A broadcast-era rulebook, pointed at everyone
On May 22, a senior official at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) told ThePrint that India will notify the final Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Second Amendment Rules by the end of May — and that the most-contested clause will survive intact. "By the end of this month, we should be able to notify the final rules," the official said, confirming the government will not roll back the expansion of Rule 8(1) despite an estimated 4,000–7,000 stakeholder submissions opposing it.
That clause matters because of what it imports. India's 2021 IT Rules created a two-track system: Part II governs intermediaries (Section 79 safe harbour, takedown duties); Part III governs digital news publishers and OTT platforms, handing the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) an oversight machine — a Code of Ethics, an Inter-Departmental Committee (IDC), and, under Rules 15 and 16, emergency blocking powers exercisable without a hearing. Until now, that machine reached only registered publishers. The amended Rule 8(1) wires Rules 14, 15 and 16 to reach intermediaries and ordinary users who share "news and current affairs" content but are not publishers at all. As The Wire reported when the draft appeared on March 30, the IDC's remit widens from hearing "complaints or grievances" to examining any "matter" MeitY refers to it.
In plain terms: post a clip, a thread, or a reel about a current event, and you can in principle be pulled into a blocking process designed for television channels.
The case the government can make
The steelman is real. Platforms spent years insisting they are neutral conduits while algorithmically amplifying whatever travels fastest, and a single viral falsehood about an election or a communal flashpoint can cause offline harm before any court can act. Governments everywhere — not only India — argue that "publisher" and "user" are increasingly indistinguishable when a creator with ten million followers functions as a newsroom. A consistent rulebook, on this view, closes a loophole rather than opening a new front.
But proportionality is the test, and this is where the amendment fails.
Where it breaks
Start with the architecture the Supreme Court already built. In Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (24 March 2015), the Court struck down Section 66A and read down Section 79: an intermediary need remove content only on a court order or a government notification, precisely so takedown power runs through identifiable, reviewable channels. Rules 15 and 16 invert that logic — they permit emergency blocking by an executive committee, in secret, without notice to the speaker. Extending that mechanism from a few hundred publishers to millions of users does not refine the safeguard; it deletes it at scale.
The companion change makes it worse. The new Rule 3(4), per ThePrint, makes compliance with MeitY "advisories, directions, standard operating procedures, codes of practice and guidelines" a condition of keeping Section 79 safe harbour. Safe harbour is the legal foundation that lets a platform host user speech without being liable for every post. Conditioning it on open-ended executive instructions converts a liability shield into a compliance leash, and the rational response to ambiguity is to over-remove. The official's assurance that "satire and parody" fall outside the rules is cold comfort — the chilling effect lives precisely in the gap between what is technically exempt and what a risk-averse platform will quietly suppress to protect its safe harbour.
Courts have flagged this exact move
India's own courts have already distrusted this design. On 26 September 2024, the Bombay High Court struck down the 2023 Fact-Check Unit amendment in Kunal Kamra v. Union of India, holding that terms like "fake, false or misleading" were so vague they would chill protected speech and violate Articles 14 and 19. The Second Amendment recreates the same defect — vague subject-matter ("news and current affairs"), an executive arbiter, no judicial gate — and applies it far more broadly.
The picture is not one-sided. In X Corp v. Union of India (24 September 2025), the Karnataka High Court upheld the government's Sahyog takedown portal and Section 79(3)(b), and held a foreign company cannot invoke Article 19; X has since appealed. The doctrine is genuinely unsettled — which is the strongest argument for restraint, not haste. Notifying a sweeping expansion of blocking power while its constitutional foundations are being actively litigated is the opposite of proportionate rulemaking.
What proportionate would look like
None of this requires abandoning the goal. A proportionate version would keep MIB's reach to entities that genuinely function as news publishers, define "news and current affairs" narrowly, route any takedown of user content through the court-order standard Shreya Singhal already prescribes, and publish reasons and an appeal path for every block.
The submissions from Meta, Google, YouTube and ShareChat, alongside the Internet Freedom Foundation — which called the package "digital authoritarianism" — were not pleas for impunity. They asked for due process at internet scale. India is the world's largest open internet market and a genuine startup and venture-capital success story, and its regulatory posture is studied and copied across the Global South. Notifying Rule 8(1) as drafted exports a template in which sharing the news becomes a permissioned activity. That is a choice India can still decline to finalize.