatesh Tamarapalli, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIT Guwahati
  73. Ajit Rajwade, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay
  74. D. Manjunath, Professor, EE, IIT Bombay
  75. Subhasis Chaudhuri, EE, IIT Bombay
  76. S. Arun-Kumar, Professor, CS&E, IIT Delhi
  77. Alka Hingorani, Associate Professor, IIT Bombay
  78. Swaroop Ganguly, Associate Professor, EE, IIT Bombay
  79. Shishir K. Jha, Associate Professor, SJMSOM, IIT Bombay
  80. Sabyasachi SenGupta, Professor, EE, IIT Kharagpur
  81. Mythili Vutukuru, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay
  82. Harish Karnick, Professor, CSE, IIT Kanpur.
  83. Piyush Rai, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIT Kanpur
  84. Jayakrishnan Nair, Assistant Professor, EE, IIT Bombay
  85. T.V.Prabhakar, Professor, CSE, IIT Kanpur
  86. Nitin Saxena, Associate Professor, CSE, IIT Kanpur.
  87. Sundar Viswanathan, Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay
  88. Sushobhan Avasthi, Assistant Professor, CeNSE, IISc Bangalore
  89. Sumit Darak, Assistant Professor, IIIT Delhi
  90. Ajai Jain, Professor, CSE, IIT Kanpur
  91. Indranil Saha, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIT Kanpur
  92. Dipankar Sinha, ISI, Kolkata
  93. Purushottam Kar, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIT Kanpur
  94. Sandeep Kumar Shukla, Professor, CSE, IIT Kanpur
  95. Surender Baswana, Associate Professor, CSE, IIT Kanpur
  96. Soumyadip Bandyopadhayay, Visiting Faculty, CSE, BITS-Pilani Goa
  97. Rogers Mathew, Asst. Professor, CSE, IIT Kharagpur.
  98. Samit Bhattacharya, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIT Guwahati
  99. Richa Singh, Associate Professor, CSE, IIIT Delhi
  100. Raghavendra Rao B. V., Assistant Professor, IIT Madras.
  101. Chandrashekar C.M., Assistant Professor, Theoretical Physics, IMSc Chennai.
  102. Aditya Gopalan, Assistant Professor, ECE, IISc
  103. Ritwik Kumar Layek, Assistant Professor, ECE, IIT Kharagpur
  104. Madhavan Mukund, Professor, Chennai Mathematical Institute
  105. Piyush P Kurur, Associate Professor, CSE, IIT Kanpur
  106. Debajyoti Bera, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIIT-Delhi
  107. Sudebkumar P Pal, Professor, CSE, IIT Kharagpur
  108. Rajat Mittal, CSE, IIT Kanpur
  109. Sandip Chakraborty, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIT Kharagpur
  110. R. K. Ghosh, CSE, IIT Kanpur
  111. Anuradha Sharma, Assistant Professor, Mathematics, IIT Delhi
  112. Kannan Moudgalya, Professor, IIT Bombay
  113. Saurabh Lodha, Associate Professor, EE, IIT Bombay
  114. Ashutosh Mahajan, Assistant Professor, IEOR, IIT Bombay
  115. S. C. Patel, Professor, IIT Bombay
  116. P Sunthar, Associate Professor, Chemical Engg, IIT Bombay
  117. Ateeque Malani, Assistant Professor, Chemical Engg, IIT Bombay
  118. J. K. Verma, Professor, IIT Bombay
  119. Rajendra M Sonar, Associate Professor, IIT Bombay
  120. Ramkrishna Pasumarthy, Assistant Professor, EE, IIT Madras
  121. Dipan K. Ghosh, Professor (Retd.) IIT Bombay
  122. Vinish Kathuria, Professor, SJMSOM, IIT Bombay
  123. Anirban Sain, Professor, Physics, IIT Bombay
  124. S P Sukhatme, Professor Emeritus, Mech Engg, IIT Bombay
  125. Ravi N Banavar, Professor, Systems and Control Engg, IIT Bombay
  126. Shyam Karagadde, Assistant Professor, Mech Engg, IIT Bombay
  127. Sourangshu Bhattacharya, Assistant Professor, CSE, IIT Kharagpur
  128. Bhaskaran Muralidharan, Associate Professor, EE, IIT Bombay
  129. Ravi Raghunathan, Associate Professor, Mathematics, IIT Bombay
  130. Krishna Mohan Buddhiraju, Professor, CSRE, IIT Bombay
  131. T T Niranjan, Assistant Professor, SJMSOM, IIT Bombay
  132. Anurag Mittal, Associate Professor, CSE, IIT Madras
  133. A.K. Suresh, Professor, Chemical Engineering, IIT Bombay
  134. Rowena Robinson, Professor, Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay
  135. Urjit Yajnik, Professor, Physics Department, IIT Bombay
  136. Bharat Seth, ex-Professor, ME, IIT Bombay
  137. Himanshu Bahirat, Assistant Professor, EE, IIT Bombay

Source: Reddit
*Parenthesis added
 

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