Internet Shutdowns
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:17
Thank you very much.
00:20
He didn't tell you I'm here for good karma. All the bad stuff I do as a lawyer, this is my way to redeem myself. As they say, there are no jokes about lawyers because they're all true stories. So internet shutdowns,
00:40
not that I always wanted to know about this topic, but life doesn't offer you many choices. We just heard about what would happen if there were no internet in this space and what that means. What happens to a lot of people in the world
01:00
is that they do face that reality and there are no choices left. This is a definition of what an internet shutdown means, but don't look at it, just ignore it. Why are we talking about this? Mostly because before we can teach ourselves
01:22
what is at stake, the technical and social facts on the ground now being created at top speed will have determined the nature of our political, social, and economic life for generations to come.
01:42
Last year, when I was at the other stage, we said the last kilometer is the last chance which this generation has because the power moves outward from the central part of the net. We said in 2016 that the net is turning
02:01
into a behaviorist, a machine for the benefit of a few data miners. And when the states arrive in full form, it will change the very nature of the internet if we don't take urgent action. It was a depressing talk, none of you actually liked it.
02:20
Now in 2017, here we are to actually talk about what happens when states actually arrive. What they do now when they arrive, the states, the governments, those traditionally in power, those who have now learned how to use the internet
02:40
for their own uses. What do they do now? What they do now is that they bottleneck the internet. And they do this in part because power of the internet is so great and because the flexibility, the mutability of the net is so great.
03:03
For many years, states relied on a scalpel approach, censoring a few websites here and there, sometimes in name of copyright infringement, sometimes for defamation. And when they couldn't find an excuse, then national security.
03:21
A phrase not defined anywhere in many jurisdictions but comes to rescue when you don't have any excuse. Everything is justified for national security. Not that there are not any valid concerns, and there are valid national security concerns, but not assertion of exigent circumstances all the time.
03:45
Now, as time passes, everyone learns new tricks and so did the states. It was too burdensome, five websites here, 12 websites there, let's shut this down, let's shut that down. But once they figured it out,
04:02
then why bother when you can just kill the entire net? Why do you bother actually with all this scalpel approach? So you see, blackouts, kill switches, social media clampdowns. This might sound a little strange to the people in this room
04:21
or the ones who live in perhaps western democracies, but it doesn't sound so strange to the ones who are living in Malaysia, Chad, Uganda, Syria, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Brazil, Iraq, Jordan, Korea, Vietnam,
04:40
Algeria, Libya, Bahrain, Turkey, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, and India. Now let's look at the slide. If you haven't already gotten bored and attention is turned to this. This is a definition which is used to tell you what a blackout actually means,
05:00
what an internet shutdown is. It's an intentional disruption of internet or electronic communications, rendering them inaccessible or effectively unusable for a specific population or within a location, often to exert control over the flow of information.
05:25
When I was trying to do this presentation, I wanted to show you a website, a live thing. But then it won't be fun, right? So I started to not use my internet connection and tried to work with things which I already had. So everything else here is static,
05:43
it's not fancy and it's screenshots because you cannot actually access the net. This year, the English speaking part of Cameroon saw a shutdown of 94 days. That region, those regions,
06:02
which are the Anglophone regions, are home to more than five million people, where the residents protected the discrimination against English speakers. Worldwide, there were 15 documented shutdowns in 2015. Not many, 15.
06:22
Then in 2016, there were 56 shutdowns. And now, in 2017, by May, we've already had 14 in India alone, where I spent half of my life. This number is going to look very different
06:41
at the end of the year. Internet shutdowns, which are a negative expression of digital sovereignty, are not just for undemocratic societies anymore. Some of the countries I named may have undemocratic regimes, but India is the largest democracy in the world.
07:05
The threat to the states, the government's control, is now omnipresent. If you leave anything open, people will use it, they will speak to the power. And so what do you do? You begin shutting everything down
07:23
and you begin dismembering your country by dismembering the net. Over the past few years, the number of instances in which internet access was blocked for entire regions by the Indian government has been steadily climbing.
