When the Supreme Court of India handed down Shreya Singhal v. Union of India in March 2015, it did more than strike down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000. It read down Section 79(3)(b) — the safe-harbour-conditioning clause — to require that intermediaries lose immunity only on receipt of a court order or a government notice issued under Section 69A and its 2009 Blocking Rules. Eleven years later, that careful architecture is under visible strain. In X Corp v. Union of India, decided by Justice M. Nagaprasanna of the Karnataka High Court in September 2025, the court upheld the Ministry of Home Affairs' Sahyog portal — a unified, multi-agency content-takedown system launched in October 2024 by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C). The ruling now sits at the centre of every serious conversation about platform liability in India.
What Sahyog Actually Does
The Sahyog portal, run out of I4C inside the Ministry of Home Affairs, was designed as a single window through which authorised officers across central ministries, state police forces, and law-enforcement agencies can issue notices to intermediaries to remove or disable access to unlawful content. The legal hook is Section 79(3)(b) read with Rule 3(1)(d) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, which obliges intermediaries to act on "actual knowledge" of unlawful information communicated by an appropriate government or its agency.
X Corp's petition framed the issue sharply: a portal that empowers a wide pool of officers — reportedly including station-level police personnel — to compel takedowns is, in substance, a parallel blocking regime. It bypasses, the company argued, the procedural safeguards that Shreya Singhal insisted upon: a written reasoned order, an inter-departmental committee, the opportunity for the originator or intermediary to be heard, and confidentiality reviewable by a designated officer. In X's reading, Section 79 is a conditional immunity provision, not an independent blocking power; only Section 69A and its rules can authorise removal directives carrying the force of law.
The Court's Reasoning
Justice Nagaprasanna disagreed. The judgment reportedly characterises Section 79(3)(b) notices as compliance triggers rather than blocking orders — instruments that move an intermediary out of safe harbour if it ignores them, but which do not, on their own, criminalise speech or directly block it. On this view, the procedural protections of Section 69A are not displaced; they continue to operate where the government itself wishes to issue a binding block. Sahyog, the court reasoned, is administrative plumbing built on top of an existing statutory scheme.
That distinction is doctrinally clever. It is also, in our view, too thin to do the work the court asks of it. In practice, a takedown notice from a designated state police officer, delivered through a government portal with the implicit threat of safe-harbour loss and the explicit threat of officer-in-default liability under Rule 7 of the 2021 Rules, looks and behaves exactly like a binding order. Intermediaries facing dozens or hundreds of such notices per week — across Meta's family of apps, Google and YouTube, X, and Telegram — will rationally over-remove. That is precisely the chilling effect Shreya Singhal set out to prevent.
Why This Matters Beyond X
India is one of the largest internet markets in the world, with an estimated user base in the high hundreds of millions. The 2021 Intermediary Rules already require platforms above defined user thresholds to appoint a Chief Compliance Officer, a Nodal Contact Person, and a Grievance Officer — all of whom can be held personally liable. Layering Sahyog on top of this framework expands the universe of officers who can demand takedowns without expanding the universe of officers who can be meaningfully held to account if they overreach.
From a pro-innovation, proportionate-regulation perspective, three concerns dominate:
- Process asymmetry. The party best placed to evaluate proportionality — a court, or even the Section 69A committee — is sidelined in favour of a streamlined administrative channel.
- Audit gaps. Sahyog reporting is, as of this writing, not publicly itemised. Transparency reports from platforms remain the only meaningful window into volume and category.
- Investment signal. Predictability of legal process is a non-trivial input into platform investment, trust-and-safety hiring, and product launch decisions for the Indian market.
The Path Forward
X has reportedly pursued appellate remedies, and the underlying constitutional question — whether Section 79(3)(b) can sustain the operational weight that Sahyog places on it — is squarely teed up for a Division Bench, and ultimately the Supreme Court. The right reform is not to dismantle inter-agency coordination. India genuinely needs faster, cleaner channels for removing CSAM, doxxing, and incitement to violence. The right reform is to put Sahyog on a firmer statutory footing: narrow the class of issuing officers, require written reasons, mandate a 48-72 hour response window with appeal, and publish quarterly aggregate data on notices issued and complied with.
Until then, X Corp v. Union of India stands as the most consequential post-Shreya Singhal precedent on intermediary liability in India — a ruling that resolves a doctrinal puzzle in the government's favour while leaving the underlying free-speech architecture visibly weaker than the Supreme Court intended in 2015.