#FactCheck - Viral Video Falsely Linked to India; Actually from Bangladesh

Introduction

In July 2025, the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership (DTSP) achieved a significant milestone with the formal acceptance of its Safe Framework Specification as an international standard, ISO/IEC 25389. This is the first globally recognised standard that is exclusively concerned with guaranteeing a secure online experience for the general public's use of digital goods and services.

Significance of the New Framework

Fundamentally, ISO/IEC 25389 provides organisations with an organised framework for recognising, controlling, and reducing risks associated with conduct or content. This standard, which was created under the direction of ISO/IEC's Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1), integrates the best practices of DTSP and offers a precise way to evaluate organisational maturity in terms of safety and trust.  Crucially, it offers the first unified international benchmark, allowing organisations globally to coordinate on common safety pledges and regularly assess progress.

Other Noteworthy Standards and Frameworks

While ISO/IEC 25389 is pioneering, it’s not the only framework shaping digital trust and safety:

• One of the main outcomes of the United Nations’ 2024 Summit for the Future was the UN's Global Digital Compact, which describes cross-border cooperation on secure and reliable digital environments with an emphasis on countering harmful content, upholding online human rights, and creating accountability standards. 
• The World Economic Forum’s Digital Trust Framework defines the goals and values, such as cybersecurity, privacy, transparency, redressability, auditability, fairness, interoperability and safety, implicit to the concept of digital trust. It also provides a roadmap to digital trustworthiness that imbibes these dimensions. 
• The Framework for Integrity, Security and Trust (FIST) launched at the Cybereace Summit 2023 at USI of India in New Delhi, calls for a multistakeholder approach to co-create solutions and best practices for digital trust and safety.
• While still in the finalisation stage for implementation rollout, India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act) and its Rules (2025) aim to strike a balance between individual rights and data processing needs by establishing a groundwork for data security and privacy.
• India is developing frameworks in cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence. Using a hub-and-spoke model under the IndiaAI Mission, the AI Safety Institute was established in early 2025 with the goal of creating standards for trustworthy, moral, and safe AI systems. Furthermore, AI standards with an emphasis on safety and dependability are being drafted by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS). 
• Google's DigiKavach program (2023) and Google Safety Engineering Centre (GSEC) in Hyderabad are concrete efforts to support digital safety and fraud prevention in India's tech sector.

What It Means for India

India is already claiming its place in discussions about safety and trust around the world. Google's June 2025 safety charter for India, for example, highlights how India's distinct digital scale, diversity, and vast threat landscape provide insights that inform global cybersecurity strategies. 

For India's digital ecosystem, ISO/IEC 25389 comes at a critical juncture. Global best practices in safety and trust are desperately needed as a result of the rapid adoption of digital technologies, including the growth of digital payments, e-governance, and artificial intelligence and a concomitant rise in instances of digital harms. Through its guidelines, ISO/IEC 25389 provides a reference benchmark that Indian startups, government agencies, and tech companies can use to improve their safety standards.

Conclusion 

A global trust-and-safety standard like ISO/IEC 25389 is essential for making technology safer for people, even as we discuss the broader adoption of security and safety-by-design principles integrated into the processes of technological product development. India can improve user protection, build its reputation globally, and solidify its position as a key player in the creation of a safer, more resilient digital future by implementing this framework in tandem with its growing domestic regulatory framework (such as the DPDP Act and AI Safety policies).

References 

• https://dtspartnership.org/the-safe-framework-specification/
• https://dtspartnership.org/press-releases/dtsps-safe-framework-published-as-an-international-standard/?
• https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/04/united-nations-global-digital-compact-trust-security/?
• https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/google-releases-safety-charter-for-india-senior-exec-details-top-cyber-threat-actors-in-the-country/articleshow/121903651.cms? 
• https://initiatives.weforum.org/digital-trust/framework 
• https://government.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/secure-india/the-launch-of-fist-framework-for-integrity-security-and-trust/103302090 

