On February 25, the Union government notified the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 202...
On February 25, the Union government notified the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. Unlike the IT Rules of 2011, the new regulations include video streaming platforms and online news portals within their ambit.
For social media entities such as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp, which are defined as “social media intermediaries” under the new rules, discussions with the Union government on the renewed guidelines have been taking place for the past few years. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology even published draft rules in 2018 and invited public comments on them. Intermediaries include internet search engines such as Google, e-commerce platforms, internet service providers and other entities.
The new rules have two major implications for intermediaries – the dilution of the conditional “safe harbour” provisions guaranteed under Section 79 of the IT Act and the introduction of traceability of content. It has been the ministry’s consistent position that traceability is an essential requirement to fix culpability on the “originator” of unlawful messages.
The IT Act defines an originator as a “person who sends, generates, stores or transmits any electronic message” or causes it to be so but does not include the intermediary. Hence, via the newly notified rules, the Union...
