Paul Joseph

The Indian government has asked net telephony service providers which use the VoIP (Voice over internet Protocol) technology to set up their servers in India if they wish to operate within the country’s territory. Services that will be concerned with the development include Skype, Viber and other similar apps and programs. This is primarily because the government at the Centre wishes these companies to be registered in India and also have an individual office so that the government agencies could directly monitor and even regulate communication that is passed through these services. This will also allow security agencies to track down and monitor communication through such services minutely, and as of now there had been mechanism to do so. The decision was taken at a recently concluded meeting which comprised of officials from the Home Ministry, Law enforcement and security agencies. Any service provider, who provides communication services in India via any media through voice-over-internet protocol ( VoIP), should be mandated to be registered in India, having its office, server located in the country and, therefore, subject to Indian laws. Necessary provisions to this effect may be incorporated through amendment in Indian Telegraph Act, 1885 and Information Technology Act, 2000,” the minutes of the meeting reads. During the meeting, officials had stated that regulating or even tracing sensitive data or communication sent and received through VoIP services was impossible on a regional basis, and specific sites and services could not be blocked state-wise. They would have to be blocked across the country for the ban or monitoring tot take place. this was credited to an unregulated internet architecture in the country. The new development will also facilitate the segregation of IP address state-wise, and will will ‘facilitate home secretaries to allow lawful interception in areas under their jurisdiction under the Indian Telegraph Act and Information Technology Act’. It has now been concluded by the government that all the telecom service providers and ISPs will have to designate a nodal officer in each state with access to GGSN gateway. The nodal officer must have access to that part of the network that is responsible for the delivery of data packets from and to the mobile stations within a geographical service area. Viber recently clocked 200 million users and also revealed a Desktop App for its users. Skype has been slowly growing its user base and even got integrated into Outlook.com recently. As far as I can remember, the history of the Indian government with this regard is not very good at all. It had earlier tried to monitor communication on BlackBerry Messenger and even Nokia devices and has asked them to set up servers in the country for that to happen. It can be clearly seen that all the government wants to achieve through this move is to monitor and regulate the free flow of information on VoIPs services, thereby defeating the basic purpose of these products. Mobile messaging apps have outpaced SMS and there’s no telling how this move by the government could prove out to be a bad one for the end-user. Image Courtesy |  indianexpress Looking For A Social Media Agency?? – Contact WATConsult – India’s Leading Social Media Agency