JOIN USHow India's new Telecom Bill will affect WhatsApp
India's new draft Telecom Bill, which was released for public feedback three weeks back, has given rise to significant concerns regarding privacy and civil liberties.
Beyond the issue of civil liberties, however, the Bill is set to adversely affect one company in particular, WhatsApp, largely due to the company's massive user-base in India, its largest market.
Among other things, the Bill seeks to bring over-the-top (OTT) services, including messaging apps, under its ambit. While this provision will affect other messaging apps too, WhatsApp's gargantuan footprint in India, as well as people's reliance on it for day-to-day communication, leaves it in particularly troubled waters.
DH Deciphers | India's new draft telecom bill
Here's how the Bill is set to affect WhatsApp:
1. End of end-to-end encryption
The draft Bill, in its current morph, seeks to compromise end-to-end encryption by introducing third-party decryption capabilities that provides a backdoor to anyone (in this case, the government) with access to decryption keys.
The weakening of encryption has an obvious impact on civil liberties, but what makes it particularly troublesome for WhatsApp is because it can't easily find a way out, the way other VPN companies have. While VPN companies just pulled their servers from India once they were asked to maintain logs, WhatsApp cannot afford to let go of its biggest market. Neither can it afford to compromise on users' privacy, something that it has long touted as one of its biggest strengths.
2. A change in business models
The new draft bill has also floated the requirement of licences for internet-based calling and messaging services, meaning that users would be required to carry out a know your customer (KYC) mandate to send messages on WhatsApp.
WhatsApp already uses phone numbers, which have already gone through a KYC process, as the primary identifier of users. Therefore, the proposed change, which seeks to replace OTP verification with official ID verification, adds an unnecessary level of bureaucracy and would require WhatsApp to undertake KYC processes at a scale never seen before.
3. Monetisation
Beyond the aforementioned issues, the draft Telecom Bill comes at a time when WhatsApp has finally found a solution to its monetisation woes and is putting considerable effort into WhatsApp Business.
A change in status quo will hamper much of the work the company has put into monetisation.
What happens now?
The government is currently collecting feedback on the draft bill till October 20. According to a report by ET Prime, while tech companies are keeping a low public profile, there's likely to be a scramble to slow down the introduction of the bill in its current form in the corridors of power in New Delhi. Whether they succeed or not remains to be seen.