You're reading it here first: The Indian government is holding a limited non-public consultation on a Chinese-led effort to revamp the internet's architecture. New Internet Protocol, or IP, is a proposal mainly pushed by Chinese tech giant Huawei that seeks to fundamentally alter the standards on which the internet has been based for decades. MediaNama received a copy of the consultation, put out as a white paper by the Department of Telecommunications, from multiple sources. The DoT gave Indian industry associations a mere five days to respond. Read: What Huawei and China’s New IP proposal is all about Inputs from this private consultation will be used to formulate India's response to Huawei's New IP standard at the international level, the DoT said. Internet Protocol is a term used to describe standards which devices on the internet rely on to communicate with each other. Huawei's proposal at the International Telecommunication Union seeks to make major changes to internet standards, raising concerns (from nonprofits like ISOC and Mozilla) around the centralisation of networks and government control of the internet, as well as around whether such radical changes are needed in the first place. The proposal's future will be clearer at the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly to be held in Hyderabad next February. What the DoT asks in its white paper On the Huawei proposal, the DoT has raised the following issues for consultation: what the shortcomings of IPv4 and IPv6 are; how these existing standards support the goals that New IP sets…
