By Nikhil Pahwa and Mengyu Annie Luo Some say India is a country of paradoxes. It has half a billion people under the age of 25, yet it struggles to create jobs for them. It produces world-class IT talents, yet its Internet penetration still hovers around the mid-single digit. It has a thriving press, but many say a somewhat stifled Internet. With those paradoxes in mind, we arrived in Gurgaon to conduct our last workshop of the year for “Shaping Culture and Governance in Digital Media”, a year-long World Economic Forum study, after exploring the same topic in Mexico, Turkey, Brussels and New York. When it comes to issues concerning digital governance, three key stakeholders – governments, industry and civil society – have been at loggerheads. The controversy surrounding SOPA and ACTA in the West also finds its parallel in India. In the past year and a half, India has passed information technology rules that put the onus on industry and other intermediaries in India for policing the web, apart from issuing orders to block Twitter accounts and websites, as well as the police arresting some Twitter users. Websites now regularly receive notices from police cybercrime cells for removal of content. At the same time, the industry has orders from courts that have allowed them to block online file-sharing sites. Actions by the government and industry have led to much outrage: government and political party websites have been hacked by Anonymous India, and public interest litigation has been filed in the Kerala…
