The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) trade negotiations had been held recently.
India may accept the free data flow clauses with some public policy exceptions at these negotiations.
What is the RCEP?
It is a trade deal that is currently under negotiation among 16 countries.
These countries include 10 member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and 6 countries with which the ASEAN bloc has free trade agreements (FTA).
The ASEAN countries have FTAs with India, Australia, China, South Korea, Japan and New Zealand.
Negotiations on the details of the RCEP have been on since 2013.
All the participants aim to finalise and sign the deal by November 2019.
Why data is important?
In a digital economy, data is the central resource.
The Prime Minister compared data to property at the advent of the industrial era.
Data is being considered as a nation’s new wealth.
A nation’s rank in the emerging new global geo-economic and geo-political hierarchies will be decided by how it employs data fruitfully, and its value captured.
The global digital or Artificial Intelligence (AI) economy is currently a two-horse race between the U.S. and China.
All other countries may become fully digitally dependent on one of these two digital superpowers.
This will compromise their economic and political independence, something referred to as digital colonisation.
The shift to digital power and its concentration is very evident.
Seven of the top eight companies by market cap globally today are data-based corporations, mostly U.S. or China-based.
What is the importance of data sharing?
To escape such a dismal situation, credible efforts like in the French, the U.K. and India’s NITI Aayog’s AI strategies are taken.
All these efforts focus on one central issue - More data-sharing within the country, and better access to data for domestic businesses.
French AI strategy - Calls for an aggressive data policy and control on data outflows.
NITI Aayog’s AI strategy - Mandated the sharing of data for social purposes.
Appropriate data policies must ensure that the required data is actually available to Indian digital businesses.
The global digital corporations such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc continually vacuum out India’s and Indians’ data.
By default they also treat the data as their private property and refuse to share it, even for important public interest purposes.
What is a Community data?
The above-mentioned lawless logjam can only be broken by asserting a community’s legal right over data that is derived from, and is about the community concerned.
This is the concept of community data inscribed in India’s draft e-commerce policy.
Data about a group of people is equally important as the personal data.
Data about a community, even if anonymised, provides very wide and granular intelligence about that group or community.
The very basis of a digital economy is to employ such data-based intelligence to reorganise and coordinate different sectors.
But this community intelligence can equally be used to manipulate or to harm the community (economic, social, political, security-related harms).
What could be done to protect the community data?
This requires effective community control over its data that produces such intelligence.
A complex process of classification of various kinds of data, and developing governance frameworks around them, is required.
In important sectors, the community data concerned may require close regulation.
This could be about accessing such data for social purposes, ensuring that important public interest is met in various uses of data.
It could also be about how to make data available to domestic businesses, to stimulate competition and for India’s digital industrialisation.
All this requires India to preserve its data policy space.
It needs to be understood that suitable data controls and policies are the mainstream of a digital economy and society.
Why shouldn’t India accept the free data flow clauses?
The history of trade agreements show that such public policy exceptions almost never work, especially for developing countries.
India may lose chances for the effective usage of its data for development of India and for digital industrialisation to become a top digital power.
It may end up ceding most of its data policy space, and data sovereignty.
Disengaging from signing binding agreements on uninhibited data flows across borders doesn’t mean that a country would localise all data.
It just means that a country retains complete data policy space, and the means to shape its digital industrialisation, and thus its digital future.
It will be laying the path for permanent digital dependency, with India’s data flowing freely to data intelligence centres in the U.S. and China.
Our understanding in these areas is just now beginning to take shape.
It will be extremely unwise to foreclose our options even before we discover and decide the right data and digital polices and path for India.