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Introduction

The most recent cable outages in the Red Sea, which caused traffic to slow down throughout the Middle East, South Asia, and even India, Pakistan and several parts of the UAE, like Etilasat and Du networks, also experienced comparable internet outages, serve as a reminder that the physical backbone of the internet is both routine and extremely important. Cloud platforms reroute traffic, e-commerce stalls, financial transactions stutter, and governments face the fragility of something they long believed to be seamless when systems like SMW4 and IMEWE malfunction close to Jeddah. Concerns over the susceptibility of undersea information highways have been raised by the incident. Given the ongoing conflict in the Red Sea region, where Yemen’s Houthi rebels have been waging a campaign against commercial shipping in retaliation for the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.  The effects are seen immediately. The argument over whether global connection is genuinely robust or just operating on borrowed time was reignited by these recent failures, which compelled key providers to reroute flows. 

A geopolitical signal is what looks like a “technical glitch.” Accidents in contested waters are rarely simply accidents, and the inability to quickly assign blame highlights how brittle this ostensibly flawless digital world is. 

The Paradox of Essential yet Exposed Infrastructure

This is not an isolated accident. Undersea cables, which carry more than 97% of all internet traffic worldwide, connect continents at the speed of light, and support the cloud infrastructures that contemporary societies rely on, are the brains of the digital economy., as cautioned by NATO’s Cooperative  Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. In a sense, they are our unseen electrical grid; without them, connectivity breaks down. However, they continue to be incredibly fragile in spite of their significance. Anchors and fishing gear frequently damage cables, which are no thicker than a garden hose, and they break more than a hundred times annually on average. Most faults can be swiftly fixed or relocated, but when several cuts happen in strategic areas, like the 2022 Tonga eruption or the current Red Sea crisis, nations and economies are exposed to being isolated for days. 

The geopolitical risks are far more urgent. Subsea cables traverse disputed waters, land in hostile regimes, and cross oceans without regard for political boundaries. This makes them appealing for espionage, where state actors can tap or alter flows covertly, as well as sabotage, when service is interrupted to prevent access. Deliberate cable strikes have been likened by NATO specialists to the destruction of bridges or highways: if you choke the arteries, you choke the economy. Ironically, the most susceptible locations are not far below the surface but rather where cables emerge. These landing sites, which handle billions of dollars’ worth of trade, can have less security than a conventional bank office.

The New Theatre of Geopolitics 

Legal frameworks exist, but they are patchwork. Intentional damage is illegal under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and previous agreements, but attribution is still infamously challenging. Covert sabotage and intelligence operations are examples of legal grey areas in hybrid warfare scenarios. Even during times of peace, national governments that rely on their continuous operation but find it difficult to extend sovereignty into international waters, private telecom consortia, and content giants like Google and Amazon that now finance their own cables share the burden of protection.

Cables convey influence in addition to data. Strategic leverage belongs to whoever can secure them, tap them or cut them during a fight. Even though landing stations are the entry points for billions of dollars’ worth of international trade, they frequently offer less security than a commercial bank branch. 

India at the Crossroads of Digital Geopolitics 

India’s reliance on underwater cables presents both advantages and disadvantages. India presents a classic single-point-of-failure danger, with more than 95% of its international data traffic being routed through a 6-km coastal stretch close to Versova, Mumbai. Red Sea disruptions have previously demonstrated how swiftly chokepoints located far from India’s coast may impede its digital arteries, placing a burden on government functions, defence communications, and financial flows. However, this same vulnerability also makes India a crucial player in the global discussion around digital sovereignty. It is not only an infrastructure exercise; it is also a strategic and constitutional necessity to be able to diversify landing places, expedite clearances, and develop indigenous repair capability.

India’s geographic location also presents opportunities. India’s location along East-West cable lines makes it an ideal location for robust connectivity as the Indo-Pacific region becomes the defining region of geopolitics in the twenty-first century. India may change from being a passive recipient of connectivity to a shaper of its governance by investing in distributed cable architecture and strengthening partnerships through initiatives like Quad and IPEF. Its aspirations for global influence must be balanced with its home regulatory lethargy. By doing this, India can secure not only bandwidth but also sovereignty itself by converting subsea cables from hidden liabilities into tools of economic might and geopolitical leverage. 

CyberPeace Insights 

If cables are considered essential infrastructure, then their safety demands the same level of attention that we give to ports, airports, and electrical grids. Stronger landing station defences, redundancy in route, and sincere public-private collaborations are now a necessity rather than an option.

