New IT Rules of India
Important Provisions:
- According to the Rules, pornographic photos that were taken without authorization must be deleted within 24 hours.
- In order to improve transparency, the guidelines also mandate that compliance reports be disclosed.
- Rules provide for the development of a procedure for resolving disputes over material removal.
- It makes it feasible to label information, making it clear to customers if it is sponsored, owned, advertised, or otherwise exclusively controlled.
These rules have following problems:
Pertaining to the freedom of expression and speech:
- In Life Insurance Corp. of India v. Prof. Manubhai D. Shah, the Supreme Court emphasised that “the freedom to spread one’s opinions is the lifeblood of every democratic organisation” (1992).
- The rules must therefore be carefully examined to spot any fresh difficulties they might have brought about.
A legal infraction:
- The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology developed the regulations (MeiTY).
- However, the Second Schedule of the Business Rules of 1961 does not grant MeiTY the ability to create laws for digital media.
- The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting is the official owner of this authority.
- The legal doctrine known as “colourable legislation,” which argues that the legislature cannot act directly if it is not possible to do so, is violated by this behaviour.
- Digital media is not covered by the Information Technology Act of 2000.
- The new IT Rules, which they refer to as their parent legislation, thus go beyond the authority granted to them by the IT Act.
- The Act is thereby violated by the Rules.
Denies a middleman a viable route of action:
- An intermediary is now required to remove content within 36 hours of receiving a court order.
- In the case that the intermediary disagrees with the Government’s order owing to a short timeframe, this denies it a just remedy.
Privacy breach:
- These Rules’ necessity for traceability is detrimental to the right to privacy.
- End-to-end encryption gave users protection because it prevented middlemen from accessing the content of their messages.
- This immunity will be lost if the traceability requirement is made mandatory, which will reduce the security and privacy of these communications.
- This makes all of the information obtained from these interactions open to intrusion by malicious people.
- In this situation, the risk goes beyond privacy invasion and access restrictions to a safe location.
- Recent data breaches, like those that affected a number of airlines and a renowned pizza delivery service, highlight the dangers of doing this in the absence of data security legislation.
- The Rules hurriedly remove everything that a ruling authority may perceive to be “fake news” rather than getting rid of the false information.
Operational expenses:
- The Rules increase the operational expenses of intermediaries by requiring them to have nodal officials, compliance officers, and grievance officers who are Indian residents.
- In addition, middlemen are required to operate offices in India.
- As a result, international firms and emerging intermediary businesses find it difficult to turn a profit.
- Therefore, by adding unnecessary financial barriers, these Rules not only obstruct the “marketplace of ideas,” but also the economic market for intermediaries as a whole.
