"The requirement of local incorporation in the draft Intermediary Guidelines might eventually hurt Indian startups operating elsewhere, because local incorporation is something that other countries would love to replicate,” said Prasanto K Roy, an independent tech policy and media professional. “It is about retaliation versus inspiration. Lot of countries, especially in the Asia Pacific region, are looking at India and what we are doing," he said. Roy was speaking at MediaNama’s discussion on Intermediary Liability in Delhi on October 23, conducted in partnership with CCG-NLU Delhi, with support from Google, Facebook, and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. “Local incorporation does not factor in the diversity of the internet, the kind of services we use, which are delivered by very, very lean teams such as Wikipedia.” – Prasanto K Roy In the payments space, the government has mandated localisation because it needs a throat to choke, Roy said. “The government can not expect all the companies that it is dealing with to have an office in the country, it has to also keep in mind its bilateral trade agreements with other countries,” he added. [caption id="attachment_206925" align="aligncenter" width="1200"] Prasanto K Roy, independent tech policy and media professional[/caption] The Personal Data Protection Bill requires entities that process data of Indian citizens to have a data protection officer in India, the GDPR already does this in Europe, so that companies don’t need have to have a legal office in the country in order to be held liable, said Mozilla’s Udbhav Tiwari. The government can look at…
