An order nine months in the ground
On 19 August 2026, Justice Jyoti Singh of the Delhi High Court directed the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to take instructions on de-registering Internet Service Providers that had failed to block pornographic content misusing the name of actor and Rajya Sabha MP Jaya Bachchan. The court was reviewing compliance with an ex parte order dated 10 November 2025 that had directed the two ministries to block the offending webpages. Nine months on, Bachchan's counsel told the court the material was still live. MeitY and DoT confirmed in court that the ISPs simply hadn't acted. Justice Singh's response, as reported by Bar & Bench, was blunt: the ISPs were "neither enforcing court orders nor responding to directions" — and de-registration, the court suggested, might be the only deterrent left (Bar & Bench, 19 August 2026).
That frustration is earned. This is not the first celebrity personality-rights case to run into a blocking order that nobody enforced — Delhi HC granted similar ex parte protection to Anil Kapoor and Amitabh Bachchan against AI-generated and deepfake misuse of their likeness in 2023, part of a now-familiar pattern of courts building personality-rights doctrine order by order because Parliament hasn't legislated one. What's new here is the remedy floated for non-compliance: not a contempt notice against a named respondent, but potential cancellation of an ISP's authorisation to operate.
The case for taking licenses seriously
The strongest version of the court's position deserves to be stated plainly. Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 already treats blocking-order compliance as non-optional: an intermediary that fails to comply faces up to seven years' imprisonment and a fine (Section 69A, IT Act 2000, via Indian Kanoon). Non-consensual intimate imagery misusing a real person's identity is precisely the kind of harm blocking powers exist for — it is not a close call on free-expression grounds, and delay compounds the injury with every day the content stays indexed and shareable. If ISPs can stall a blocking order for nine months with no consequence beyond a strongly worded hearing, the order is theatre. A regulator that never revokes anything eventually stops being believed, and licensing leverage is the one lever DoT actually holds over the physical layer of the internet that content-blocking orders depend on.
Why de-registration is still the wrong first instrument
The trouble is that de-registration is not a fine-grained tool — it's closer to a corporate death penalty, cutting off every subscriber an ISP serves, for defaults that are frequently technical and vary enormously in culpability. Not every ISP asked to block a URL runs its own DNS or content-filtering infrastructure with equal sophistication; a regional or rural provider genuinely may lack the tooling that a Reliance Jio or Airtel takes for granted, and treating unequal capacity as uniform defiance risks knocking out connectivity for thousands of unrelated subscribers to punish one operator's negligence. Nothing in the record disclosed so far distinguishes ISPs that ignored the order from ISPs that tried and failed, or names which providers are even implicated — the court asked MeitY and DoT to "take instructions," which itself signals the compliance picture isn't yet clear enough to act on.
That gap matters because India's intermediary-liability architecture has no calibrated escalation ladder between "court order issued" and "license cancelled." Section 79 of the IT Act conditions an intermediary's safe harbour on due diligence, and MeitY's own draft amendment to the 2021 IT Rules — open for consultation until 14 April 2026 — proposes making compliance with ministerial directions an explicit due-diligence obligation, with loss of safe harbour as the consequence of defiance (ThePrint, MeitY draft IT Rules). That is closer to right-sized: liability exposure scales with the specific failure, doesn't require shutting down a network, and can be litigated without collateral damage to uninvolved subscribers. The Telecommunications Act, 2023 separately gives government broad suspension and revocation powers over telecom authorisations for security and public-order grounds, but those powers were built for network-level threats, not for adjudicating a single unblocked URL (PRS India, Telecommunications Bill 2023 legislative brief).
What should happen next
The fix isn't to abandon enforcement teeth — it's to name the actual laggard ISPs, publish a compliance audit, and reserve de-registration for providers that fail a second, post-audit deadline, rather than floating network-wide cancellation as the opening move against an unnamed set of defaulters. MeitY and DoT's forthcoming submission to the court is the moment to draw that line. If India wants blocking orders to mean something, the credible threat has to be proportionate enough that courts actually use it — a sanction so severe it's never imposed teaches ISPs the same lesson as an order nobody enforces.