Also that last line, "The government wants the ability to throttle communication when necessary (see Pulwama terrorist attack )" is exactly the kind of slippery slope that no democracy should head down.
I, by no means, support the Govt's intention to control communication and snoop but India is a country unlike any other - it has its own very unique set of problems sometimes engendered by its own diversity. It feels sad to say this but at times, at places here shutting down the entire communication system in a particular state of region is the only way of preventing mass unrests and riots which almost always result in too many civilian deaths and unspeakable loss of property. I wish there was a better way but there isn't yet. Lack of proper education plays a large role, yes.
Finally a sane voice instead of your usual "they took mah freedom of speech".
I remember when the Nepal's royal family was massacred. We had all our telephone connections cut for 5 days with full blown curfews. They were necessary to stop riots, rumor mongering, and knee jerk reaction of people to the horrible news.
India and the rest of the world will face and make even worse decisions in the future.
I really don't see an argument that suggests that China style Censorship is not coming for everyone.
Here are my facts and inferences:
1) Data/content is without inherent Good/Evil value. A sentence "Jihad!" is only terror affiliated if it shows up in a specific context. It could be part of a sarcastic comment for all you know.
2) This context sensitivity creates means that you can rarely identify what is actually dangerous speech given raw data. You need contextual information (person speaking it, lists of people associated with terror networks etc.)
3) Virality - People in India for example, are busy sharing videos of child abductions which are leading to lynchings of innocents in villages. Except those videos are concoted out of Mexican gang videos, health and safety videos, and frames from other countries.
There is no way to stop this, without breaking past the "intent" barrier inherent to all information.
4) Better understanding of human neural weak spots. We are constantly learning to hack human brains - gamification, loot boxes, attention sucking websites, "Addictive UI/UX". We are simply driven by business need to evolve firms and practices that are best able to survive in the substrate that businesses operate in - which is Humanity. Sex sells was true years ago, today we can do Sex sells in a personalized and automated manner to everyone with a cell phone.
Given these basic factors, virality, impossibility to identify intent, human neural hacking, we create a perfect storm.
Nations can never defend against incoming fake news, hoaxes, psych warfare, riot inducing whats app messages, gossip and more.
The only way to stop this is to go from black lists (let people be on a "free net" and then take down blacklisted content) to a white list (let people only stay on a safe internet, and ensure nothing else gets in.)
This is what China does, and while not fool proof (people still find ways to share their dissatisfaction) its not bad from a central government perspective.
Most Chinese wouldn't know about Tianmen square for example, and are largely happy with the Government. Issues which do crop up with Government satisfaction can be resolved by finding a person responsible and then executing that person.
As long as you keep the system running (economic and job growth) most people will be happy.
Even in a worse case scenario, dissent will be hard to coalesce into outright rebellion.
I don't see how nations wont be driven to copying this model given the success of Brexit, Trump market spam, Virality of Hate speech and forums etc.
Further, techies on places like HN regularly keep moving the needle forward to make such technology easier to implement. I spoke to someone on a flight a while ago who is busy helping create language translation data bases which get used for predictive text recognition.
This reduces the "armor" or "camouflage" that non english languages had when dealing with authorities - eventually with a good dictionary, you can start making more sophisticated tools to identify language patterns and put them to a halt.
I see the above used every day when moderators put it to good use on forums like HN and Reddit. But thats a few evolutions away to being applied to larger scales (unless there is some genuine technical issue which prevents this - which will be seem as a "business opportunity" for someone to crack)
I have spent time moderating forums, I listen and read up on internet arcana and history, have met and speak with people who work on censorship in India, have friends in policy, and so on. I can only call this a hobby, but everything I have seen in multiple realms, I see nothing substantial, so far, which contradicts this thesis.
I see China as the likely END result of all nations, because of our good intentions.