What's the news? The industry and government are exploring the idea of establishing internal appellate committees at intermediary level, unnamed sources told Moneycontrol. This committee would be a level above the grievance officers. If a user disagrees with the decision of the grievance officer, they can appeal to the committee of an intermediary, Moneycontrol learnt from sources. Why it matters: This would be in contrast to the proposed IT Rules 2021 amendments, which allow a user to appeal to a government-appointed Grievance Appellate Committee (GAC) if they were not satisfied with the grievance officer’s decision. But the Government was open to the idea of industry having a self-regulatory body, in a public discussion with stakeholders. However, another report released later stated that the government may decide on having a government-backed GAC. A source told Business Standard last month, “The self-regulatory organisation (SRO) can cover only a few companies working from outside India. The SRO model, if implemented, will be only for a few social media platforms", he went on to say that, the SRO could co-exist only with the GAC model. According to the Business Standard report, Rajeev Chandrashekhar, Union Minister of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) had also said that there would be multiple grievance appellate committees to deal with appeals of users against decisions of grievance officers of intermediaries. Background: According to a Reuters report last month, Google was against the idea of a self-regulatory body for the social media sector. The body would mean external reviews of…
