Category: Communications

Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp on Thursday got the backing of an adviser to Europe’s top court in its fight against the EU privacy watchdog, which had ordered the Irish data protection authority to jack up a fine four years ago for privacy breaches.

The Irish enforcer fined WhatsApp 225 million euros ($242.2 million) in 2021 following complaints about its use of personal data in Ireland. The higher penalty came after the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) intervened in the case.

A lower tribunal rejected WhatsApp’s challenge against the EDPB in 2022, saying it has no legal standing to sue the authority as it was not directly affected by the EDPB’s decision, but that it could go to a national court on the Irish fine.

WhatsApp subsequently appealed to the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union, Europe’s highest.

CJEU Advocate General Tamara Capeta on Thursday faulted the lower tribunal on its analysis.

“WhatsApp’s challenge of the EDPB decision is admissible and the case should be referred back to the General Court for a decision on the merit,” Capeta said in a non-binding opinion.

The CJEU, which follows its advisers’ recommendations in four out of five cases, is expected to rule in the coming months. Reuters

More undersea cables are needed to carry the bulk of international internet and telecom traffic to and from India, experts said.

“India’s share of subsea cable landing stations presently constitutes 1%” of the world’s total, said Aruna Sundararajan, a former Union Secretary of Electronics and Information Technology who is presently chairperson of the Broadband India Forum (BIF), an industry body for big tech firms and internet service providers operating in India.

“India should rightfully have ten times the number of existing cable landing stations and four- to fivefold capacity of sub-sea cables as we go forward,” Sundararajan added, speaking at a BIF event on sub-sea cable deployments.

More undersea cables are needed to carry the bulk of international internet and telecom traffic to and from India, experts said on Wednesday (March 26, 2025).

“India’s share of subsea cable landing stations presently constitutes 1%” of the world’s total, said Aruna Sundararajan, a former Union Secretary of Electronics and Information Technology who is presently chairperson of the Broadband India Forum (BIF), an industry body for big tech firms and internet service providers operating in India.

“India should rightfully have ten times the number of existing cable landing stations and four- to fivefold capacity of sub-sea cables as we go forward,” Ms. Sundararajan added, speaking at a BIF event on sub-sea cable deployments.

Cable protection zones
Sonia Jorge, founder and executive director of the Global Digital Inclusion Partnership, said that India would do well to protect the cables it already has. India needs to implement “cable protection zones,” Ms. Jorge said, to protect portions of cables near the coast from fishing activities.

“In our internal estimate, at least 11 out of the 17 cables [landing in India] are at economic end-of-life today,” said Amajit Gupta, CEO of Lightstorm, an internet infrastructure firm. “Physical end-of-life could be 25 years and that really poses a challenge and shows the asymmetry of this infrastructure relative to the growth that we aspire to.”

Unused coastline
Gupta pointed out that even though two-thirds of India’s borders are coastal, “95% of cables land in a six-kilometre stretch in Versova in Mumbai,” some of the most expensive real estate in the country. More cables needed to be installed for redundancy, he said.

“If there is an incident in the Red Sea” — where several cables pass through a narrow opening in the Bab al-Mandab Strait — “India can lose 25% of its bandwidth,” he added. “That’s not just theory, it happened two years ago,” when Houthi rebels attacked that infrastructure, he said.

“We also need to think about threats in the Malacca Strait,” he warned, referring to another cable choke point connecting the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. “All our internet either enters through the west or through the east, irrespective of how good the infrastructure locally is.” The Hindu

Vodafone Idea (Vi) on Tuesday said it has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the West Bengal State Export Promotion Society (WBSEPS) to accelerate digital transformation of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the state.

The move comes as the West Bengal government aims to strengthen its MSME ecosystem, which employs over one crore people.

The collaboration will leverage the digital assessment and advisory initiative of the telecom company and it has already evaluated over 1.9 lakh MSMEs nationwide since its launch in 2022, the statement said.

Under the partnership, the telecom major will provide localised digital tools and training modules in Bengali, and host webinars to enhance tech adoption among West Bengal’s MSMEs.

“MSMEs contribute 30 per cent to India’s GDP. This partnership will empower them with digital capabilities to scale operations and access global markets,” Vi Business EVP & Segment Head Rajeev Mehta said.

The West Bengal government emphasised the initiative’s focus on rural artisans and women entrepreneurs.

