Jaijit Bhattacharya Writes: Why Tech Sovereignty is Important

Sovereignty basically implies the ability of the people of a country to be able to enforce their collective will on its resources and its destiny. Sovereignty is one of the cornerstones for ensuring the security of the country and ensures that we as a nation can stand up to pressures from other countries. Sovereignty is critical to ensure our economic independence.

So, what is technological sovereignty? Is it the same as atmanirbharta? To understand the fine difference between the two concepts, one only has to look at the cyber-bombing of the Iranian centrifuges that happened in Natanz in 2021. This was the first time that a cyberattack was used to degrade the nuclear capabilities of a nation.

As is widely known now, the attack was carried out through a malware called Stuxnet. This malware was injected into the nuclear centrifuges through a USB drive, and it used eight backdoors of an operating system provided by a US-based tech company, to infect the programmable logic controller (PLC) that controlled the speed at which the nuclear centrifuges would spin. It made the nuclear centrifuges spin extremely fast and self-destruct.

It is extremely difficult to find one back door to an operating system. Finding eight back doors is nothing short of a miracle. Or as was in this case, it required the wilful cooperation of the American company. The PLCs were from a German company. One had to have cooperation from these companies, in order to be able to infect the PLCs to make them spin faster. The code for Stuxnet itself was purportedly written by an Israeli company. The entire operation was apparently run by the US government.

Arm-twisting Acts

And this explains what technological sovereignty is. The US did not have ownership or atmanirbharta of all the technologies involved in this attack. But had the ability to get access to these technologies and weaponise them for its own benefit. It did not have the need to own all of the technologies.

And this is why I had coined the term “technological sovereignty” in 2007, for policymakers to understand the risks that our nation runs, if we do not focus on owning and controlling technologies.

If a nation does not have technological sovereignty over key technologies, it is not only exposed to the risks of having to pay disproportionately high amounts for accessing such technologies, but also compromise national security. This is the situation that Indian companies faced when Google decided to charge a usurious 30% for payments from Indian apps that are hosted on Google Play, against a usual charge of around 2% for enabling such payments.

Even the government did not have a leverage against such a demand from Google, as Google has the power to shut down multiple industries in India. Imagine, if Google Maps stops operating from tomorrow, millions of drivers from Ola and Uber will lose their jobs.

Unfortunately, monopolisation of access to technology is one of the preferred tools of corporates from developed economies to extract undue economic benefit from emerging economies.

The issue becomes even more severe when we observe that globally, nations and companies are trying to convert technologies on which they have an intellectual property right into standards, thus forcing their monopoly on economies and extracting an unfair and undue economic benefit from manipulation of the global IPR and standards regimes.

Losing Control

Organisations file blanket patents on an emerging technology that is out of reach of developing countries. Quite often, the patents are relatively trivial in nature. For example, the over 550 patents on MPEG4 [standards related to compression of audio and visual data] by a Dutch and a Japanese technology giants.

These patented technologies are then pushed in as global standards by the organisation, using standards bodies such as ISO [Internation Organisation for Standardisation], IEC [International Electrotechnical Commission], IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] or by using their sheer market presence.

This is where we start losing our technological sovereignty.

Technological sovereignty is about having national control over key technologies. As an example, when India was trying to defend its territories during the Kargil war, Indian military was denied the use of mapping technologies that it had bought during peace time. Apparently, the fine print said that the mapping technologies cannot be used during conflict.

This was a perfect example of violation of technological sovereignty, where the national government did not have control over the technologies critical for the nation. This experience led to India to develop its own constellation of geo-positioning satellites, the NavIC system.

Technological sovereignty is one of the cornerstones for ensuring the security of the country and ensures that India as a nation can stand up to pressures from other nations. Technological sovereignty is critical to ensure our economic independence.

Pump in the Money

For India to build its technological sovereignty, a very large investment is required just to build the minimum infrastructure to implement the provisions of Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). For example, the US Patent and Trademark Office has an annual budget of $1bn and a staff of more than 3,000 highly trained scientists, engineers, and legal experts and judges to examine claims and disputes. In spite of the recent expansion in its patent office, India still significantly lags behind the US in being able to process the patents filed.

With the lack of control over the technological layers, Indian economy and defence institutions will be challenged to protect the nation from cyberwarfare. Is India in a position to pull-off the equivalent of a pager-bombing attack that Israel recently did in Palestine? Certainly not.

More importantly, military hardware itself could be subject to intrusions and control by adversaries, thanks to the increased “intelligence” of equipment. Hence, technological sovereignty is not just a futuristic concept for academic discussions, but an issue that is impacting us on a daily basis. We as a nation need to accelerate our initiatives to rapidly become a technologically sovereign nation, thereby also becoming a prosperous and secure nation.

(The writer is president, Centre for Digital Economy Policy Research)