Internet Democracy Project

While India has become a staunch supporter of multistakeholderism in Internet Governance, it has also stuck by its stance that cybersecurity should remain primarily the responsibility of governments. In the past quarter of 2015, there has been a flurry of bilateral negotiations between India and other countries on cybersecurity. What did these negotiations address, and would multistakeholder involvement really not have contributed additional value? We explore.    More

On 5^th October, a coalition of organizations and individuals, including the Internet Democracy Project, petitioned Facebook to bring attention to the harm that is being caused by its Authentic Identity policy. Along with pointing out a non-exhaustive list of groups affected by the policy, the petition made some concrete recommendations for changes. The petition also demanded that Facebook’s justification for the policy (that it discourages bad behavior) be backed by real data. In this post, we examine what the promised changes are, and whether they satisfactorily address the problems with the ​‘real name’ policy.    More

At the conclusion of the 10^th Internet Governance Forum on 13 November 2015, a group of over 25 organizations came together to issue a joint statement on the WSIS+10 Review process. You can join the list of signatories by signing the statement either on behalf of an organization or as an individual.   More

The draft outcome document for the WSIS+10 Review was recently made available, which will form the basis for textual negotiations during the informal consultations that are scheduled to take place in November-end preceeding the December High-Level Meeting of the UNGA on the WSIS+10 Review. We compared the draft outcome document with the joint civil society submission on the zero-draft to understand what all concerns of the global civil society groups have been addressed and what all concerns remain going forward.    More

The Internet Democracy Project joined 74 other human rights, digital rights, LGBTQ, and women’s rights advocates to come together as a broad global coalition and send an open letter to Facebook explaining exactly why their ​‘real-name’ policy is broken, and how Facebook can mitigate the damage it causes. In addition to our coalition letter to Facebook, there is also a petition to Facebook in support of our demands, for which you can sign up here. With your help, we can make sure Facebook is truly a safe and accessible place for those who truly make it a rich community: women and girls, human rights activists, LGBTQ people, domestic violence survivors, targets of harassment, and more.   More

In June 2015, India made waves in the Internet governance world by finally formally announcing that it would support multistakeholderism. What received less attention is that the government at the same time continued to bat for a pre-eminent role for States in some aspects, most notably those related to security. In fact, early indications are that its support for multistakeholderism have already started to pay it rich dividends in the global arena precisely where India’s cybersecurity interests and demands are concerned. Was India’s embrace of multistakeholderism a purely opportunistic move, or is something more substantive indeed going on?   More

The Internet Democracy Project has joined a coalition of anti-harassment initiatives and digital rights organisations to fight a proposal from ICANN that would force a wide range of website owners to reveal significant personal information. An initiative of the Online Abuse Prevention Initiative, the group has written to ICANN in protest. Like others in the coalition, the Internet Democracy Project believes that ICANN’s proposed changes to the WHOIS records put already vulnerable Internet users at further risk, and that they significantly reduce the empowering potential that Internet access has for these groups. The text of the letter that the coalition wrote to ICANN can be found below.   More

On 2 July 2015, an Informal Stakeholder Consultation on the WSIS+10 Review took place at the UN General Assembly in New York. Unfortunately, the Internet Democracy Project was not able to accept an invitation to speak at the event. However, Valeria Betancourt from the Association for Progressive Communications did speak, on the session on ​‘The way forward: Harnessing information and communications technologies for development’. Her statement further built on joint statements about the WSIS+10 Review made by APC, the International Federation for Library Associations and the Internet Democracy Project earlier, and was supported by all three organisations. The full text of Valeria’s statement can be found below.   More

The Internet Democracy Project was one of more than ninety organisations supporting an NGO oral statement at the UN Human Rights Council calling for a UN Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy. The statement was delivered to the UN HRC’s 28^th ordinary sesion by Article 19.   More

Together with a group of civil society organisations from India, the Internet Democracy Project has issued the following statement, a copy of which has been sent to the Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad, and to the Chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, Dr. Rahul Khullar.   More