Internet and civil society: Why #NetNeutrality is a democracy issue

For months, I have seen Internet experts tweet to each other about Net Neutrality and regulation. I have eavesdropped on these conversations, sensing this was an important issue, and wanting to learn. The fact is, in the snatches I caught, given that I am neither a software expert nor a lawyer, I just did not understand what they were saying. I felt bad because I could tell this would matter to me, and I did not want to make an ill-informed choice. Yesterday, All India Bakchod’s video explaining the issue did the rounds, followed by Paromita Vohra’s column. The penny dropped with a loud noise. 

As I shared the video on Facebook, I wrote a sentence about how important the Internet was to Prajnya, the small NGO I run. And I realised that all the arguments I was hearing related to other concerns — freedom of choice and expression, a truly free market, a level playing field for app developers and for small businesses—but no one was talking about the impact this could have on civil society. I would like to share this with you, through the lens of Prajnya’s own experience of using the Internet as a critical support system in the last few years. 

We are a very small, “now you see them, now you don’t” NGO based in Chennai. We have not had the money for salaries or overheads, so with the exception of an administrator and maintenance we pay for a room, we are a team of volunteers working “off-site” or remotely or whatever the correct term is. 

One of the first things I did after founding Prajnya was register a domain name and set up a website. The website is a simple one but it houses all our reports (including financial) and our publications—which we do not have the budget to print out and until recently, did not have the space to store. Over the years, our Internet presence has expanded to include almost 10 blogs (active to different degrees), a wiki, a YouTube channel, three Facebook Pages and a Twitter account. We also host a user-generated photographic archive and the Chennai chapter of the Hollaback! movement.

The Internet is a small NGO’s best friend. We have found volunteers through various calls — people to design; people to rapporteur; people to edit. Our fundraising—which has been mainly crowd-sourcing even before we knew the term existed—has been dependent on friends of Prajnya and friends of volunteers and their friends, responding to and sharing our appeal every year. We have managed eight years of activities—very frugal, almost stingily run—because our access to social networks did not cost us anything.
Specific activities benefited through our free access to the Internet. The history of women’s work in the public sphere of politics and policy is a very important part of the work we want to do. We wanted to save the photos that were rotting in damply stored albums and tossed out summarily. We could not have afforded a space to house this project or a full staff of archivists. But free access to the blogosphere meant we could set up a digital repository, using several free tools to design it.  

Public education is one of our three mandates; what this means is that making information on policy matters accessible and available is what we are supposed to do. Most of our volunteers are trained in the social sciences and/or communications. We are skilled at finding information, repackaging it and then taking it back out into the public domain. We depend a great deal on public domain, open-access resources to put together what we describe as “information initiatives.” We then put most of them back into the public domain. The factboxes that we did for a newspaper in 2008-09 are online on our website. All our reports and guidelines are accessible in .pdf format, and some shorter ones, as .html pages. Over the last few years, we’ve published useful resources on our blogs—symposia that explore important dimensions of gender violence and even the last edition of our Gender Violence Report. We have some peace education materials online too. Perhaps most useful, we carry a listing of distress helplines in Chennai on our website, along with .pdfs in various sizes and in English and Tamil. Anyone can access and download these.

Let me clarify: here, my concern is not, how will you know we are doing this work? It is this: the whole point of all this work is that people should find the resources and use them. When, as citizens, they discuss important social issues, they should be able to read and learn and make informed choices. This is our raison d’être. We cannot afford to print and distribute, and we cannot afford to pay a provider to facilitate access to our sites. If those who need information are stuck having to pay or endure slow connections, they will not bother after a point. The over-simplified position and the loudest argument will prevail. In the long run, this will diminish the citizen’s ability to participate in democratic politics.

As I wear my other hat and seek documentation of civil society’s work in the critical area of peace and security, the question is in fact this: If you do not make your reports available online, then how do I know you exist? If I do not know you exist, and are doing work in an area I am concerned about, then I cannot learn from you, seek your support and advice, establish guidelines or ‘best practices’ or most crucially to you, support you. Most researchers do not have the grant money to travel in search of good work, and most civil society organisations can barely pay for their monthly Internet charges. It is in everyone’s interest that work is documented and this documentation is made available online to the fullest extent possible, given privacy laws. The Internet is already creating a divide between those able to have an online presence and others. Any regulation or deal that limits access to the Internet will only exacerbate this exclusion. 

Let us also talk about the issues of transparency and accountability. Small groups cannot have expensive press meets and AGMs. We can however, place our reports (including financial) online, and we can be transparent about processes. The Internet is a direct line between my office and vigilant citizens. Have we filed our taxes? Where is our annual report? You should have such questions for me and I should have answers. I should be able to post these and you should be able to find them. We should be able to talk. The Internet connects us, and facilitates our compliance and your Right to Information. 

Between the grassroots social movements and the large international NGOs are innumerable organisations like ours. We too make up civil society. We get by with very little—even wondering if that is in fact a counter-productive talent. We make the most of what is available to us—the goodwill of partners, the confidence of donors, the commitment of volunteers and the potential of a free Internet. 

Prajnya is a tiny, Chennai-based organisation whose team, on some days, is more an idea than a reality. Our physical presence is tiny. But people who only know us through social networks, our blogs and our resources, see us as a very large organisation. Our footprint is large because we have been able to use a free Internet as a strongest support system and our most expansive platform. This has not benefited us as much as it has benefited users of our resources. For us, this large footprint has led people to think we have better skills and resources and therefore, may not need help! That is unfortunate, but we are gratified that in spite of our resources and size, we are still a little useful. We should be deepening and widening this access by placing more translations online and getting help to make our site mobile-friendly—not moving in the opposite direction. 

Microscopic groups like ours will find it very hard to comprehend and cope with the proposed changes in Internet access. The economy will find a way to survive, and so will software talent. But in a climate where civil society is under attack on multiple fronts, shrinking access to information may be a hit that democracy will find hard to survive. I am not a technical or legal expert but that worries me, and that is why this is an instrument of social and political transformation I really want to save. 

A political scientist by training, Swarna Rajagopalan is the founder and Managing Trustee of Prajnya. She intends to email this article and write in to TRAI via http://www.savetheinternet.in/