“This aligns with our mission to bridge the digital divide and foster inclusive growth,” MSME & Textiles Department Principal Secretary Rajesh Pandey said. PTI

Developers of undersea cable infrastructure, such as Bharti Airtel and Meta, on Tuesday called for incentives, easier regulations and a sustained policy push to quickly bring more subsea cables into India, and create indigenous cable repair vessels at home.

Speaking at the first-ever conference on subsea cable systems in India, organised by the Broadband India Forum, industry officials said India has great potential to become a hub for submarine cables connecting it and other countries to Europe, West Asia, Africa, and Southeast Asia, given its strategic geographical position. Partnering with telecom operators, global submarine cable consortiums have outlined plans to land multiple cables in the country.

However, the industry faces major hurdles in repairing damaged cables.

“The biggest problem for cable landing systems is fishing trawlers which break the cables regularly. The approval needed to get a repair ship to India takes 6 months. It requires officials from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to be present on the ship when maintenance is going on,” Bharti Airtel’s Chief Regulatory Officer Rahul Vatts said.

The industry also faces challenges on customs duty, having to report whether repairs of cables are ongoing within or outside India’s Economic Zone, which raises confusion, and escalates costs, he added.

In order to further incentivise the sector, he suggested the government reduce the licence fees for cable landing systems and tax incentives on the import of cables. Airtel has 400,000 route kilometres of cable, 10 large data centres and investments in 34 large cable systems globally. It also has large CPaaS partnerships which carry the traffic globally.

Submarine telecommunication cables are the backbone of global communication, carrying approximately 99 per cent of internet traffic and supporting critical services such as commerce, finance, government operations, digital health, and education. Physically linking continents, they also connect markets. As of 2024, more than 500 active cable systems are in operation, transmitting vast amounts of data with high efficiency. While India has become the largest data generating nation, and hosts more than 152 data centres, it is fed by only 18 undersea cables.

Strategic concerns
India also doesn’t have in-house repair and cable installation capabilities. “If 4 or 5 cables go down today, the entire internet traffic can go down. We were nearly at that point 2-3 years back since the cable repair ship was not being allowed to enter the country,” Vatts said.

On the other hand, 15 of India’s 18 undersea cables go through just a single 6 km wide area on the Juhu, Versova beach in Mumbai, pointing out strategic risks, Amajit Gupta, group CEO & managing director of network infrastructure major Lightstorm, said. A small fire in that area brought down 4 cables, he revealed.

“About 20 per cent of global internet traffic is consumed or generated in India. To support that, India has only about 3 per cent of global subsea cables, and 2 per cent of global subsea traffic,” Gupta said, adding that at least 11 of India’s cables are at the end of their average 25-year life today.

While data centres can be built within 2 years, a transoceanic cable system takes at least 5 years to build, Scott Cowling, director, Network Investments at Meta said, calling for an attractive policy environment for foreign companies.

Meta last month announced India will be a key component of the ambitious 50,000 km Project Waterworth, which will touch the United States, India, Brazil, South Africa, and other key regions.

“Meta is the largest investor in digital infrastructure globally. In order to serve 4 billion daily users, we have invested in one of the largest terrestrial and subsea cable networks across the planet,” Cowling said. Business Standard

AT&T is in talks to acquire Lumen Technologies’ consumer fiber operations, in a deal that could value the unit at more than $5.5 billion, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

Shares of Lumen were down more than 14% after the report.

The terms, which are not yet finalized, could change or the talks might still collapse, according to the report.

The potential move to offload the fiber business, which provides high-speed internet services to residential customers, comes as Lumen is doubling down on the AI boom to power its near-term growth, while grappling with a rapid decline of its legacy business.

Lumen kicked off a process to sell its consumer fiber operations, Reuters reported in December.

The fiber-optic cable provider has over 1,700 wire centers across its total network, with consumer fiber available in about 400 of them.

U.S. telecom giant AT&T has been investing in its high-speed fiber internet offerings to help drive faster subscriber and revenue growth. Earlier this month, it had forecast first-quarter adjusted profit in line with analysts’ estimate. US News

Three Democratic senators on Monday urged the White House to seek authority from Congress to extend a deadline for China’s ByteDance to sell TikTok to safeguard the popular video sharing app from a potential ban.

President Donald Trump in January unilaterally extended the sale deadline from January 19 to April 5 by postponing enforcement of a law passed last year that requires ByteDance to sell a majority stake to U.S. owners or face a ban on the app in the United States.

Trump said last month that he could further extend that deadline to give himself time to shepherd a deal.

