cyberBRICS observatory | nº 20, February/2023

Paper by CyberBRICS Fellow Smriti Parsheera published at the African Journal of Information and Communication (AJIC).

Paper by CyberBRICS Fellow Smriti Parsheera published at the Indian Journal of Law and Technology.

The CyberBRICS Project and the Center for Technology and Society at FGV organised the joint session “Data Governance From The Global South” at the MyData Online 2022 Conference. The session’s goal was to create a space for the exchange of information about the evolving data governance models in the Global South. Experts shared their insights on developments regarding data frameworks at the national and regional level, with a particular focus on data governance innovations. The session was hosted by CyberBRICS Associated Scholar Nicolo Zingales and had Luca Belli (CyberBRICS Director), Wei Wang (CyberBRICS Fellow), Alison Gillwald (CyberBRICS Advisory Board) and Mishi Choudhary (Software Freedom Law Center India) as speakers.

The 17th annual meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) took place between November 28th and December 2nd, 2022 in Ethiopia in a hybrid format. Members of the CyberBRICS Team participated in 6 panels to debate this year’s theme: “Resilient Internet for a Shared Sustainable and Common Future”. You can check all panels organized by our Fellows and Associated Scholars at the CyberBRICS Website.

The CyberBRICS Team attended the 2022 edition of the World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit (WIC Wuzhen). This year, besides participating in two sessions, our team will also publish two papers in the Conference’s Outcome Report. On Wednesday, November 9, CyberBRICS Director Luca Belli attended the “Bridging the Digital Divide” Forum, organized by the China Federation of Internet Societies. Dr. Belli presented the paper “Community Networks: Complementary Strategy to Bridge Digital Divides Sustainably”, co-authored with CyberBRICS Fellow Senka Hadzic. Also on November 9, Dr. Belli attended the Expert Symposium on Working Together to Build a Community of Shared Future in Cyberspace, organized by the Cybersecurity Association of China. He presented the paper “Interoperability to foster Open Digital Ecosystems in the BRICS and beyond”, co-authored with CyberBRICS Associated Scholar Nicolo Zingales.

Instagram, facing scrutiny from safety advocates, started testing a program in the U.S. earlier this year to verify users’ age of those claiming to be 18 or older. It uses techniques including authentication via running video selfies through an artificial intelligence system. The Meta-owned service is now ready to roll out this program to two key overseas markets: India and Brazil.

The deployment of 5G mobile technology advances at fifth generation speed in the country and will soon reach 140 million potential users. In a meeting on January 24, at Anatel of Gaispi - the Anatel group that oversees the 3.5 GHz spectrum clearing for the arrival of 5G - it was decided to expand to 78 more cities that will receive 5G beyond what was specified in the public notice, because the 3.5 GHz frequency clearing is well under way. According to the group's coordinator and Anatel's counselor, Moisés Moreira, with the measures taken so far, 1,610 Brazilian cities will have 5G available by June 30.

Russian tech giant Yandex has registered holding companies in Armenia and the U.S. in order to bypass international sanctions on Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, Russian-language TV channel RTVI reported in December. Senior Yandex managers Maxim Zagrebin and Dmitry Stepanov registered Beyond ML, a company that itself owns a dozen technology startups, in Armenia in August, according to RTVI, while a second legal entity called Beyond ML Inc. was registered in the U.S. at the same address as Yandex's U.S. office. The channel also reported that a number of the company’s employees had been told that Beyond ML had been set up to facilitate Yandex's continued operation in the U.S. and Europe.

Russia’s central bank is reportedly set to begin developing a cross-border settlement system using a central bank digital currency (CBDC) amid ongoing sanctions in response to its invasion of Ukraine. The plans to move forward with Russia’s digital ruble are expected to come in the first quarter of 2023 and will see Russia’s central bank study two possible cross-border settlement models (...). The first proposed model sees various countries entering into separate bilateral agreements with Russia to integrate their CBDC systems. (...) The second, more complicated model proposes a single hub-like platform for Russia to interact with other countries, sharing common protocols and standards to facilitate payments between the connected countries.

India set an “incredibly important precedent” by banning TikTok two and a half years ago, FCC Commissioner said, as he projected a similar fate for the Chinese giant Bytedance app in the U.S. (...) Carr warned that TikTok “operates as a sophisticated surveillance tool” and told the Indian daily Economic Times that banning the social app is a “natural next step in our efforts to secure communication network”.

India said on Thursday that under its ongoing G20 presidency, it will prioritize the development of a framework for global regulation of unbacked crypto assets, stablecoins and decentralized finance and will explore the “possibility of [their] prohibition” in a potentially large setback for the nascent industry.

A self-regulatory body, mandatory know-your-customer norms for verification, and a grievance redressal mechanism are among the key proposals in the draft rules for online gaming, released by the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) on Monday, January 2. Online games will have to register with a self-regulatory body, and only games cleared by the body will be allowed to legally operate in India. Online gaming companies will not be allowed to engage in betting on the outcome of games, the proposed rules say.

Hong Kong-based Red Date Technology, the technical architect for China’s state-backed Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN), has launched a new initiative that aims to make stablecoins and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) interoperable in order to facilitate cross-border payments.

The main app of Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing has returned to China’s iOS and Android app stores, a crucial step for the company to fully resume its business after Beijing banned it from registering new users for 18 months. The Didi Chuxing app returned to Apple’s store on Thursday, while the Android version was restored by Wednesday on various local platforms, including Huawei’s AppGallery and Xiaomi’s GetApps, according to a person familiar with the matter, who declined to be named as they are not authorised to speak to the media.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa says he'll use his chairmanship of the BRICS group of leading emerging economies to focus on advancing African interests. The bloc -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- is seen as an alternative to dominant Western economies.

The threat of cyberattack is real and growing, and the likelihood of businesses being attacked is increasing daily. In fact, South Africa is the second most targeted country in Africa, with ransomware among the top five cyberthreats. Public sector, infrastructure and large organisations are the most attractive targets for a number of reasons, chiefly because they have information that is valuable as well as the means to pay the ransom.

To develop policies and regulations which will ensure inclusive ICT developments are a vehicle for advancing the United National 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, a deeper understanding is needed of how individuals, households and businesses interact with ICT and how this interaction impacts on their livelihoods and well-being. (...) National representative demand-side surveys of individual or household, and microbusiness access and use, are essential for assessing policy outcomes and are especially in predominantly pre-paid mobile markets like South Africa the only way to obtain data that can be disaggregated by sex, education, income, geographic location – information critical to identifying the exact point of policy intervention to redress different aspect of inequality.  The first point of access into the digital world is the Internet, and so this brief focuses on high-level findings related to the ability to access the Internet across different segments of the South African population.