If proactive monitoring and takedowns is going to be a rule, it’s undoubtedly going to increase costs for us, said Santosh Panda, CEO of Explara at MediaNama's discussion on Intermediary Liability: The Way Forward in Bangalore in November 2019. “It will also reduce adoption since the onboarding process will become complex, since we wouldn’t able to onboard users with just a mobile number, and would have to ask for PAN or Aadhaar card, etc,” he said. “At the end of the day, we want to ensure that the user is real, has legal representation, and is eligible to host an event,” he added. According to Ravi Sethia, co-founder of Udhaar, there should be a blanket rule for everyone. He laid out hypothetical challenges he could face if proactive monitoring and takedowns was implemented: "Being a mobile app for taking loans, one of the things that would happen is someone could have submitted documents with a pornographic image, and suppose we pass it on to the lender. Does that also cause some kind of issue, are we liable for scrutinising the content we get?" "If someone is recharging their number on our platform or transferring money from one user to another, and there is a message with terrorist content sent alongwith the money transfer, could that be misuse for terrorist activity? Do we become liable?" Note that quotes are not verbatim and have been edited for clarity. Is this requirement vulnerable to court challenge? Besides, a substantive new obligation should not…