“This non-enforcement of the TikTok ban was not only unlawful but also raised serious questions about TikTok’s future,” wrote Senators Ed Markey, Chris Van Hollen and Cory Booker, urging the president to back legislation extending the deadline to October.

“The path to saving TikTok should run through Capitol Hill.”

The White House and TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Reuters reported last week that White House-led TikTok talks are coalescing around a plan for the biggest non-Chinese investors in ByteDance to up their stakes and acquire the app’s U.S. operations, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.

The plan entails spinning off a U.S. entity for TikTok and diluting Chinese ownership to avert a U.S. ban, the sources said.

The fate of the app, used by 170 million Americans, has remained uncertain for months.

“We urge you to stand up for TikTok’s users and use your immense influence over congressional Republicans to demand a long-term solution to the TikTok ban,” the senators wrote.

The law, passed last year with broad bipartisan support, reflects concern in Washington that Beijing could use the app to conduct influence operations against the United States.

The app went dark briefly, then came back online shortly after Trump’s inauguration.

Reuters and others reported in January that the Trump administration was working on a plan that would involve tapping software giant Oracle (ORCL.N), opens new tab and some existing ByteDance investors to take control of the app’s operations.

The Democratic senators said they want Trump to say whether he plans to extend the deadline and, if so, on what legal basis.

They also want to know if news reports are accurate that say the White House “is considering a potential deal with Oracle under which Oracle would take a stake in TikTok” and provide security for TikTok’s user data.

Trump said earlier this month his administration was in touch with four unidentified groups about a prospective TikTok deal. Reuters

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has vowed to track down companies that could be evading sanctions against Chinese telecommunications operators.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said that the commission began an investigation to root out organizations that were still operating with equipment and services from companies in China that are currently banned in the U.S.

The Covered List, which includes the likes of Huawei, ZTE and China Telecom, is intended to block U.S.-based carriers and service providers from using equipment and services from companies that have close ties to adversary governments. The Chinese government has long been suspected of forcing companies in the country to allow for covert monitoring and data collection.

The fear from Uncle Sam is that the equipment and services from those companies could be embedded with back doors and data collection components that could potentially be leveraged for espionage operations.

According to Carr, the commission suspects that some of those companies could still be using nefarious means to get their products into the U.S. telecommunications sector.

“We have reason to believe that, despite those actions, some or all of these Covered List entities are trying to make an end run around those FCC prohibitions by continuing to do business in America on a private or ‘unregulated’ basis,” Carr said in announcing the operation.

“We are not going to just look the other way.”

According to the FCC, the operation to root out lingering Chinese infiltration has been ongoing since the announcement earlier this month of a new FCC-backed Council on National Security.

The council’s first official action was to investigate whether any U.S. operators are still using gear or services from those banned Chinese vendors, thus posing a potential national security risk.

“The FCC, working through our new Council on National Security and in coordination with partners across the federal government, will identify the scope of their ongoing activities and move quickly to close any loopholes that have permitted untrustworthy, foreign adversary state-backed actors to skirt our rules,” said Carr

Notably absent from the announcement was any mention of investigating or pursuing the use of software from security vendor Kaspersky, the only non-Chinese company on the covered list.

The Russia-based security vendor, suspected of maintaining close ties to the Kremlin, was sanctioned and forced to shut down its U.S. operation over espionage fears. The Trump administration has also ordered the U.S. Cyber Command to cease operations against the Russian government while it was reported that CISA was told to scale back efforts against Russian threat actors, though those reports have been disputed. SC World

Cloud storage provider Dropbox, opens new tab is facing pressure from an activist investor to end founder control of the company, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Half Moon Capital, a small hedge fund, is criticizing the company’s slowing revenue growth and taking issue with its strategy on payment tiers, the report said.

Dropbox and Half Moon did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

Half Moon seeks to remove Dropbox’s dual-class share structure, which gives CEO and co-founder Drew Houston a voting supermajority, the report said.

The proposal says the structure has prevented shareholders from holding management accountable after it made “significant missteps,” according to the report.

Half Moon Capital holds around 40,000 Dropbox shares, a stake recently valued at about $1.1 million, according to the report.

The WSJ report said the proposal would require a majority vote for approval, meaning Houston’s support would be needed for it to pass.

Houston currently has a roughly 77% voting stake because of his Class B shares, which have 10 times the voting rights of Class A shares, the report said.

Half Moon Capital believes the proposal, which is set for a vote at the company’s annual meeting, will pressure management and the board to make other changes, the report added.

