The Minister of State for Electronics & Information Technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar entered a room full of journalists at a press conference on a Saturday morning (29th October) to brief about the new IT rules amendment notified a day earlier. Surprisingly, the first thing he did was apologise to journalists, who had to work overtime as the amendment was released at night. Well, that’s a problem for us. For you, the users, there seems to be a new set of problems – the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2022. These rules add to and change certain provisions in the existing IT rules of 2021. Read this article if you want a full summary of it. And if you’re short on time, here’s a brief about some major changes this amendment brings: First, it calls for the creation of a government-appointed committee called a Grievance Appellate Committee (GAC), to which users can appeal if they’re not satisfied with how an intermediary (like Facebook) is responding to their grievances (like content takedown). More than one GACs can be created and the intermediary has to comply with its decisions, according to the new rules. Next, the amendment adds more obligations on intermediaries to regulate content. Thirdly, the word “misinformation” has been added among things that need to be regulated by the intermediaries. Since the bill’s release, several concerns and questions have been raised on how this will play out in real-world scenarios. In this piece, we clarify several…
