One wonders what the authorities in India are thinking, suing Google, Facebook, Yahoo and everyone else on the Internet over content that it thinks is objectionable.

 

It will be interesting to see if Google’s appeal on the grounds that it would be humanly infeasible to provide the level of policing demanded by the Indian authorities succeeds.

 

But looking at history, the world’s largest democracy always has had a rather authoritarian streak when it comes to communications.

 

One could say it began after the partition of India and Pakistan. Mail from one country to the other was not sent over the border, but was sent for sorting via London so that the motherland could do the censorship and interception deemed necessary for peace and civility to endure, so they say.

 

I first went to India in 2007, to Bangalore at the invitation of IBM. Back then, there was much of a ruckus about VoIP. The technology was too secure and it was not possible for the police to intercept communications as they might have to. One of my hosts explained that after a long protracted series of negotiations, IBM was allowed to use VoIP for internal communications, but not for external calls within India or overseas. Hence most desks had two phones on them.

 

Fast forward to 2010 and Skype and Nokia had similar run-ins with the Indian authorities. The centralized, encrypted nature of push mail on BIS and Nokia Ovi meant it was impossible to intercept messages, and thus a backdoor or a local server under the jurisdiction of Indian courts was mandated.

 

It is ironic in a way that while many CIOs are talking about data sovereignty in terms of escaping the US Patriot Act, it is really the authorities in more repressive regimes that demand access to data and are themselves complaining of being unable to access data in US-hosted data centers.