Reuters reported on 11 November 2026 that India's Department of Telecommunications (DoT) ordered internet providers to block 129 betting websites this year on the strength of two High Court orders that the courts now say they never issued. The episode is small in scale. It is large in what it shows about how blocking works in India: the system trusts a document that arrives by email.
What happened
According to MediaNama's account, which builds on the Reuters report, the DoT blocked 34 sites on 21 July after receiving a purported Rajasthan High Court order by email at 8:59 PM on 19 July. It then blocked 95 more sites by a letter dated 2 September, relying on a purported Allahabad High Court order dated 14 August that counsel had emailed to officials on 22 August. That is 34 plus 95, or 129 sites.
Both orders have since been disowned. The Allahabad High Court filed a police complaint on 6 November, and police registered a case of forgery and cheating against unknown persons. The order named a judge as signatory; her office told police that no such order had been passed. The Rajasthan High Court's registrar told Reuters its order "appears to be fraudulent" and does not exist on the court's server. Neither order appears in the courts' online records, and both were still on the DoT's website on 11 November. Reuters could not establish who forged them or whether anyone at the DoT checked them first. The DoT did not respond to Reuters.
The case for fast blocking
The strongest argument for the government is practical. Betting operators are offshore, they re-appear on mirror domains within hours, and a court order is the most authoritative instruction a ministry can receive. India's Parliament passed the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, 2025 on 20 and 21 August 2025, and PRS notes it empowers the central government to block information related to online money gaming services. An official who receives a signed-looking court order and acts on it is behaving as a diligent administrator would, and demanding a slow verification step for every illegal-gambling domain risks letting real harms run on.
That argument is sound for policy. It does not excuse the failure here, because the whole point of a court order is that it carries judicial legitimacy, and that legitimacy was never confirmed.
The safeguards that were meant to exist
India's blocking regime was upheld by the Supreme Court because of its procedural safeguards. In Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (24 March 2015), the Court called Section 69A of the IT Act "a narrowly drawn provision with several safeguards" and held that "reasons have to be recorded in writing in such blocking order so that they may be assailed in a writ petition under Article 226." It also said blocking can happen "only by a reasoned order after complying with several procedural safeguards including a hearing to the originator and intermediary."
The 2009 Blocking Rules supply the machinery. Rule 8 requires notice to the person or intermediary in control of the content, with an appearance date "not less than forty-eight hours" after receipt. Rule 9 allows emergency interim blocking without a hearing, but the Designated Officer must put the request before the review committee within 48 hours, and the interim direction is revoked if it is not approved. Rule 16 requires "strict confidentiality" about requests and actions taken.
The confidentiality rule is the crux. Writ review under Shreya Singhal only works if the affected party knows an order exists and can read its reasons. Here, the only people positioned to notice a forged order were the courts it was attributed to, and they found out after the fact. The public record shows that the blocking decision depended on documents nobody could independently check. It is not clear from the reporting which legal route the DoT treated these orders as following, and MediaNama itself frames that as an open question. Whatever the route, a forged document cannot stand in for the reasoned order that the Supreme Court required.
Who verifies?
The reporting shows the DoT forwarded both orders to ISPs. For the Allahabad order it also copied its 2 September letter to MeitY's cyber law division, asking it to "take action as per the said Court order." Digital rights commentator Nikhil Pahwa told MediaNama that "MeitY cannot simply play the role of a courier, like it says it does in case of the Sahyog portal," and that "the legality of the order, if it is being sent by MeitY to a platform, is MeitY's responsibility." That is the right frame. A government that routes takedowns on the assumption someone upstream has checked them has built a system with no checker.
The cost is not only to the 129 sites, which were gambling sites. Any forged or mistaken order that reaches an authority this way can just as easily name a news site, a rival business or a critic. The next forger may not choose betting domains.
What a proportionate fix looks like
None of this requires new blocking powers or tougher penalties on intermediaries. It requires basic hygiene:
- Authenticate court orders at source. Courts already publish orders on their own systems. The DoT should confirm any order against the issuing court's record before acting, and treat an order absent from that record as unverified.
- Publish a blocking register. Each blocked domain should list the authority, date and legal basis, with narrow redactions only where a specific security need is shown. Confidentiality under Rule 16 should not mean that the courts themselves cannot see their own supposed orders in action.
- Notify affected parties. Site owners and ISPs should be told why a site is blocked, in line with the written-reasons requirement from Shreya Singhal.
- Audit the 129. The DoT should review the blocks resting on the forged orders and either re-justify them under a valid legal basis or lift them.
A pro-enforcement stance and a pro-process stance point the same way here. Betting crackdowns lose credibility when they rest on forgeries, and a defence lawyer for any blocked operator now has an obvious argument. The cheapest way to protect enforcement is to make it checkable.
The bottom line
India does not need to choose between policing illegal betting and protecting an open internet. It needs to treat blocking as a decision that requires a verified legal instrument, not an attachment. Until the DoT confirms what it acts on, every block it issues carries the same unanswered question that these 129 now do.