A senior India government official said it plans to move forward “as quickly as possible” with new legislation governing the internet after abruptly scrapping a long-awaited, controversial personal data protection bill last week.
Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s minister of state for electronics and information technology, also pushed back against criticism from technology groups such as Meta and Google, which had complained about the draft bill’s compliance costs and some of its provisions, including a requirement that companies store data locally in India.
“Big Tech have gotten used over the past decade to little or no regulation, little or no scrutiny, and they got away with things they should not have gotten away with,” Chandrasekhar told the Financial Times. “Governments around the world were asleep at the wheel.”