“European GDPR is considered a gold standard for privacy and data protection. But we would like to disagree. With more than 820 million internet users, we have the largest presence on global internet and deserve an opportunity to shape our own destiny. We will chart our own course and build a framework suitable for us,” Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar remarked at the India Global Forum held in Dubai on December 14, a press release from the IT ministry said. Why does this matter: Chandrasekhar's comments suggest that the upcoming regulations governing the internet in India (such as the Digital India Act) are unlikely to follow the EU, which has been at the forefront of regulating the digital space and has come out with policies like the GDPR (for privacy) and the Digital Markets Act (for competition) after years of extensive consultations. If India is charting its own path, its regulations will need to go through extensive consultations since there won't be international precedents from which lessons can be drawn easily (as is the case with the latest data protection bill). This could either delay the regulations considerably, or result in the enactment of half-baked policies. On the data protection bill: "Protecting the digital rights of our citizens is an obligation of the Government. But we do not see this as a binary at the expense of slowing down the ecosystem for innovation that exists in India and in partnerships with other countries," Rajeev Chandrasekhar said,…
