As 2019 comes to an end with the introduction of the long-awaited Personal Data Protection Bill, India Inc awaits yet another year of hectic technology policymaking that will seek to regulate everything from personal and non-personal data, technology intermediaries, ecommerce companies, over-the-top platforms, cloud services and digital taxation.
Technology companies will have their hands full in 2020 with the implementation of the Personal Data Protection Bill, which has gone to a joint parliamentary committee for a thorough review.
“The Personal Data Protection Bill and the setting up of the Data Protection Authority (DPA) will be the key developments to watch out for the next year. Codes of practice set by the DPA will be critical for businesses and a lot of time will be spent on that,” said Nikhil Narendran, a partner at Trilegal.
The Bill that is aimed at giving individuals more control over their data, has not proposed a timeline for the implementation of the rules. Government sources have stressed that since the Bill was based on the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, foreign technology companies may not need more than two years.
Heated debate is expected in the coming year on the most controversial provisions of the Bill, which are the right given to the central government to exempt itself from the obligations of the Bill, including seeking consent to collect and process personal data, powers bestowed upon it to seek non-personal data from companies for the purposes of policymaking, and the verification of social media users.
“Hopefully we should see extensive consultation on the PDP Bill next year. It remains to be seen what the government does on wide exemptions granted to them in the Bill,” said Nehaa Chaudhari, director, public policy, at Ikigai Law. “There are many moving parts. Most issues that grappled policymakers and companies will remain alive in 2020.”
Experts said other technology policies on the governance of non-personal data, ecommerce companies, cybersecurity and cloud that are work in progress may also get finalised in the coming year. Many of these are in various stages of drafting and consultation. Also, India could probably see a lot more debate around regulatory overlaps among the Ministry of Electronics and IT, Ministry of Information and Broadcast and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.
“Now we are moving into the next stage to see how it will all pan out. In 2020, we will see the start of the implementation of what has been in the works,” said Ashish Aggarwal, a senior director and the head of public policy at the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), which counts Indian IT companies as well as US technology firms such as Google and Facebook as members.
Another critical technology policy development expected in early 2020 is the finalisation of the proposed amendments to the Intermediaries Guidelines Rules, which originally provided a legal shield to technology platforms against the content shared on their platform.
“The most important likely developments are likely to come from recommendations of the joint parliamentary committee and the passage of the PDP Bill through Parliament. The second moving piece is the proposed amendment to the intermediary guidelines. They have the potential to be hard-hitting for the industry,” said Arun Prabhu, a partner at Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas.
The government now hopes to make social media companies more accountable for the content shared on their platforms and give bureaucrats the right to ask companies to pull “problematic” content down. The draft amendments, which have been termed violative of the right to speech by technology companies and activists, are expected to be finalised in January.
More debate is expected on digital taxation, and India may have to renegotiate global double-taxation treaties to ensure the industry will not be trapped between the rules of different nations.
“In the last two years, we have seen a lot of debates on taxation of digital services at a global level. This is because physical presence is no longer required for significant economic presence. Hope we come to some agreement in 2020,” Nasscom’s Aggarwal said.
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