Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar
| Photo Credit:
KAMAL NARANG
With nearly 120 crore Indians expected to use internet for a diverse set of services by 2025-26, the Centre is taking a slew of measures to catalyse the India Techade.
In his special address at “Future of Digital Media Conference” organised by the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) and exchange4media group, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that AI, Web3, rapid acceleration of digitisation and cloudification of digital economy are the key trends that will drive future growth of internet.
Driving digital economy
He said the government’s policy focus in terms of framework of laws to drive the growth for digital economy is two-pronged. One being the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill which codifies the right to data protection of individual citizens while creating a predictable and easy compliance framework for those who innovate on the internet, he said.
“The second important prong will be the current IT Act getting superseded by a much more contemporary Digital India Act in the coming months. This two pronged approach will guide Indian digital economy and ecosystem and continue to drive growth in the coming years,” he added.
The Minister pointed out that in the last decade significant challenges have emerged including domination of some big platforms and heightened awareness about user harm. “ We hope in the Digital India Act to address the issue of disproportionate control and the imbalance in the dynamics between content creation and content creators ‘monetization requirements …and the power that ad tech companies and ad tech platforms hold today,” he added.
Traditional news industry
Meanwhile, the Information & Broadcasting Ministry Secretary Apurva Chandra in his special written address at the conference highlighted the challenges being faced by the traditional news industry. He stated that for the growth it is important that the digital platforms of news publishers, who create original content, get a fair share of revenue from the big tech platforms, that act as an aggregator of content created by others.
DNPA serves as an umbrella organization for the digital wings of media businesses and has taken proactive action in recent years to restore equality and fairness for all news publishers.
