Throttled meaning in nepali12/24/2023 ![]() However, there is much in the rules that still causes concern. As a result, the final text of the rules differs from what was earlier proposed, and it is arguably more nuanced in certain respects. The government also reportedly sought additional advice from the Ministry of Law and Justice on the legality of the rules. In the two years between the draft amendments and the notification of the actual rules, the subject of intermediary liability reform received continuous attention from civil society organizations in India. Github, Cloudflare and Mozilla, for instance, wrote an open letter to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, stating that “mposing the obligations proposed in these new rules would place a tremendous, and in many cases fatal, burden on many online intermediaries-especially new organizations and companies.” The draft amendments drew considerable attention from various companies and organizations, at both domestic and international levels. The draft rules imposed a host of stringent legal obligations and technical requirements on intermediaries: a general proactive monitoring obligation for “unlawful” content, as well as a traceability obligation for intermediaries to enable “tracing” of content creators. In 2018, following a calling attention motion on “Misuse of Social Media platforms and spreading of fake news” in the Parliament, the government had floated a draft version of amendments to the 2011 rules, which was subject to a period of public consultation. The 2021 rules supersede the regulations on intermediary liability issued in 2011 via the rule-making power granted under Section 79. This legal model is administered chiefly via section 79 of the Information Technology (IT) Act and the rules thereunder. India’s intermediary liability law follows what the human rights organization Article 19 terms a “conditional immunity” model: An intermediary is guaranteed a “safe harbor” exemption on the fulfillment of specific statutory conditions. The freedom of speech and expression on the South Asian internet appears to be visibly curtailed, as waves of polarization across South Asia are driving even relatively older democracies such as India into systematic democratic regression.īackground of the Indian Intermediary Liability Regime ![]() While each of these interventions has been passed with purported legitimate aims and-as we explore in this post-strikingly similar rationales, their cumulative impact on internet freedom and expression online has been dire. It joins other South Asian governments that have leveraged stringent, controversial norms on digital entities operating on their territories in the past five years, especially social media intermediaries and digital news publishers. By enacting these rules, India has become the newest hotspot of content regulation in South Asia. Given that the scope of the rules goes beyond online intermediaries, and extends to digital news publishers and OCCPs, the implications would be extensive. Fourteen prominent international civil society organizations called upon the government recently to withdraw the rules and put an end to digital censorship. At least 17 petitions challenging the validity of the rules have also been lodged in constitutional courts around the country by various individuals, news organizations and associations, and entities such as Facebook and WhatsApp. Many digital rights organizations and media houses criticized the rules for, among other things, being undemocratic, encouraging self-censorship and undermining privacy. The content of the 2021 rules became the subject of immediate controversy. Further, these rules also seek to regulate a new set of entities under the encompassing term “digital media,” essentially comprising online news “publishers” and online curated content providers (OCCPs) such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. These new rules seek to comprehensively regulate intermediaries by requiring a host of technical measures, compliance with stringent content takedown requests, and the incorporation of supposed standards of transparency and accountability in their processes. Titled the “Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021,” which we refer to as “ the 2021 rules ,” these regulations supersede a decade-old set of rules on the same subject, ostensibly coming on the heels of a series of disinformation-mediated offline harms and high-profile litigation on the culpability of online intermediaries in the spread of sexual abuse imagery. In February, the Indian government enacted the highly anticipated amendments to its intermediary liability regime.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |