On June 10, 2026, Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced the JAWBONE Act (S.4749), a bipartisan bill to amend the Communications Act of 1934 and create a federal cause of action against government officials who coerce — or merely attempt to coerce — social media platforms, broadcasters, and AI providers into restricting lawful speech. Crucially, the suit lies even when the pressure fails, and agencies would have to publicly disclose their content-related communications with intermediaries.
That Cruz and Wyden — rarely allies — agree on this tells you the problem is structural, not partisan. The bill responds directly to Murthy v. Missouri (2024), where the Supreme Court tossed a challenge to Biden-era pressure on platforms for lack of standing, and to NRA v. Vullo (2024), which reaffirmed that informal government coercion of speech violates the First Amendment. JAWBONE closes the standing gap by making the attempt actionable.
It is worth reading this American debate from New Delhi — because India has spent the last two years building precisely the architecture JAWBONE is designed to dismantle.
India formalized what the US is trying to ban
In the United States, jawboning is a scandal because it is informal, deniable, and off the books. In India, it has been given a login screen. The Sahyog portal, launched in October 2024 by the Home Ministry's Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), is a unified interface through which dozens of government agencies issue takedown directions to intermediaries. It routes those orders not through Section 69A of the IT Act — which carries codified procedure, a review committee, and the confidentiality and hearing safeguards the Supreme Court relied on in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) — but through Section 79(3)(b), the safe-harbour provision. The mechanism is simple coercion: comply, or lose your legal immunity for everything every user posts.
When X Corp challenged this, the Karnataka High Court, in a 351-page judgment by Justice M. Nagaprasanna on September 24, 2025, rejected the petition outright. It construed Section 79(3)(b) as a standalone power for government officers to order blocking through Sahyog, called the portal "an instrument of public good," and held that intermediaries must comply or forfeit safe harbour. X has filed a writ appeal; the High Court issued notice to the Centre in March 2026, and the matter is now before a division bench.
The contrast is stark. JAWBONE treats the threat "restrict this or face consequences" as a constitutional injury. India's courts have treated the same threat as lawful administration.
Steelmanning the Indian approach
The government's case is not frivolous. India's information ecosystem is genuinely dangerous: fraud rings, deepfakes, non-consensual intimate imagery, and communal incitement spread at a scale and speed that overwhelm case-by-case adjudication. Rest of World documented in June 2026 how scammers now operate inside the trusted apps — WhatsApp, Google, Facebook — that Indians use for everyday life, inflicting real financial and physical harm. A regulator facing that reality wants one fast lane to reach every intermediary at once. Sahyog is that lane, and the October 22, 2025 amendments did add safeguards: takedown notices must now come from an officer of at least Joint Secretary or Deputy Inspector General rank, must give a reasoned legal basis and specific URLs, and are subject to monthly review by a Secretary-rank officer.
Those are real improvements over a free-for-all. But they are administrative self-restraint, not law. They can be relaxed by the same memorandum that imposed them, and they substitute internal review for the independent check — judicial or quasi-judicial, with notice to the speaker — that distinguishes lawful regulation from coercion.
Proportionate regulation means procedure, not a faster threat
The pro-innovation objection is not that India should tolerate scams or CSAM. It is that the fast-takedown-or-lose-immunity model is the wrong tool, and a self-defeating one. It conscripts private companies as the state's enforcement arm while denying the affected speaker any hearing, collapsing the distinction between unlawful content and content an official simply dislikes. It chills exactly the lawful, critical speech a democracy most needs, because the rational platform response to a vague threat is to over-remove. And it deters the investment and trust India is otherwise courting — the same window in which, as Rest of World reported, elite Indian AI talent is looking to come home.
The JAWBONE Act points to a better equilibrium, and one India already half-possesses. Section 69A and Shreya Singhal supply the template: blocking must follow defined procedure, with reasons, review, and the possibility of challenge — not the bare leverage of safe harbour. JAWBONE's transparency mandate is the cheapest, highest-value reform: if every government takedown communication were published, Sahyog's 36-hour deadline would coexist with public accountability instead of replacing it.
America is moving — with rare bipartisan agreement — to make coercion of platforms a thing citizens can sue over. India has built the machine that makes such coercion routine and called it cooperation. The word Sahyog means "cooperation." Between a regulator and an intermediary, cooperation under threat of losing one's legal existence is just jawboning with better branding. The fix is not to abandon online safety; it is to route it through procedure that a court, and a speaker, can see.