07:43
Those are the numbers, as you see, 14 in 2015, 31 in 2016, and 14 in 2017. We're only in May, I would remind you again. These internet shutdowns are usually instituted as responses to conflict situations,
08:04
that is to prevent rumor-driven escalations of civil unrest, but they're also instituted at times for reasons which are far more trivial. For example, preventing cheating during examinations. This rise in frequency and broadening of reasons
08:26
behind shutdowns, even in the face of strong international condemnation of the practice, cause concern to those of us who believe in democratic values. They not only threaten the democratic working of nations,
08:43
but also point out to the gradual normalization of the mindset that permits such blanket restriction of internet access. Many countries across the world, the shutdowns have been used as a tool
09:01
to constrict the functioning of the democratic process by restricting internet access at strategic times, like during an election, as happened in Ghana, or during public mobilization, as was witnessed in Egypt. In India, where all your software gets produced,
09:22
all your calls get directed, digital India is now a reality. That is the big program. Our entire society is going to be digitized. Demonetization, where 86% of the currency was pulled out in November of 2016,
09:42
showed us state's power over essential facilities in the economy and society. The push towards a cashless India demonstrated the necessity of the mobile internet in the economy. If you were going to use digital systems of payments,
10:01
wallets, other such ways of using internet to make your everyday transactions, then you understood how important mobile internet is. In the countries we come from, the developing world in India, 94.8% of internet connections are through mobile internet,
10:23
not broadband, not dial-up internet, but mobile internet, and that's why we keep talking about the mobile connections. What happens then is family life and human relations in business processes, both within and between firms,
10:41
are now dependent on the availability of digital communications, which is why the increasing spread of government-imposed internet shutdowns throughout the country is a matter of concern. These restrictions can cancel people's civil liberties,
11:02
imperil livelihoods, and cost businesses their ability to function. This slide is by my organization called Software Freedom Law Center India. SFLC.IN maintains this dynamic internet shutdown tracker.
11:21
This is the map of India, and this tells you how many shutdowns have happened in each region, and it also tells you the details about the numbers. If you click on a particular state, it will actually tell you the details, what happened when. With the view to extract more information
11:41
from the data collected through this tracker, we also categorized the shutdowns on the basis of kind of services that are restricted, whether the order was for restricting mobile fixed line, or both the modes of connecting to internet. What was the duration? Was it less than 24 hours?
12:01
More than 72 hours? How long was the internet shutdown instituted for? What was the nature of the shutdown? Was it supposed to be reactive, or was it supposed to be proactive? Was it post an occurrence? What really happened? For example, if you would turn your attention
12:20
to the west of this map, on the 18th of April, as a precautionary measure, mobile internet services were suspended in the Udaipur and Fateh Nagar areas to curb the escalation of tensions over a social media post that sent Pakistan
12:41
and hailed about our neighbor. The service was reported to be restored the next day. Now, an internet shutdown is more than just a disconnection from WhatsApp, or Signal, or Facebook, or Twitter. It actually means limiting opportunities for education,
13:01
for artists who showcase their talent using various other websites, YouTube, SoundCloud, entrepreneurs who have leveraged the web that lets them amplify an idea without burning a hole in their pocket, or restricting avenues for learning that are provided by various platforms, edX, YouTube.
13:23
During an internet shutdown, students are unable to appear for various examinations, mitigation agencies, journalists, and families are unable to establish contact in crisis-hit zones, and dispersal of benefits
13:40
through various e-governance schemes is hindered. How do you have a digital economy or a digital India if there is no digital out there? If you take away the internet, how do you actually tell the society, now everything is going to be done by the internet? There isn't much data.
14:02
There are a few studies, economic studies. You know, because civil liberties and free speech and expression doesn't appeal as an argument these days. It's the economic losses which are far more appealing to everybody. When you lose money, then there's some attention to be paid about it. But here are some anecdotes,
14:21
some people who actually suffered these internet shutdowns talking about their experiences. As you see, this is a person from Srinagar who's a community manager and tells you that life comes to a standstill. Snapping was the biggest blow in terms of how they communicated. It's like getting strangulated.
14:42
No communication, you can't reach anyone. Here's another person. These are not very rich people. They'd use, but they're ingenuous. They can use the ingenuity of the net to actually run businesses. There's somebody who does their entire business on WhatsApp,
15:01
taking orders, providing in orders. What happens when you actually plug it up and there is no business? What happens to surgeons when they tell you that most hospitals are now going to be hosting their databases on servers online,
15:22
various life-saving drugs and surgical instruments are shipped across the world, ordering, making payments, and subsequent tracking of the shipment, or to just access patient's information? What do you do? Then they improvise a contingency plan
15:42
because there isn't much option out there. What happens to somebody who thinks that the FinTech revolution in the country is going to be an example and then is suddenly faced by this complete blackout or shutdown?
