📰 Stopping hate on TV as essential as police lathis, barricades to prevent riots: SC
‘People can take any tone on TV as long as they don’t incite violence, hatred, communal riots,’ says CJI Sharad Bobde
•The Supreme Court on Thursday said stopping hate on television was as essential for law and order as arming policemen with lathis and putting up barricades to prevent the spread of violence and riots.
•“Control over certain kind of news which agitate people to violence and riots is a law and order problem. Preventing it is as powerful as putting up barricades. Preventing instigation is as important as providing lathis to policemen,” Chief Justice of India Sharad A. Bobde, heading a three-judge Bench, addressed Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Centre.
•The CJI referred to how the government had shut down internet facility on January 26 amid violence during the farmers’ tractor rally.
•“You shut down the internet mobile facility because of the farmers’ visit to Delhi,” Chief Justice Bobde remarked.
•“It can hardly be called a ‘visit’,” Mr. Mehta reacted.
•“I was just using a non-controversial word,” Chief Justice Bobde replied.
•The CJI said the court, by government control, did not mean to curb free speech on TV.
•“People can take any tone on TV as long as they don’t incite violence, hatred, communal riots. We are interested only with people instigating and inciting violence and riots. These are situations which cause loss of lives and property. That is what we are worried about,” Chief Justice Bobde explained.
•Mr. Mehta said the creation of such situations though “unfortunate” were “deliberate”.
•The Chief Justice said the court had no problem with “fair and truthful reporting”.
•“Fair and truthful reporting normally is not a problem. The problem is when it [broadcast, programmes] is used to agitate others. There are broadcasts, programmes that definitely have the effect of instigating people, not just against one community, but any community... Why are you blind to them... You don’t do anything about it?” Chief Justice addressed Mr. Mehta.
•Mr. Mehta referred to how some channels end up with “rightfully or wrongfully guiding terrorists” during operations.
•Chief Justice Bobde was reminded of the 26/11 attack in Mumbai. “I was a judge of the Bombay High Court,” the CJI said.
•The hearing was based on a batch of petitions, including one filed by Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, which alleged that certain sections of the media communalised the Tablighi Jamat congregation by linking it to a spike in the spread of COVID-19 infection.
•The court has been examining the question of efficacy of certain laws, including the Cable Television Networks Act of 1995, to prevent such scenarios.
Diplomat cites support and opposition
•In response to a question on whether India, Germany and Japan should become permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), U.S. President Joe Biden’s pick for U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said that discussions on the subject were underway. She noted that there were arguments for and opinions against these countries becoming permanent members.
•“ There are some strong arguments for that but I also know that there are others who disagree within their regions that they should be the representative of their region. That too is an ongoing discussion,” she said during her Senate confirmation hearing.
•Ms. Thomas-Greenfield was presumably referring to the opposition that the Uniting for Consensus (UFC) group – Pakistan, South Korea, Italy and Argentina- has to the G4 (Brazil, Germany, Japan and Italy) becoming permanent members. In addition, China opposes permanent membership for India and Japan.
•The U.S. has for some years supported India’s permanent membership to the Council – with Barack Obama telling declaring his country’s support in his address to Parliament in 2010. In 2017, former U.S. President Donald Trump reaffirmed the U.S.’s support for the idea in a joint communique issued during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the White House.
•“ Recognizing India’s growing role on the world stage, the Obama-Biden Administration formally declared U.S. support for India’s membership in a reformed and expanded United Nations Security Council,” Mr. Biden’s campaign website had said. India has just embarked on a two-year non-permanent term at the UNSC.
•Ms. Thomas-Greenfield, a former ambassador, who is likely to be confirmed soon, was grilled by Senators on a speech she gave in 2019 at the Savannah State University, which was sponsored by the Confucius Institute, established by the Chinese government to promote Chinese culture and language abroad. She expressed regret at having given the talk and said she was surprised by the Institute’s predatory activities – which she discovered later – in high schools and elementary schools.
•"We know that China is working across the U.N. system to drive an authoritarian agenda that stands in opposition to the values of the institution," she had said.
📰 ‘Plug GST gaps, cut wasteful spending to lift fiscal support’: Gita Gopinath
Tight policy risks harm: IMF’s Gopinath
•India should propose a credible privatisation plan for public sector firms, plug gaps in GST collections and cut wasteful expenditure from the Budget in order to contain borrowing costs while enhancing fiscal support for the economy, International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief economist Gita Gopinath said on Thursday.
•Stressing that there is a risk of a sharp rise in inequality, with millions entering extreme poverty, Ms. Gopinath said India must continue to provide support to the weaker sections and increase outlays for the national employment guarantee scheme this year as well.
‘Expand MGNREGS’
•“The policies of in-kind and in-cash support that were deployed in 2020 and expired in 2020, should be deployed again this year. And also, the employment guarantee scheme should be expanded again this year like last year, so that you are able to prevent this rise in inequality,” she said, delivering a lecture at the National Council for Applied Economic Research.
•On the IMF’s forecast for India’s economy to grow by 11.5% in 2021-22, Ms. Gopinath said most of the expansion would be ‘mechanical’ as “you are coming off an 8% estimated collapse in the previous year”.
•“ If we do a simple adding up — over two years, we are looking at India being about 2% bigger, where it would have grown 12% normally. We still have a 9% to 10% gap that has to be filled.”
•Responding to concerns about high government debt, Ms. Gopinath said any tightening of fiscal policies in the middle of the pandemic while people are still being asked to stay home, would be damaging.
