Tim Berners-Lee Talks About India's Recent Push To Data Localization, Proposed Compromise of End-to-End Encryption, and Frequent Internet Shutdowns

On the occasion of the web's 30th anniversary, its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, has given some interviews and shared his thoughts on some challenges that the web faces today. He spoke with Medianama, an Indian outlet, on some of the relatively unique challenges that the government over there has been pushing lately. Some of these challenges include government's push to have Silicon Valley companies store data of Indians in India itself; a nudge to WhatsApp to put an end to its encryption (On a side note: The Australian government recently passed a law to do this exact thing); and frequent shutdowns in the nation.

On data localisation and data as a national resource: That's one of the things that the Web Foundation has always been concerned about: the balkanisation of the Internet. If you want to balkanise it, that's a pretty darn effective way of doing it. If you say that Indian people's data can't be stored outside India, that means that when you start a social network which will be accessed by people all over the world, that means that you will have to start 152 different companies all over the world. It's a barrier to entry. Facebook can do that. Google can do that.

When an Indian company does it, and you'll end up with an Indian company that serves only Indian users. When people go abroad, they won't be able to keep track of their friends at home. The whole wonderful open web of knowledge, academic and political discussions would be divided into country groups and cultural groups, so there will be a massive loss of richness to the web.

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