On June 11, 2026, a division bench of the Karnataka High Court — Chief Justice Vibhu Bakhru and Justice C.M. Poonacha — took up X Corp's appeal against a September 24, 2025 single-judge verdict that upheld the Union government's 'Sahyog' portal. The bench has sought the Centre's response. The narrow legal question is technical; the stakes are not. At issue is whether an executive officer, logging into a web portal, can order a platform to delete content with no written reasons, no hearing, and no forum to contest the order — and whether that power can be conjured out of a provision the IT Act wrote for an entirely different purpose.
What Sahyog does
Sahyog is a portal run by the Ministry of Home Affairs through its Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), operational since October 2024. By the government's own description, it exists to "expedite the process of sending notices to IT intermediaries" for the "removal or disabling of access" to unlawful content. The legal hook is Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, 2000, read with Rule 3(1)(d) of the 2021 Intermediary Guidelines. Nodal officers across ministries and state police can issue takedown notices through it; the platform routes them to intermediaries, which must act or lose their safe-harbour shield.
The government's case, fairly stated
The Centre's strongest argument is not censorship for its own sake. India faces real, scaled online harms — financial fraud, non-consensual imagery, doxxing, communal incitement — that move faster than any court docket. Section 69A's formal blocking process, with its committee review and inter-ministerial sign-off, was built for a smaller, slower internet. The single judge, Justice M. Nagaprasanna, accepted this framing in a 351-page judgment, calling Sahyog "an instrument of public good" and stressing that the portal itself blocks nothing — it merely transmits notices that officers are independently empowered to issue. On that reading, Sahyog is plumbing, not power.
Why the plumbing argument fails
The difficulty is that Section 79 is not a power-granting provision at all. It is an exemption — the safe harbour that shields intermediaries from liability for user content. The Supreme Court settled what 79(3)(b) means in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015). The Court read the provision down: an intermediary's "actual knowledge" obligation to remove content arises only on receipt of a court order, or a government notification under Section 69A that the content relates to a ground in Article 19(2). The Court upheld 69A precisely because it carries safeguards — reasoned orders, a review committee, and the procedural protections of the 2009 Blocking Rules.
Sahyog inverts that holding. It treats 79(3)(b) — a clause that conditions an immunity — as if it were a free-standing licence to command deletions, while shedding the very safeguards that made 69A constitutional. X Corp's counsel argued before the High Court that this is "a colourable attempt to usurp judicial functions": a parallel takedown channel that delivers 69A's effects without 69A's discipline. That is not a corporate complaint about compliance costs. It is a structural objection that the executive cannot manufacture a blocking power the legislature declined to give it.
The numbers cut against the 'bad actor' story
The single judge suggested X intended to flout Indian law. Its own filings say otherwise: between January and June 2025, X received 29,118 takedown requests through the Sahyog channel and complied with 26,641 — a 91% compliance rate. A platform removing nine in ten flagged items is not refusing to police content. It is objecting to a process in which an officer can demand removal with no recorded justification and no route for the affected user — or the platform — to be heard before speech disappears.
Proportionality, not permissiveness
None of this requires India to tolerate genuinely unlawful content. The pro-innovation position is not zero regulation; it is regulation that is reasoned, contestable, and bounded. The government has shown it can move in this direction: an October 22, 2025 amendment to the Intermediary Rules restricted notice-issuing authority to senior officers — Joint Secretary rank or DIG and above — a tacit admission that the earlier, anyone-with-a-login design was too loose. That is a start, but seniority is not the same as due process. An order from a Joint Secretary with no written reasons and no appeal is no more reviewable than one from a junior officer.
A proportionate Sahyog would keep its speed while restoring the floor Shreya Singhal drew: every takedown order in writing, stating the specific unlawful ground; notice to the user wherever feasible; and a fast, genuine appellate path before — or promptly after — content is pulled. Those are not foreign impositions. They are the safeguards the Supreme Court already held to be the constitutional price of blocking power in India.
The division bench now decides whether that price still has to be paid, or whether a portal can quietly waive it. For an open internet that depends on predictable, rule-bound governance rather than executive discretion, the answer matters well beyond one platform's appeal.