🥇If There’s One Story To Read Today When hosting news, are OTT platforms considered news aggregators or not? Recently, the Indian government said that OTT platforms that stream news from channels are exempted from the Foreign Direct Investment limit of 26 percent, which is applicable to all other digital media. One may be prompted to think: is this any kind of preferential treatment toward traditional news channels over digital news media publishers? While that may be the case, the stated reason is that OTT platforms do not really curate the news content, so they are not really news aggregators. Hence, they are not even digital media publishers–under the country’s new IT Rules–who are subjected to the FDI rule. But, unaddressed ambiguities and contradictory definitions indicate that OTT platforms can also be classified as “news aggregators”. Whether or not they are news aggregators, India’s I&B ministry is definitely suggesting otherwise. This further adds to the existing confusion about how the government chooses to deal with news streaming and news aggregation on different online platforms. [Read, 3 minutes] Click here to subscribe to MediaNama Daily and receive the best of tech policy in your inbox. 🎟 Our event is around the corner! Can user verification prevent scams? How can we protect our sensitive data while undergoing government verification? Can verification prevent harm to children? We will be raising and discussing these, and more such questions, at our hybrid roundtable on ‘Exploring User Verification’ at The Claridges in New Delhi on March 23, 2023. Want…
