Passionate About India

Each discovery and innovation comes at a cost. The gift that Tim Berners-Lee gave the world in 1990 is no exception. While, the World Wide Web has revolutionised the very ways the global economy, various national governments and ordinary individuals function, the price tag it bears is significant. What are the focal points of dispute that I’m referring to here? Two questions. Are acts of espionage over the Internet healthy? Is surveillance over the web a necessary component of some greater good for a society, one that claims to be democratic? As per a 2013 report published in Web Index (the annual journal of the World Wide Web Consortium), the surge of online censorship and surveillance is a potential threat to the very “future of democracy”. That incidences related to spying and surveillance (on the web) are causing tides that the Internet was not originally expected to influence is no surprise. The Internet threw open an age of information, where flow of information was expected ...

While I am jotting down my thoughts for this week's editorial, someone thousands of kilometers away in another nation would be surfing the internet at a speed nothing less than 1 Gbit/second – the highest in the world – at a price that is affordable to 95 per cent of the population of their country. The evolving knowledge economy is perhaps the second most important economic milestone in the world after the industrial revolution. The platform of this knowledge economy is primarily based on internet and internet based applications. This economy is the most appropriate indicator of globalization and how people belonging to different nationalities, cultures and linguistics can be brought into a common domain with mutually beneficial experiences. Millions of people in India have built their careers based on internet related services and applications. Online transactions too have increased at the speed of light. The spread of knowledge, education, healthcare, banking and agriculture th...

Why internet vandals and slander supporting entities like Google must be criminally prosecuted and made to pay for promoting defamatory links and suggestions, and how the new IT act is a step in the right direction and gives Indians the right to get justice against such vandalism. Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.” So wrote Daniel Lyons some years back, in a classic Forbes cover story titled 'Attack of the Blogs'. As the Senior Editor of Forbes then, Dan was simply expressing his extreme frustration at the utter nastiness of the Internet community, which seemed to have a super-majority of calumnious commentators, who thrived on the faceless protection that the net provided in order to leave shamefully slanderous and defamatory comments left, right and center. Cut to the present, and the situation has sickeningly worsened. Not just globally,...