•“Every time you communicate your fiscal plans from now, you provide confidence that you have a medium-term fiscal framework that will bring the deficit under control once we are out of the pandemic and in a durable growth phase. That can be done by talking about specific plans,” the IMF chief economist said.
•“For instance, In India, more effectiveness in GST collections, there are still gaps there... more credible disinvestment plans, there’s always been the intention but it hasn’t happened as intended. So credibility on all these fronts will give confidence to the markets and keep borrowing costs low during the transition,” she said. “A perennial problem is that there is a lot of wasteful spending that gets done in Budgets, so this is a great time to think of how you can get rid of those,” Ms. Gopinath concluded.
📰 Global antitrust and the challenge of Big Tech
The issue is about checking their monopoly power while encouraging their positive externalities and consumer surplus
•There are ongoing investigations worldwide, including in the European Union and the United States, on the abuse of monopolistic power by the Big Tech firms, especially Facebook and Google. Many compare this with the earlier antitrust investigations in the U.S. on the telecom industry and the break-up of the AT&T dictated by the Department of Justice in its Modified Final Judgment in 1982.
Key differences now
•However, there are important differences this time around when compared with the earlier investigations. First, the information good that is being provided by the Internet firms of today, is largely non-rival. The consumption of information by one does not alter the value for the others. However, in telecom, due to limited network capacity, the consumption by one has an effect of decreasing value for the others and, hence, is rival in nature.
•Second, telecom services are within the jurisdictional boundaries of regulators and, hence, the regulators have the power to lay down rules of the orderly behaviour of the licensed telecom operators. On the other hand, the Internet firms operate globally, thanks to the ubiquitous Internet. Therefore, it is often difficult to lay down international rules of obligation and fulfilment by the different country regulators.
•Third, while it is debatable whether the goods and services provided by the Internet firms are excludable, telecom is certainly excludable due to the need for consumers to obtain connections from the respective telcos and pay the subscription charges for the same. It is this factor that was leveraged by the Internet firms to provide search, navigation, and social connectivity with no charge to the consumers, and, consequently, making these services non-excludable. In fact, the Internet, started as the Department of Defense project in the U.S., was created to be non-excludable. However, commercialisation of the Internet has created this new avatar of non-excludability that includes subtle trade-offs of personal information for availing services of the Internet firms.
Monetisation models
•It must be pointed out that such non-excludable and non-rival goods, also known as public goods, are provided by governments. On the other hand, in a peculiar way, the information goods as described above are being provided by private firms. This arrangement poses several problems.
•First, while governments can cover the expense of providing public goods (such as police protection, parks and street lights) through tax-payers’ money, private firms need to have monetisation models to cover the costs of providing their services. Hence, the Internet firms have resorted to personalised advertisements and third-party sharing of the personal information of their users for monetisation purposes.
•Second, the strong network effects present in these Internet platforms warrant increasing the subscriber base and garnering as much market share as possible. This results in near monopoly of some firms in their defined markets. In order to retain their pole position, these firms may resort to anti-competitive behaviour including acquiring rivals to vertically integrate; erecting entry barriers by refusing to interconnect and inter-operate with competing firms, and leveraging their capital base, thereby engaging in predatory pricing, and driving out competitors.
Indispensable applications
•However, network effects create a huge consumer surplus. Even without our knowledge, these Internet firms have now become an indispensable part of our lives. We cannot do without Google Maps for our day-to-day commute to various destinations; Google Searches are indispensable in our quest for information and news; Google Scholar is a necessary tool for academicians to explore relevant research artefacts. There are positive externalities as well. For example, Google Maps Application Program Interface (APIs) is being used by almost all logistic and transport companies; Facebook APIs are used for advertisement by almost all firms across the industry. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, recently announced that its Search is being expanded to provide accurate and timely information on vaccine distribution to enable quick recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
•Hence, the question before policymakers is how to regulate these Internet firms from abusing their monopoly power while at the same time encouraging the positive externalities and consumer surplus they create. This is a tough nut to crack as it is often very difficult to prove that the firms engage in the abuse of their monopoly power. Due to strong network effects, it is not possible to ban or curtail these services. Even if other options are available (such as Signal and Telegram for messaging), the network effects bind customers to their often used platform (WhatsApp), even if it is not their favourite.
Possible solutions
•A traditional view is to subsidise the good that creates positive externalities. Should the governments provide tax subsidy to these Internet firms in return for their orderly behaviour in the marketplace? Should the governments mandate sharing of Non-Personal Data (NPD) owned by these firms for societal and economic well-being as pointed out in the expert committee on NPD? It is legitimate as pointed out by the Australian government in its media legislation, that Google and Facebook must negotiate a fair payment with news organisations for using their content in Facebook’s newsfeed and Google’s Search. Controlled expansion of products and services without hurting the interests of consumers and smaller competing firms shall be the mantra used by these firms to minimise litigation, lawsuits and, eventually, wastage of tax-payers’ money.
•The other way to control any abusive behaviour of the Internet firms is to use the power of public voice. The million mails that were sent to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India in March 2015, effectively put an end to the Free Basics programme of Facebook in India, thereby prohibiting any violation of Net Neutrality principles. Similarly, the huge public outcry and subsequent government actions have delayed the recent changes to privacy policy relating to the sharing of personal information between WhatsApp and its parent firm, Facebook.
•While governments and regulators deal with these dilemmas, should not the Internet firms adhere to core ethical principles in conducting their businesses? Lessons from the Enron scandal, and collusions between large banks and financial institutions during the 2008 financial crisis, indicate that firms that aim at super monopoly profits and are greedy to become powerhouses of the world, often end up in the ditch.
