India will not hold back from making laws that safeguard national interest when it comes to regulating social media content, RS Prasad, India's Union Minister for Electronics, told Reuters. Prasad added that the country will hold ‘wide consultations’ with internet companies before finalizing the rules. “We’ll be fair, we’ll be objective, but India’s sovereign right to frame rules and laws will always be there,” Prasad said. “As a minister, I want to assure that a social media company shall not be allowed to abuse the data of Indians to influence elections,” he added. According to the report, technology companies have lobbied the government as the proposed rules “impose burdensome obligations” on them. The Centre is currently in the process of finalizing the country's intermediary liability rules. The rules and their implications In late December, MeitY released the proposed changes to the Intermediary Liability Rules under the IT Act. The rules propose stringent regulation from internet companies and intermediaries, requirement of a physical office in India, and providing information to the government within 72 hours. For a platform like WhatsApp, this would mean breaking end-to-end encryption to ensure traceability. The rules also need platforms to proactively take down content and unlawful content within a shorter period of time than before. What companies have said about the proposed rules A month after the call for consultations, Mozilla, Wikimedia Foundation, and GitHub wrote an open letter to RS Prasad pointing out that the proposed rules “take an unprecedented step” in turning the open internet to “a tool of automated censorship and…
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