On 6th December 2016, MediaNama had held a discussion in Delhi, on issues related to Internet Shutdowns, with support from Facebook and STAR India . The following are notes based on these discussions. Read Part 1 here. Shutting down the Internet can have wide-ranging impact, on individuals, businesses, and even the law enforcement authorities who actually enact them in the first place -- these aspects are covered in Part 1 of our discussion. But what exactly drives law enforcement and government authorities to block Internet access in the first place? Law enforcement challenges Mahesh Uppal, a telecom consultant, said that it's impossible to say that widespread Internet access can never cause rumour-mongering to proliferate and cause challenges to law enforcement. He said, "Could we as professionals in the Internet space seriously argue that there are no circumstances ever that this could be an issue? We can’t! So I think the counter-data that we are really talking about is --whether any reasonable person would actually suggest that this is something where threats to security are impossible -- using or abusing the Internet. I don't think anybody can argue that. If you look at what has happened with Snowden, you can look at it the other way around and say that well people genuinely believe that there are security implications of what is going on in the Internet." Subho Ray, president of industry association IAMAI, said "Now in practical terms if you're giving a SP of a district 300 armed guards with the power to…
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