Following on the heels of the Paul Boutin piece in Slate (blogged here) comes a BBC News report that "Bombay [for some reason, the BBC style manual hasn't switched from "Bombay" to "Mumbai" yet] plans cyber cafe controls." The Maharashtra state legislature is considering legislation requiring cafes to be licensed, to install anti-porn software, and to require users to "fill out lengthy forms listing addresses, telephone numbers and other details."

Not surprisingly, cafe owners are up in arms. Not only do they fear it would drive away customers, but if it passed, "cyber cafe owners would need permission from no fewer than 13 separate government agencies in order to set up shop and do business." (This kind of multi-level bureaucractic navigation, according to Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto (profiled here, interviewed here), forces many businesses underground.) Finally, the efforts marks another attempt to reduce the anonymity- and privacy- of Internet use:

[Cyber cafe owners] say it is important to prevent increasingly internet-savvy India from going down the China route of regulation and control.

If passed, the new law would come just weeks after Cuba controversially tightened its grip over internet access by making it impossible for many Cubans to dial up the internet from their home telephone lines.

Bombay's plans could set a precedent for other Indian cities, such as Calcutta and Delhi.

Interestingly, patrons quoted in the article were more sanguine about the idea of giving the names and contact information- a reaction that jibes with Boutin's argument. As one visitor put it, "There's nothing wrong with giving your name and address. It's like going to a residential complex in Bombay, where a watchman is standing guard. You have to write your name and address before you enter the building. Why can't we do the same when we visit a cyber cafe?"

Paul Boutin has an essay in Slate on efforts to weave digital IDs and secure computing into the Web. (It's one of those meta-articles that were common in 19th century journalism, and have made a comeback in the world of Web publishing and blogging: an article discussing an article (Steven Levy's recent Newsweek piece based on another article, John Walker's "The Digital Imprimatur: How big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle.") Walker (and Boutin) argue that digital IDs will be sold to the public as a convenience- a way to cut down on spam, for example- and as a way to protect against identity theft; but that equally significant benefits will go to media companies and others who want to tame the anarchy of the Web (and shut down file trading). It'll also spur a backlash:

"Picture digital freedom fighters huddling in the electronic equivalent of caves, file-swapping and blogging under the radar of censors and copyright cops," Newsweek concluded. They might as well have added: Cooooooooooool.

An ad hoc alliance of techno-rebels covertly transferring unauthorized data in defiance of network authorities- sound familiar, Neo? It's such a popular scenario that the same Microsoft researchers leading the company's secure computing efforts wrote a paper two years ago describing this inevitable backlash, which they dubbed the darknet. The darknet! Jeez, are they trying to make piracy cool?

The essay, incidentally, is The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution."