The Intermediary Guidelines 2021 just make things more confused. It will cover social media intermediaries on the basis of registered users and not active users which can be a big deal for many companies that have a relatively small active Indian user base. It will apply to services that provide messaging as just an ancillary service - and most digital platforms do that. Voluntary verification is also a strange requirement since it doesn’t ensure traceability because its not mandatory. Anyone who fails to comply even with the most minor requirements of the regulations will lose their intermediary liability protections.

We need different protocols to deal with the pandemic in rural India. Instead of supplying oxygen we need to provide them with a supply of medicines and basic equipment they need. Since it is not feasible to get RTPCR tests done in a reasonable time frame we need to replace that with syndromic testing using oximeters and thermometers. And we need to leverage our decentralised healthcare networks.

The concept of a sovereign nation-state grew out of the Treaty of Westphalia that established the absolute authority of a sovereign power over its territory. Technology compresses distances and helped improve control over the far flung regions of nation-states. The internet compressed distances even more. This coupled with globalisation has challenged the concept of sovereignty. Nations have opposed this with data localisation laws and slowly big tech companies are agreeing to be bound by concepts of regional sovereignty.

Given the urgency to vaccinate the world there is an urgent need to ramp up production of vaccines. All that is coming in the way of that is the intellectual property rights over vaccine recipes. What is required is a temporary vaccine waiver of intellectual property rights in order to encourage worldwide manufacture.

We must combat vaccine hesitancy and get everyone vaccinated against covid-19. The only strategy to survive in India is to not get infected or to get fully vaccinated. The risk of blood clots is insignificant compared to the risk of getting the disease.

In order to effect the judicial sector reforms that has been outlined in the Digital Courts Vision document, we need to unbundle the workflows in the judicial system and reduce them down to their constituent parts. We should then focus on the outcomes we are looking to achieve and re-assemble them using re-usable building blocks from existing stack infrastructure. Since much of the digitisation of the judicial sector can be expressed in terms of data flows we can achieve this by borrowing from the design of DEPA.

NFTs are digital tokens that represent ownership in an underlying asset. At present they are a means by which to monetise digital art but eventually they will become the digital bridge that various commercial applications need for monetisation.

Issues of privacy and competition often overlap and we need a coordinated approach between regulators. That works in the US and EU where both the privacy and the competition regulators are active. In India, where we are yet to establish a privacy regulator, the competition commission will step in and regulate privacy aspects of data businesses from a competition perspective. There is a risk that privacy will be decided from a competition perspective. We need a data protection authority asap.

When measures being put in place to prevent third-party cookies from tracking individuals across the internet, companies that relied on these cookies to deliver personalised services had to find workarounds. Privacy activists are concerned that all this does is concentrate power in the hands of fewer gatekeepers. We can use this opportunity to move away from advertising as the business model for the internet and explore the subscription model.

The new map guidelines issued by the government has liberalised the map making in the country by doing away with the requirement for prior approvals and security clearances, relying instead on companies to self-certify their compliance. It has legalised the export of maps up to 1 meter resolution and have permitted Indian companies to use drones, street view and LiDAR technologies to create maps of higher resolution.