16:00
There are definitely justifications. Justifications are easy to find. Law is not always just, and justice is not only found in legal terms. Yeah, that is coming from a lawyer. The legal justifications offered for shutdowns, including the prevention of unlawful assembly,
16:24
and often used to excuse, are far too narrow to sustain any measure with this breadth of undesired social consequences. Exigent circumstances may make it reasonable in some constitutional orders,
16:41
this definitely do in my constitutional order, to prohibit certain forms of speech, but a routine assertion of urgency, every day an emergency, is not sufficient justification for limiting all communications across the economic, educational,
17:02
and private lives of tens of millions of citizens. Just to give you an idea, the state of Jammu and Kashmir has 13 million people. That's a small number compared to Indian standards, but it is 13 million people. Another justification is that it's done to prevent the circulation of rumors.
17:24
Haven't rumors been propagated by word of mouth since long before the printing of newspapers, let alone the adoption of internet? But that's an often used excuse. What happens when a shutdown really occurs?
17:42
There is some data on the economic loss. Mr. Darryl West in 2016 released a report. It only captures data from some part of 2015 up to June 30th of 2016. He examined 81 short-term shutdowns in 19 countries
18:02
and their impact on the gross domestic product of those nations. Based upon the analysis, he found that between July 1, 2015 and June 30th, 2016, the internet shutdowns cost at least 2.4 billion US dollars loss in GDP globally.
18:26
He also told us that 968 million, that's almost close to over 45% of those losses, were in India, 968 million. And he works at the Brookings Institution.
18:42
That's where the report is coming from. When we talk to a lot of people who actually suffer this, these, there are young entrepreneurs. We spoke to somebody who's a 26 year old CEO of an e-commerce platform that takes handicrafts from,
19:03
handicrafts from workmen and then puts it on e-commerce platforms. What happens to his business when the internet is shut down? Now, what he has become is part of this collective punishment system of shutting down the economy
19:20
for Indian national security purposes. What has happened is that the state has decided that an entire economy is to be punished for some excuse which it seems is justified. What do these shutdowns actually do?
19:44
They turn the net from a unifying structure in the society into a differentiating structure in the society, and it differentiates in two ways. It differentiates it territorially, as in one region does not have internet connections.
20:03
But it also differentiates societies by education levels. When the little sultan breaks Wikipedia, it's really like turning off the educational system, like purging the universities, which also the little sultan is doing. So what is really happening is that the government
20:22
operates an active ignorance policy and a collective punishment policy. Some people must remain ignorant because right to know and free flow of information is going to become the biggest threat to those who are in power.
20:41
So let's just stop the proliferation of information and impose a punishment to all of those who may or may not have any political ideas, like the CEO I was talking about, or a small entrepreneur in an economy for justifications which can only be justified
21:00
for a limited period of time and not as an ex-surgeon circumstance forever. This is what we talked about in 2016. This is the internet we do not want. This is the internet which we now have. Yesterday, Mozilla was holding an internet health clinic.
21:21
They gave us these emojis to pick up how was I feeling about the internet. I couldn't make up my mind because one day I felt like this, the other day I felt sad, the other day I felt very excited. But whether it is a depressing idea or it's an uplifting idea,
21:41
there are many contradictory things happening in the internet which we have right now. But a big part of it is not the net we want. But we definitely can fix it and operate it in a way and move it towards the net we actually want.
22:00
So I did tell you about all of this. This ton of stuff is happening. It's happening in some parts. It's happening in other parts. Is anyone doing anything about it? Yes, there is. There's international condemnation. In July of 2016, the United Nations Human Rights Council stated that it condemns unequivocally measures
22:21
to intentionally prevent or disrupt access or dissemination of information online in violation of international human rights law. The UN Human Rights Council specifically calls on all the states to refrain from and seize such measures.
22:44
30 governments of the Freedom Online Coalition declared their commitment to fight the internet shutdowns in an important statement in March of 2017. This Freedom Online Coalition includes member countries as diverse as France, Tunisia, Ghana,
23:01
the United States, and Australia. But they're still happening because the states have released power. Because the citizenry has power now. It can speak to multitudes and it doesn't think. And it wants to talk.
23:21
And it's going to find out ways to talk. Freedom of the mind depends on freedom of the media, which depends on free technology, which depends on free hardware, free software, and free bandwidth. The rights of technology users and how to protect them are the most important issues
23:44
for the next five years. Living in digital world can either be blessing or a curse depending on how we carry our democratic values into this new age. And what do we have to show for all of this?
24:01
Is it going to be the various shutdowns and blackouts while the next three billion try to come online? Or is it going to be a free and open information mechanism? That promise of the internet that it offers these interconnections in a social ecosystem
24:22
where people just by the mere use of their ingenuity can become either entrepreneurs or whoever they want to be. Thank you very much. And I'll take some questions if you have any.
24:42
I'm going to give you the mic, but I'm going to hold the mic so you have to be very, very short in the way you ask. Okay. So the Brookings Institution report that you referenced, when it actually included Facebook having to shut down free basics in India
25:01
as an internet shutdown when it was a kind of a net neutrality thing. So I'm a little bit uncertain about the tallies that they came up with there, but I wonder if you could just talk about that and talk about the issue of net neutrality clashing with people's ability to get online very, very cheaply or for free.
25:21
Great. Yes, those are the only few numbers which are available and right now the methodology can be doubted, but Turkey Blocks has a calculator in order to understand or calculate what may be the economic losses. Some trade associations in different parts of India
25:41
have come up with some kind of losses. Somebody scaled it to 15 million rupees. Some people said it was around two billion rupees in a few days, but there is definitely a requirement and a need for better methodology and to collect more data. What are the economic losses? What is the impact on human life? And this is not to account for the loss
26:02
in trust for investors, whatever are the collateral damages. So those are the numbers I could find and that's why I cite it. I totally agree with you that they're not, can't be relied as gospel or these are the numbers, but they give you a little indication about what's happening.
26:20
What's going to happen is that after the demonetization, there was a 239% increase in the use of digital payments in India within two months. And that number when it actually goes, and this is a country which does not rely on credit cards and debit cards, but has now leapfrogged into using these things.
26:43
When you move to a society, then the economic losses are going to be at a much larger scale than they were before this came out. And this only has data until June 2016. I thought my last year's talk was so boring nobody listened, but I did talk a lot about free basics that time.
27:02
Free basics is not only a network neutrality problem, but it really bothers me when we talk about internet issues and we try to divide them and segregate them into these silos. It's also a privacy problem. Today, Europe and US, your markets are exhausted. We are the people who are still there.
27:22
In India, only 320 million people right now have internet access. Our population is 1.25 billion people. Now it makes sense to give and move our packets for free in exchange of mining of the data. If companies like Facebook really want to offer us access online,
27:42
they can just say for two hours every day you can access anything you want on the web. Why do they say I can only get free internet through an app which will be gate kept by Facebook? There's only one reason. In exchange of my data, which is how the business model is sustained, that's what I'm getting.
28:01
So what we don't want is this charity, in the name of charity, this deal where we actually sell all our data. All we are asking was, or at least our regulator, and in India the people said, no we don't want that deal, thank you very much. We will just get our own deal in some other way. Because this also assumes that users of internet
28:24
are merely consumers. As if internet was a shopping mall on the highway where we only shopped. As if we never created anything. As if we were not supposed to have all ports all the time open for everybody, but it was only that I'm going to consume
28:40
what's being beamed at me by one person who's going to curate my newsfeed. And that's why it's not just a question of either network neutrality or about access, but these are intertwined issues. I hear what you're saying, that the Brookings report actually took that into account, and I may have different disagreements
29:02
or agreements about it, but all I'm saying is these losses are going to increase. So as a friend of mine would say, you're stuck between a Kafkaesque novel and a Catch-22. You do not know where to go. I am very, very sorry. I have to quit the Q&A phase because we don't have enough time anymore.
29:22
I'm very sorry. Last question. Don't you think that there is a contradiction between internet privacy and at the same time if we consider that as a public good? And the second thing, I didn't understand what do you mean by little Sultan. Maybe you can describe that.
29:42
Well, we've seen what's happening in Turkey, and we saw what President Erdogan did with Wikipedia, and what's happening in universities. All I'm saying is it's not always a complete blackout or shutdown. It could be parts of the internet. When Wikipedia is shut down, you're actually depriving a big part of the society
30:02
about how they get educated themselves. I think that's one website where I spend a lot of my time when I do not know anything, and I do not have to feel guilty about the fact that there is a place I can go to and learn. I think we're living in a time when facts itself, facts themselves have become a little dangerous.
30:22
And when crowdsourced factual websites like Wikipedia are shut down for some reason in a country, then it also tells you that the authorities are imposing a policy of ignorance on their population, and that's what I meant. And the first part about, sorry,
30:42
I did not understand the question where you said there's between privacy and public good. We can have a longer discussion whether you're talking about public good as an economic concept, or you're talking about is that a utility or privacy. But I think they're gonna give me indications
31:01
to wrap this up, but I will come back again. Thank you for your patience, and thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.