Tag: Internet users

Grievance Appellate Committee launched — What is it and how will it help internet users

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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The Grievance Appellate Committee (GAC), which will investigate users’ complaints about content and other issues, was established on Tuesday by Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar in an effort to give millions of social media users in India more influence.

In accordance with the recently modified IT Regulations, 2021, the IT Ministry announced last month that three Grievance Appellate Committees (GACs) must be established.

“The move is to make sure that the internet remains open and safe for users in the country. These are early days for the committee and it will keep evolving as the days progress,” the minister said.

In the audience were representatives from major online corporations like Meta, Snap, Google, and others.

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The recently established body will examine user appeals against decisions made by social media platforms as part of an effort to improve the nation’s digital laws and rein in Big Tech giants.

A Grievance Officer is already needed by the IT Rules for social media intermediaries like Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp so that users can report any rule violations.

The GACs will serve as an online “traffic signal”. There will be three people on each GAC.

The need for such panels arose due to large numbers of grievances being left unaddressed or unsatisfactorily addressed by Internet Intermediaries.

The GACs are expected to create a culture of responsiveness among all Internet Platforms and Intermediaries towards their consumers.

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Users will have the option to appeal against the decision of the grievance officer of the social media intermediaries and other online intermediaries before this new appellate body.

The Committee will endeavour to address the users’ appeal within a stipulated period of 30 days.

The GAC is a critical piece of overall policy and legal framework to ensure that the Internet in India is open, safe, trusted and accountable.

The GAC will be a virtual Digital platform that will operate only online and digitally — wherein the entire appeal process, from the filing of the appeal to the decision thereof, shall be conducted digitally.

(With IANS Inputs)

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KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

These 10 countries have the highest number of Internet users in 2022

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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There are 5.07 billion Internet users around the world at present, which is equivalent to 63.5 percent of the world’s total population.

With a penetration rate of 47 percent of the total population of the country, India is one of the leading countries with the highest number of Internet users. In January 2022, India had 658 million Internet users, according to the World Population Review.

China has the highest number of Internet users. India ranks second in the number of Internet users, although only 20 percent of its population uses the Internet. The penetration rate of countries like the UK and the US is more than 90 percent.

On International Internet Day, here’s a look at the top 10 countries with the highest Internet users in 2022.

China

China had 1.02 billion Internet users as compared to its population of 1.45 billion in January 2022.

India

While the World Population Review said India had 658 million users in January 2022, a report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI)-Kantar in July revealed that there were 692 million active Internet users in the country at present.

United States

There were 307.2 million internet users in the US in January 2022. The country has an Internet penetration rate of 92 percent of the total population.

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Indonesia

As compared to the total population of 277.7 million in January 2022, Indonesia had 204.7 million Internet users.

Brazil

Brazil had 165.3 million Internet users at the beginning of the year. The country has an Internet penetration rate of 77 percent of the total population.

Russia

There are 129.8 million internet users in Russia in January 2022, while the total population of the country is 145.9 million. This means that 16.04 million people in the country were not using the Internet at the start of 2022.

Japan

Japan has 118.3 million Internet users and a 94 percent penetration rate.

Nigeria

Among African countries, Nigeria has the highest number of Internet users at 109.2 million.

Mexico

Mexico’s total population stood at 130.9 million in January 2022, while the number of Internet users in the country was 96.87 million.

Germany

Germany had 78.02 million Internet users in January 2022. The country has an Internet penetration rate of 93 percent of the total population.

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Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

How many Internet users are there in India?

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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There are over 451 million active internet users in India every month, IAMAI data showed.

Out of these, only 33 percent are females.

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Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

India home to world’s second largest internet user base, thanks to Jio: Report

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Helmed by Reliance Jio, India is home to the world’s second largest internet user base, accounting for 12 percent of all internet users globally, the 2019 Mary Meeker report on Internet Trends said.

Jio is one of the most innovative internet companies based outside the US, it added.

“At 3.8 billion, the number of Internet users comprises more than half the world’s population,” it said, adding China has the largest base, accounting for 21 percent of all internet users globally. The US has 8 percent of global internet users.

Global internet user growth is solid but slowing, it said. The growth was 6 per cent in 2018, down from 7 percent in the previous year.

