India Plans To Regulate Internet Services To Protect Democracy

Last Monday, India announced that the government is planning to tighten existing rules to control intermediaries, including social media platforms depending on their users to develop different content as they are leading to “unimaginable disruption” to democracy.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has filed a legal document with the Supreme Court of India. As state in that document, by next year's 15^th January, regulations for intermediaries would be formulated.

In a legal filing of the government department, the internet was said to appear as a useful tool to provoke unimaginable disruption to Indian democratic polity. According to the ministry, the oversight of several internet services would allow officials to address the increasing threats to the nation’s security, sovereignty, and integrity as well as individual rights.

In late 2018, the government announced a draft of consultation guidelines. The proposed regulations, which revise the law of 8 years ago, identified any internet services or social media platforms that have the number of users to over 5 million as intermediaries.

The filing this Monday responds to a current case filed by Facebook. The tech giant wants to stop the government to force WhatsApp, a popular instant messaging platform, to launch a system allowing to reveal the source of exchanged messages. Currently, India is the biggest market of WhatsApp with over 400M users.

There are some suggestions that different social media apps should ask Indian users to link accounts with a 12-digit biometric, government-issued ID called Aadhaar. Over 1.2 billion Indians have joined this system.

Executives of Facebook have shown their disagreement. They think that meeting those demands means breaking what international WhatsApp users enjoy – the end-to-end encryption. Besides, wiping out the encryption is likely to compromise the privacy and safety of Facebook users.

The online population in India has grown dramatically in the last few years. According to the estimation of the industry, over 600 million Indian users are online today. More and more Indian is becoming a part of social media platforms and the internet thanks to the easy access to inexpensive mobile data as well as the proliferation of economical Android devices.

According to the earlier speech of a lower court to the apex court, technology has resulted in societal development and economic growth. Technology has also led to an exponential increase in fake news, hate speech, defamatory postings, anti-national activities, as well as several unlawful activities on the Internet.