A wolf in watchdog’s clothing

1st March, 2021 GOVERNANCE

Context:

The new rules introduced by the Centre last week to regulate all types of digital platforms, with the idea of redressing user grievances and ensuring compliance with the law, are deeply unsettling as they will end up giving the government a good deal of leverage over online news publishers and intermediaries.
This holds troubling implications for freedom of expression and right to information.

Government’s Stand:

Electronics and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, while launching ‘The Information Technology (Guidelines for Intermediaries and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021’, presented it as a “soft-touch oversight mechanism”.
A government press note termed it “progressive” and “liberal”.
It also claimed the rules seek to “address people’s varied concerns while removing any misapprehension about curbing creativity and freedom of speech and expression”.

Controlling Media:

The soft tone notwithstanding, these rules force digital news publishers and video streaming services to adhere to a cumbersome three-tier structure of regulation, with a government committee at its apex.
This is unprecedented in a country where the news media have been given the space all along to self-regulate, based on the mature understanding that any government presence could have a chilling effect on free speech and conversations.
That the new rules pertain only to digital news media, and not to the whole of the news media, hardly provides comfort, as the former is increasingly becoming a prime source of news and views.
Further, it is of significant concern that the purview of the IT Act, 2000, has been expanded to bring digital news media under its regulatory ambit without legislative action, which digital liberties organizations such as the Internet Freedom Foundation have flagged.

Increasing Burden:

The new rules have increased the compliance burden for social media platforms too.
The bigger of these platforms will have to appoint chief compliance officers, to ensure the rules and the laws are adhered to, and a nodal officer, with whom the law enforcement agencies will be coordinating, apart from a grievance officer.
Such platforms in the messaging space will have to “enable the identification of the first originator of the information on its computer resource” based on a judicial order.
Thus, the rules require messaging apps such as Whatsapp and Signal to trace problematic messages to the originator.
While the triggers for a judicial order that require such an identification are serious offences, it raises uneasy questions about how such apps will be able to adhere to such orders, as their messages are encrypted end-to-end.

Way Forward:

Some amount of tightening of policy is inevitable given new challenges. But it would be wrong to imagine that by implanting itself in the grievance redress process or by making platforms share more information, the government can solve these problems.
It could prove counterproductive in a country where the citizens still do not have a data privacy law to guard themselves against excesses committed by any party.
Regulation has an important place in the scheme of things, and no one advocates giving a free pass to the digital platforms.
The laws to combat unlawful content are already in place. What is required is their uniform application. It is also far from reassuring that this government has had an uneasy, sometimes unpleasant, relationship with the media in general.

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