With 307 million mobile phone service subscribers, Reliance Jio is expanding offline access to e-commerce, the report said.

“We are creating a hybrid, online-to-offline commerce platform by integrating Reliance Retail’s physical marketplace with Jio’s digital infrastructure & services,” it quoted Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani as saying. “This platform will bring together 350 million customer footfalls at Reliance Retail stores, 307 million Jio connectivity customers & 30 million small merchants all over India who provide the last-mile physical market connectivity.”

Jio’s free voice call and cheap data plans have helped grow data usage by two-fold in one year.

The report put internet regulations in India at moderate.

There are diverse regulatory bodies in India, many with the power to regulate access.

On content regulation, it said India has “event-driven content filtering often without direct public input with some speech protection.”

Also, there is some censorship, generally to remove ‘insulting content’, it said.

Reliance announced its foray into the e-commerce segment with a hybrid online-offline model in 2018 and has since then acquired logistics and rural consumer-focused startups including logistics player Grab, software firm C-Square, vernacular language-as-a-service platform Reverie Langauge Technologies, government schemes/services aggregator EasyGovt and multiphysics simulation services SankhyaSutra Labs.

According to the report, annual data usage of Jio network was between 17-18 exabytes (17-18 billion GB) in 2018, which is almost two times growth from 9 exabytes data usage in FY 2017. Further, the number of Reliance offline retail stores are reported to be about 11,000.

The company plans to use its more than 5,100 Jio point stores located in 5,000 cities and towns as delivery and collection points for its e-commerce venture. With this, the company is expected to expand its direct reach to 95 per cent of India’s population.

Disclosure: RIL, the promoter of Reliance Jio, also controls Network18, the parent company of CNBCTV18.com.

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KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Reddit, Telegram among websites blocked in India

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Websites like Reddit and Telegram are being blocked in India by internet service providers, throwing into question the enforcement of net neutrality rules, advocacy groups said on Wednesday.

Restrictions on “torrent sites” that offer free movie and music downloads are routine in India to prevent copyright infringement. Pornography websites are also blocked by court orders seeking to protect children.

But in recent months, websites such as the discussion board Reddit, messaging service Telegram and comedy site College Humor have been blocked for intermittent periods, often for days and only in some regions, baffling internet users.

“It’s not making any sense, what’s happening,” said Apar Gupta, executive director at the non-profit Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF). “A lot of these blocks are also happening in such a way that no notices are displayed.”

Since January, there have been at least 250 reports of websites blocked on networks operated by Jio, a unit of Reliance Industries, Bharti Airtel and Hathway, the IFF said in a letter to the telecoms department.

Jio and Airtel are among India’s top telecom providers.

Some internet users have posted on social media screenshots of pages displaying messages saying a website was blocked to comply with government orders.

When Reuters tried to access CollegeHumor.com on Wednesday a message read: “Your requested URL has been blocked as per the directions received from Department of Telecommunications, Government of India.”

An official at the telecoms department, which last year approved rules on net neutrality – the concept that all websites and data on the Internet be treated equally – declined to comment when contacted by Reuters.

Complaints by Indian internet users have covered “most forms of net neutrality violations,” IFF’s Gupta said.

Nearly 60 percent of the user reports compiled by the foundation since January involved Jio networks, the IFF’s data showed.

A Jio representative did not respond to an emailed request for comment. Hathway did not reply to phone and email requests for comment.

Bharti Airtel said in a statement it “supports an open internet” and does not block content unless directed by authorities. It did not say if it was currently blocking any websites.

Reddit did not respond to an emailed request for comment outside regular U.S. business hours.

Telegram, which has been blocked previously in Russia and Iran, did not immediately respond to a phone message seeking comment.

If websites are blocked based on government or court orders, or internet firms have legal grounds to restrict web pages, they might not violate net neutrality rules, said Gurshabad Grover, a researcher at the non-profit Center for Internet and Society.

“But in this case we’re not entirely sure,” he said.

Other sites blocked this year include tax portal Taxscan and legal database Indian Kanoon.

After complaints from Jio’s internet users, Indian Kanoon founder Sushant Sharma said he had been told by Jio the portal was blocked for one day last week due to a government order.

“By evening, apparently, that order was taken back,” said Sharma, whose website has some 150,000 daily visitors.

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Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

WWWorries? Inventor of Web laments coming-of-age woes

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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The inventor of the World Wide Web knows his revolutionary innovation is coming of age and doesn’t always like what he sees: state-sponsored hacking, online harassment, hate speech and misinformation among the ills of its “digital adolescence.”

Tim Berners-Lee issued a cri-de-coeur letter and spoke to a few reporters Monday on the eve of the 30-year anniversary of his first paper with an outline of what would become the web — a first step toward transforming countless lives and the global economy.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, plans to host Berners-Lee and other web aficionados on Tuesday. “We’re celebrating, but we’re also very concerned,” Berners-Lee said.

Late last year, a key threshold was crossed — roughly half the world has gotten online. Today some 2 billion websites exist.

The anniversary offers “an opportunity to reflect on how far we have yet to go,” Berners-Lee said, calling the “fight” for the web “one of the most important causes of our time.”

He is convinced the online population will continue to grow but says accessibility issues continue to beset much of the world.

“Look at the 50 percent who are on the web, and it’s not so pretty for them,” he said. “They are all stepping back suddenly horrified after the Trump and Brexit elections realizing that this web thing that they thought was so cool has actually not necessarily been serving humanity very well.”

The anniversary is also a nod to the innovative, collaborative and open-source mindset at the Geneva-based CERN, where physicists smash particles together to unlock secrets of science and the universe.

As a young English software engineer, Berners-Lee came up with the idea for hypertext-transfer protocol — the “http” that adorns web addresses — and other building blocks for the web while working at CERN in March 1989. Some trace the actual start of the web to 1990 when he released the first web browser.

Berners-Lee reminisced about how he was really out to get disparate computer systems to talk to one another and resolve the “burning frustration” over a “lack of interoperability” of documentation from disparate computing systems used at CERN in the late 1980s.

Now, the hope of his World Wide Web Foundation is to enlist governments, companies, and citizens to take a greater role in shaping the web for good under principles laid out in its “Contract for the Web.”

Under the contract’s sweeping, broad ambition, governments are supposed to make sure everyone can connect to the internet, to keep it available and to respect privacy. Companies are to make the internet affordable, respect privacy and develop technology that will put people — and the “public good” — first. Citizens are to create and to cooperate and respect “civil discourse,” among other things.

To Berners-Lee, the web is a “mirror of humanity” where “you will see good and bad.”

“The Contract for the Web recognizes that whether humanity, in fact, is constructive or not actually depends on the way you write the code of the social network,” he said.

Some tough regulation may be necessary for some places, in others not, Berners-Lee said.

On one issue, he’s insistent: “Net neutrality — strong regulation,” Berners-Lee said, hammering a fist on the table. He was alluding to a principle that anyone with an internet connection should have equal access to video, music, email, photos, social networks, maps and other online material.

Berners-Lee said the web has created opportunity, made lives easier and given the marginalized a voice, but “it has also created an opportunity for scammers, given a voice to those who spread hatred, and made all kinds of crime easier to commit.”

Ultimately, his “Contract” proposal is not about “quick fixes,” but a process for shifting people’s relationship with the online world, he said.

“It’s our journey from digital adolescence to a more mature, responsible and inclusive future,” he wrote.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

India to have 627 million Internet users in 2019: Report

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Backed by increased Internet penetration in rural India, the number of Internet users in the country will reach 627 million by the end of this year, registering an 11 percent growth over 566 million users in 2018, according to a new report on Wednesday.

While Internet users grew by seven percent in urban India, reaching 315 million users in 2018, rural India registered a 35 percent growth in Internet users over the past year, said the “ICUBETM 2018” report from market research firm Kantar IMRB.

It is now estimated that there are 251 million Internet users in rural India, and this is expected to reach 290 million by the end of 2019.

“It is fascinating to note that the digital revolution is now sweeping small towns and villages perhaps driven by increased accessibility at affordable data costs,” Hemant Mehta, Managing Director, Media and Digital, Kantar IMRB.

Mobile data rates in India are the cheapest in the world.

Bihar registered the highest growth in Internet users across both urban and rural areas, registering a growth of 35 per cent over last year, the findings showed.

In a sign of narrowing gender gap in Internet access in India, the findings showed that women today comprise 42 per cent of total Internet users in the country and that they spend as much time on the Internet as men.

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Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow