Digital India Bill should unleash innovation and entrepreneurship, not kill it

livemint.com:

Innovations tend to be, by their very nature, disruptive. Governments tend to be, by their very nature, wary of disruption. Satisfying the primary objectives of these fundamentally different stakeholders in a single piece of legislation is, therefore, requires a nigh-on impossible balancing act.

If recent reports on the draft bill are anything to go by, the government appears not to have managed this fine balance with the proposed Digital India Bill, which has been in the works for more than a year and is likely to be released for consultation shortly before being moved to Parliament. According to reports, the government plans to arm itself with pre-emptive powers to ban the deployment of new and emerging technologies if, in its view, such technologies are likely to “cause harm to users", “discriminate against a group or groups of users", or “pose a threat to national security". The draft bill also proposes penalties for both developers and publishers of such technologies if they violate government restrictions.

The government is also said to be arming itself with powers to restrict the purpose for which new technologies are deployed, which it says must be in consonance with the purpose for which they were developed. Violations will once again attract penalties. While unexceptionable in principle, the problem with this is likely to be in its implementation.

While it can be nobody’s case to permit the free deployment of technology that harms national security, the problem is that this term has never been defined and arms the government with sweeping powers. Other provisions are equally problematic. Anything consumed in excess can be harmful to users – from simple games to social media, e-commerce and streaming