The company said in October 2024 that it would reduce its workforce by 20% globally, after its 16% lay offs announcement in 2023. Reuters

The Delhi High Court granted time to a panel constituted to examine the issue of deepfakes and submit its report. A bench of Chief Justice D K Upadhyaya and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela directed the committee to also consider the petitioners’ suggestions while examining the issue. The bench said, “By the next date we expect that the committee shall complete the deliberations and submit its report.” The matter would be heard on July 21.

The court was hearing three petitions against the non-regulation of deepfake technology in the country and the threat of its potential misuse.

Deepfake technology facilitates the creation of realistic videos, audio recordings and images that can manipulate and mislead the viewers by superimposing the likeness of one person onto another, altering their words and actions, spreading disinformation in the process.

The Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology had informed about a committee being formed on Nov. 20, 2024 to tackle the issue.

On Monday, the counsel for MeitY submitted a status report and said the committee had held two meetings.

The counsel, however, said the committee needed to deliberate further on the issue and sought three months to file a comprehensive report.

The court, in November 2024, directed the Centre to nominate members for the committee.

One of the pleas, filed by journalist Rajat Sharma, seeks regulation of deepfake technology in the country and directions to block public access to apps and software enabling the creation of such content.

The other petition has been filed by Chaitanya Rohilla, a lawyer, against deepfakes and the unregulated use of artificial intelligence.

Sharma, the Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Independent News Service Pvt. Ltd., in a PIL said the proliferation of deepfake technology poses a significant threat to various aspects of society, including misinformation and disinformation campaign, and undermines the integrity of public discourse and the democratic process. PTI

Industry stakeholders invested in digital policies and rights have come out in support of the merits of Elon Musk-owned X Corp platform’s petition that opposed the use of Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act for taking down content online.

Microblogging platform X has filed a petition before the Karnataka High Court asking for a declaration that Section 79(3)(b) does not authorise the government to issue information blocking orders. This section dismisses safe harbor protection to an intermediary if the entity fails to take down content flagged by the “appropriate” government agency. The petition also asked the court to restrain the government from taking prejudicial action against X for not registering under the “censorship portal” Sahyog.

X said this portal created by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) allow central and state agencies, local police officers to issue information blocking orders in violation of previous Supreme Court instructions and provisions like Section 69A that does deal with blocking orders.

Prasanth Sugathan Legal Director, SFLC.In agreed that 79 cannot be used as a takedown provision.

“What the Supreme Court says is this provision exempts intermediaries from liabilities. It has to be read with other provisions like 69A that actually allows take down actions. 79(3)(b) cannot be used as provision to take down content by itself,” said Sugathan.

Confidentiality clauses
If X’s demands are met, blanket orders under 79(3)(b) may come down or at least follow procedure, said Sugathan. However he added that it is hard to say this for sure as many orders are issued with confidentiality clauses that restrict the intermediary from sharing the order with others.

“On Sahyog portal, you cannot have mechanisms that are not provided in the rules. Rules say you need to have a compliance officer. You cannot add new mechanisms to this unless it is incorporated in the rules,” said Sugathan.

Similarly, Apar Gupta, Founder of the digital rights group Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), said there is merit in X’s plea arguing that the Sahyog portal creates a parallel censorship system.

“The mandate for participation in the portal is not required under the due diligence requirement for safe harbor protection. Further, the portal may act as a proxy to overstep the bounds of the existing content website blocking powers considering there is no transparency as to which authorised agencies may be part of system and can submit request for takedown,” said Gupta.

He argued that the demands by the microblogging platform would further strengthen the safe harbor framework. It may be mentioned that the IFF has opposed the idea of the portal even before the petition.

Pranesh Prakash, Principal Consultant at Anekaanta Advisory and Co-Founder of the Centre for Internet and Society, also agreed with X’ stand and said that Section 79(3)(b) is about intermediary liability.

“I have long argued that Section 79 does not provide any powers for the government to block content,” said Prakash.

According to Gangesh Verma, Principal Assocaite for Tech and Policy at Saraf and Partners, the reason the government prefers 79(3)(b) is in response to the cybercrime case. “Late last year in December, the High Court had pulled up the government and asked what they doing with regards to cybercrime. The I4C then came up with the solution that these things need to be coordinated better and faster, and so it created the Sahyog portal. Now, the portal and I4C do not have statutory backing. This is a body that was created through executive action by the Ministry of Home Affairs. So, you will not be able to source the exact power under which I4C has created Sahyog, nor can you say whether you will not be able to find the exact provision,” he said. The Hindu BusinessLine