The Internet in India is regulated by the Information Technology Act (2000) to which amendments were passed in 2008 and in 2009 the IT (Amendment) Act 2008 was passed. The Ministry of IT has now gotten down to notifying additional rules for the Act. Amongst the set of rules is one specifically for cyber cafes, about which I’ll write another post, and there’s one on ‘due diligence on intermediaries’. Intermediaries in the context of internet means that if you post any comment on this blog, I am legally responsible for your comments too. Intermediary liability is a favourite tool of internet censorship by repressive regimes the world over.

To those familiar with Indian laws, this will appear to be routine stuff, the sort of laws that regulate newspapers, for instance, or freedom of expression in India in general. However, three main problems here: one, the over-emphasis on blogs and bloggers, indicating the government’s anxiety over controlling blogs; two, the vagueness and vast scope of the reasons for which the government can block websites; and three, the utterly regressive move of introducing ‘intermediary due-diligence’, a favourite tool of repressive regimes against bloggers.

It is interesting that while “Blogs” and “Blogger” are defined in the Definitions section of this rule, the words aren’t used in the rules per se. In other words, they had blogs in mind while making the rules. These rules, if notified, will basically be India’s Blogger Control Act.

Continue reading Updated: Get Ready for India’s Blogger Control Act →