Abstract
The paper draws on ethnographic studies of urban, peri-urban cyber cafes in Western India, to understand public norms governing digital security and privacy in a context brimming with inconsistent and arbitrary state telecom regulation and a widespread culture of software piracy. We focus on issues emerging from three interrelated contexts crucial to cyber regulation in India: the grass-root, the state and the non-formal economy. While café managers dismiss their responsibility to police on-line security, state level initiatives show contradictions in their stated enthusiasm for an IT enabled society and sporadic regulatory behaviour directing public usage of the internet. There is a lack of will and genuine bemusement in the state apparatus to handle cyber regulation in non-formal and para- legal economies.
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Rangaswamy, N. (2007). Regulating India’s Digital Public Cultures: A Grey or Differently Regulated Area. In: Aykin, N. (eds) Usability and Internationalization. Global and Local User Interfaces. UI-HCII 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4560. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73289-1_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73289-1_23
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