Karuna Nundy Speaks on Edges of Tech: The Courts, Litigation and the Road Ahead at the BW Legal World Global Legal Summit

The BW Global Legal Summit and Leaders Awards 2020 saw insights from industry experts on various topics from the Rise of LegalTech- Leveraging Power of AI to Grow 10X to other important discussions focussing on the road ahead for Ease of Doing Business in India- Breaking into World Bank’s Top 50 Nations on the Ease of Doing Business Index,  Dispute Resolution, Systemic Digitisation in the Aftermath of Covid-19, Tribunalisation of Justice, compliances around Data, Security & Privacy and much more.

Setting the contours of tech regulations in India today, Keynote Speaker Karuna Nundy, Advocate, Supreme Court of India shared her thoughts on what the future holds for us. It is a truth universally known that technology is speeds ahead of regulations. However, at what speed and to what extent should governments and intergovernmental bodies regulate it? To what extent, should there be self-regulation or say regulation by the technology itself, and does that ever work.

Speaking from her personal experience and narrating the findings in different cases, Nundy shed light on the interesting aspects of a case that involved the enforcement of blockchain technology, which is a distributed ledger technology. Nundy represented Paytm in the matter. In order to make sure that the telecommunication companies and their principal entities, including clients of these companies and then the users themselves, contribute to the common understanding of data through blockchain in terms of whether the data is accurate; triangulating the consent between the telcos, the principal entities, and the users. This, in turn, obviates the need for regulators, like, TRAI and the courts to come in to determine questions of the veracity of fact, or questions of whether in a particular case, there was consent for use of the particular data or not. 

“That's a lot to unpack. I think the role of blockchain technology was somewhat overstated. It was called the basis for the fourth industrial revolution. As we have seen, technology has its very important place but it's only as good as the users that use it. And only as good as the regulation that is enforced. Now, Indian courts have been in some sense supportive of the technology. In the Bitcoin case, for example, the Supreme Court set aside the RBI notification, which would have actually made illegal various aspects of the technology itself. But the Supreme Court very clearly in a robust judgment set it aside,” said Nundy.

Further advocating the need for strong regulatory oversight, Nundy shared that the speed of tech overtakes any kind of regulation necessitating a strong regulatory oversight while having a respectful hands-off approach. Thus, the role of writ courts becomes quite important in this regard to arrest the failure in an environment where tech is being entrusted to private players—collaborating with each other and creating a domino effect. In such circumstances, the writ courts should step in, and step in fast. 

She further spoke on the differential privacy policies of WhatsApp in India and Europe, stressing on the need for a robust regulation by the government and the need for tech companies to ensure equal territorial policies.