The legality of the Grievance Appellate Committee was once again questioned in submissions on the draft amendments to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 made by Software Freedom and Law Centre (SFLC). SFLC, which is a Delhi-based not-for-profit, submitted its comments last month as part of the public consultation undertaken on the Rules analysing the legality of the Rules and free speech implications of the amendments. We have summarised it below. On June 6th, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology had released a set of proposed amendments to the 2021 Rules for public consultation. After their release, stakeholders and experts had raised concerns on the amendments' legality, effectiveness, and more. Why it matters? The changes proposed in the amendments instituting a new grievance redressal mechanism (the Grievance Appellate Committee or GAC), shortening existing grievance redressal timelines, making intermediaries respect constitutional rights, and more which stakeholders have criticised for stifling free speech online, increasing compliance burdens on intermediaries, upturning legal precedence, respectively. SFLC's comments provide further clarity on the legal position as well as possible ways forward could be, for the amendments. Legal issues with the Rules Excessive 'subordinate delegation' in proposed GAC "The Rules create the administrative body of the GAC without any policy or guideline established for its functioning under the parent Act and hence, suffers from the vice of excessive subordinate delegation of legislative powers. On examination, it becomes evident that the Rules do not contain appropriate safeguards, guidelines, or checks…
News
In comments on IT Rules amendments, SFLC looks at the legality of changes and way forward
Software Freedom and Law Centre (SFLC) raised concerns on the GAC and “overzealous” censorship in comments on India’s IT Rules during consultation
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...