An Appropriate Way to Go About Regulating Technology

Context: Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) issued recommendations on the regulation of cloud services in India.

Reasons for the poor functioning of Tech sectors

• Laws are not able to keep pace with evolving technologies: By the time the law comes into force, the technology has moved on, bringing a whole host of new issues.

• Poor understanding of technologies: Lawmakers don’t fully seem to understand the technologies they are looking to regulate

• Arbitrary regulation: Tech companies function at the mercy of whatever interpretation regulators choose to apply on a given day.
• Lack of technical expertise and organisational muscle: to develop new versions of existing frameworks and to keep the current frameworks in good shape, respectively.

India’s recent achievements in Digital Public Infrastructure: 

• India’s payments infrastructure that includes the Universal Payment Interface (UPI) and 

• The account aggregator framework, to the National Digital Health Mission that will bring on-demand data portability to the health-care sector. 

Core considerations that are essential for good tech sector regulation. 

• Establish regulatory principles rather than rules: In the context of technology, it is often far more effective to establish regulatory principles rather than trying to write rules that often only apply to the limited implementation of that technology. 
• Seek outside help: Government should not be shy to ask for help from technologists, economists, policy analysts etc. for formulating policies required to govern the sector.

• Establish Self-Regulatory Organizations (SROs):  

• It will be able to feed into the regulatory process commercial inputs that will help develop better regulatory objectives, appropriately taking into account societal and commercial imperatives.

• This was recommended from the side of government which shows its desire to lean on the expertise that resides within the industry to formulate regulations required to govern the space.

• By requiring light-touch regulation, the SRO will be forced to first evolve principles that can then be translated into user-specific regulations. 

• Keep the powerful infrastructure current and up-to-date: This will help to keep pace with evolving technology as well as to respond to market demand for new and more innovative digital products.

• Designate Technical Standards Organisations (TSOs) to recommend regulators on continuously evolving standards for our public digital infrastructure. 

Conclusion: Our regulators should get the assistance they need in formulating the technical standards that are critically important to the long-term success of the sector in question.