The Red Sea incident is a call to action rather than a singular disruption. The robustness of underwater cables will determine whether the internet is a sustainable resource or a brittle luxury susceptible to the next outage as reliance on the cloud grows and 5G spreads. 

References

• https://forumias.com/blog/answered-assess-the-strategic-significance-of-undersea-cable-networks-for-indias-digital-economy-and-national-security-discuss-the-vulnerabilities-of-this-infrastructure-and-suggest-measures-to-e/ 
• https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/red-sea-cable-cuts-disrupt-internet-across-asia-middle-east-2025-09-07/ 
• https://pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/what-can-we-learn-from-africas-multiple-submarine-cable-outages 

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18th November 2022 CyberPeace Foundation in association with Universal Acceptance has successfully conducted the workshop on Universal Acceptance and Multilingual Internet for the students and faculties of Royal Global University under CyberPeace Center of Excellence (CCoE). CyberPeace Foundation has always been engaged towards the aim of spreading awareness regarding the various developments, avenues, opportunities and threats regarding cyberspace. The same has  been the keen principle of the CyberPeace Centre of Excellence setup in collaboration with various esteemed educational institutes. We at CyberPeace Foundation would like to take the collaborations and our efforts to a new height of knowledge and awareness by proposing a workshop on UNIVERSAL ACCEPTANCE AND MULTILINGUAL INTERNET. This workshop was instrumental in providing the academia and research community a wholesome outlook towards the multilingual spectrum of internet including Internationalized domain names and email address Internationalization.

‍Date –18th November 2022

‍Time – 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM

‍Duration – 2 hours

‍Mode - Online

‍Audience – Academia and Research Community

‍Participants Joined- 130

‍Crowd Classification - Engineering students (1st and 4th year, all streams) and Faculties members

‍Organizer : Mr. Harish Chowdhary : UA Ambassador Moderator: Ms. Pooja Tomar, Project coordinator cum trainer

‍GuestSpeakers:Mr. Abdalmonem Galila, Abdalmonem: Vice Chair , Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) ,Mr. Mahesh D Kulkarni: Director, Evaris Systems and Former Senior Director, CDAC, Government of India, Mr. Akshat Joshi, Founder Think Trans First session was delivered by Mr. Abdalmonem Galila, Abdalmonem: Vice Chair , Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) “Universal Acceptance( UA) and why UA matters?”

• What is universal acceptance?
• UA is cornerstone to a digitally inclusive internet by ensuring all domain names and email addresses in all languages, script and character length.
• Achieving UA ensures that every person has the ability to navigate the internet.
• Different UA issues were also discussed and explained.
• Tagated systems by the UA and implication were discussed in detail.

Second Session was delivered by Mr. Akshat Joshi, Founder Think Trans on “Universal Acceptance to the IDNsand the economic Landscape”

• What is Universal Acceptance?
• The internet has had standards that allow people to use domain names and email addresses in their native scripts. Software developers need to bring their applications up-to-date so that consumers can use their chosen identity.
• A typical problem is that an IDN email address is not recognised by a website form as a valid email address.
• The importance of adopting IDNs z Enable citizens to use their own identity online (correct spelling, native language) z Relates to language, culture and content z Promotes local and regional content z Allows businesses and politicians to better target their messages.

Third session was delivered by Mr. Mahesh D Kulkarni, ES Director Evaris on the topic of “IDNs in Indian languages perspective- challenges and solutions”.

• The multilingual diversity of India was focused on and its impact.
• Most students were not aware of what Unicode, IDNS is and their usage.
• Students were briefed by giving real time examples on IDN, Domain name implementation using local language.
• In depth knowledge of and practical exposure of Universal Acceptance and Multilingual Internet has been served to the students.
• Tools and Resources for Domain Name and Domain Languages were explained.
• Languages nuances of Multilingual diversity of India explained with real time facts and figures.
• Given the idea of IDN Email,Homograph attack,Homographic variant with proper real time examples.
• Explained about the security threats and IDNA protocols.
• Given the explanation on ABNF.
• Explained the stages of Universal Acceptance.