The push for regulation of online news — as the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, has formed a committee to do — has been driven by a perception that the online space has failed in tackling bad actors and bad content (hate speech, fake news). But the concern with government regulation remains because some see it as taking a bad situation and making it worse. “When you talk about market failure you ignore government failure, government failure is ubiquitous,” said Amit Varma of Think Pragati. Since the beginning of the internet, the barriers between information and its consumers have slowly withered away as traditional news organisations and their editors have lost their gatekeeping monopoly. Anyone can start a blog and subvert business models of news publishing giants considerably larger than they are. So even before one talks of regulating online new the question that needs to be asked is how does one define it. Is the web edition of an old media (TV, print) online news? Can a blog which is run independently be labelled as online news? Is a post on social media online news? Even if one overcomes this seemingly insurmountable odd how does one go about regulating it? This discussion held at the Hilton in Mumbai, with support from STAR India, Amazon and Google raised these key questions. Should there be regulation? [caption id="attachment_185091" align="aligncenter" width="550"] ThinkPragati's Amit Varma speaks.[/caption] The key question put to the panellists before discussing the nuances of the regulatory process was that…
