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Online security top concern in Asia Pacific: Internet Society survey
NEW DELHI: Online security is an area that warrants most urgent attention from policymakers, according to a recent Internet Society (IS) survey on Policy Issues in Asia Pacific.
“As trust online has become a key issue for Internet users throughout Asia Pacific, it’s clear that people feel that current policies are not doing enough to protect their privacy and security online,” IS said in a statement from Singapore.
The survey polled almost 2,000 end-users from across the region on their attitudes towards current Internet policy issues. Access is still the primary concern for stakeholders, but Internet security has become top of mind, replacing cloud computing as the second-most followed topic by respondents, as tracked by the annual study.
Moreover, 58 per cent of respondents in the 2016 survey thought cybercrime needed to be addressed by governments, followed by connectivity (47 per cent), data protection (45 per cent) and privacy (44 per cent).
As connectivity has improved over the past year –70 per cent stated that they had experienced better Internet speed and 55 per cent saw a drop in the cost of their Internet subscription — users are turning their focus to online trust.
“The results of this year’s survey show that stakeholders in the region hold connectivity and security as paramount and feel these need urgent attention from governments,” Internet Society’s Regional Bureau Director for Asia-Pacific Rajnesh Singh was quoted in the official statement as saying.
“As trust online has become a key issue for Internet users throughout Asia Pacific, it’s clear that people feel that current policies are not doing enough to protect their privacy and security online,” adds Singh.
The elements of trust online are multi-faceted and are reflected in the survey’s findings. A large proportion of respondents cited data protection (77 per cent) as crucial for building confidence in the Internet. More than half also felt that consumer protection (54 per cent), transparency (51 per cent) and the ability to communicate confidentially (51 per cent) were more important than content, service, technology and applications (45 per cent).
While many believed that policies regarding online security in their country were largely compatible with their human and civil rights, this view did not extend to privacy online. The survey reveals that 59 per cent of participants did not believe their privacy was protected online.
Internet users were also doubtful about the impact of online security policies on their online activities. Over half indicated these policies have not increased their confidence in being able to use the Internet securely and only 34 per cent agreed that the current online security policies appropriately address the real threats and risks encountered online.
The Internet Society is an independent source for global Internet information and thought leadership. It is also the organizational home for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and has members and chapters around the world. For the 2016 survey, maximum respondents were from South Asia (67 per cent), followed by South-East Asia (17 per cent), East Asia and Australia, New Zealand & the Pacific Islands.
To a lesser degree, Internet users were also following developments around cloud computing (46 per cent), e-commerce (44 per cent), big data (44 per cent), consumer protection (43 per cent), the Internet of Things (43 per cent), freedom of expression (40 per cent), online child protection (38 per cent), content filtering (37 per cent), censorship (36 per cent), and net neutrality (34 per cent).
Internet access was of greater importance to specific sectors and sub-regions, particularly rural dwellers (69 per cent) and those living in the Pacific islands, Australia and New Zealand (77 per cent).
Respondents also opine that governments should have more people’s involvement in policy-making related to Internet. About 77 per cent of respondents say that they have not had an opportunity to participate in public consultations for government policy-making for the Internet in the past year. This figure was higher for those between 15 to 24 years old (85 per cent) and those in the private sector (84 per cent).
Conversely, the proportion of those who have had the opportunity to participate was higher for those who identified with civil society (34 per cent) and those who live in Southeast Asia (33 per cent). The minority (23 per cent) who have had a chance to contribute to policymaking learned of these opportunities mainly through email (63 per cent). Other means included personal invitations (46 per cent), social media posts (40 per cent), government websites (26 per cent), media or press coverage (24 per cent), word of mouth (19 per cent), government press releases and advertisements (15 per cent).
According to the IS survey, respondents accessed the Internet through various means: more than a quarter went online mainly through wireless or cellular (41 per cent) or through DSL (26 per cent) networks. The rest were using optical fibre (19 per cent), cable (12 per cent) or dial-up (2 per cent).
Those who spend more than one-third of their income on Internet connectivity used cellular (28 per cent) more than any other means. By contrast only 6 per cent of senior citizen respondents used cellular connectivity. Women mainly used wireless Internet (43 per cent).
Some 73 per cent of respondents also use the Internet for business purposes, the bulk (68 per cent) of which are between 25 to 44 years old. Business use was drastically lower among those who spend more than one-third of their income on Internet connectivity (51 per cent) and among rural dwellers (54 per cent).
Those who spend more than one third of their income on Internet connectivity had mobile data as the primary mode of access available to them daily (74 per cent) with residential connection (67 per cent) and office Internet (49 per cent) trailing behind. A similar pattern is observed among rural residents. Perhaps, not surprisingly, mobile data is also the leading source of everyday access for respondents between 15 to 24 years old (78 per cent). There was a lower overall availability of private establishments with free Wi-Fi in rural areas. Southeast Asia, on the other hand, had a higher than average concentration of free Wi-Fi in cafes (67 per cent), restaurants (57 per cent), and shopping malls (54 per cent).
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
