GitHub, Mozilla and Cloudflare request Indian Government to be transparent about changes in its intermediary liability rules
The Indian government proposed changes to its intermediary rules in December 2018 which has left the country’s internet companies worried as the government is set to notify these rules by January 15, 2020. Companies like Microsoft’s GitHub, Mozilla and Cloudflare have written an open letter to IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad appealing him to make the final draft for consultation.
According to the proposed rule, any service that facilitates communication between two or more users and had more than 5 million users in India to set up a local office and have a senior executive in the nation who could be held responsible for any legal issues. The proposal also suggested that any of these services must be able to take down questionable content within 24 hours and share the user data within 72 hours of request.
Upto this time, companies like Facebook and Google have enjoyed “safe harbor” laws. The laws, currently applicable in the U.S. under the Communications Decency Act and India through its 2000 Information Technology Act, say that tech platforms won’t be held liable for the things their users share on the platform.
Earlier, the Indian government said that by January 15, it would submit the final draft of the proposal to India’s Supreme Court. The only issue of concern with the proposal is that except the government officials nobody has idea about what is in the final draft.
The organizations argued that safe harbor liability protections have been fundamental to the growth of the internet in India — which has emerged as the last great growth market for internet companies globally. Imposing the obligations proposed in these new rules would “place a tremendous, and in many cases fatal, burden on many online intermediaries — especially new organizations and companies. A new community or a startup would be significantly challenged by the need to build expensive filtering infrastructure and hire an army of lawyers,” they said.
See What’s Next in Tech With the Fast Forward Newsletter
Tweets From @varindiamag
Nothing to see here - yet
When they Tweet, their Tweets will show up here.