Nick Clegg, President, Global Affairs, Meta (Facebook), on Wednesday, said that the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill is “cogent” and has “great clarity” on what it is trying to achieve.
“In broad terms, I think the Indian government has done really thoughtful work in terms of providing this draft...it is a promising turn of events,” he said at the Global Technology Summit organised by Carnegie India.
He said India was also right in not copying much of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as India has its own needs and requirements.
“There was a time when the European Union used to pride itself as a regulatory leader, even though not necessarily a leader in big tech compared to digital powerhouses like India or China and west-coast in America...I don’t think that is going to carry on the same way, quite rightly Indian policy makers are now saying, ‘look India is India, it is not the European Union... we have our own needs, we have our own specificities, we are going to craft legislation as a sovereign nation for ourselves’,” he said.
Decoding the latest Data Protection Bill 2022
Earlier this month, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) had released a revised draft of the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2022 after pulling down the previous draft.
And, in the current form, the government has tried to make it comprehensible and friendly for global tech companies.
Meanwhile, commenting on localisation of data, Clegg said data localisation technically has a very specific meaning, which is literally that data is housed/ stored in separate jurisdiction and that is not happening.
He also noted that getting various countries to agree on things like digital rights at a United Nations-level was tough due to the level of granular consensus it needs.
“People often talk about global Internet, but it doesn’t exist..it’s a fiction. My view is that if the three great techno democracies in the world — India, the US and the European Union — can broadly agree on the foundational principles that they think should underpin the governance of Internet, it would be transformative,” he said.
He said India can play a big role as it is already a digital super power with 100 unicorns and counting, and by 2024 India is going to have the largest app developer base in the world.