IT Rules Amendment: Govt doesn't want to be internet ombudsman, says Rajeev Chandrasekhar

Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar.

Last week, the Union government modified a piece of digital media legislation which allows it to appoint a quasi-judicial body to hear user grievances on digital content moderation.

This will be done through one or more grievance appellate committees (GACs) that will hear users’ appeals against content moderation decisions taken by social media intermediaries like Meta, Twitter, Google and others. Although the amended rule says that such platforms have to comply with the decisions of the GACs, it does not specify any punitive provisions in case of non-compliance yet.

When the idea for such a provision in law was first floated in June by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity), it surprised both internet activists and industry players.

According to reports, social media platforms went into a huddle and came up with the idea of creating a self-regulatory body to pre-empt the need for government supervision.

In conversation with Moneycontrol over the weekend, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State (MoS) at Meity, said he waited in earnest for the self-regulatory body to come up before going ahead with the latest legislation.

Edited excerpts:

The amendments to the IT rules were finally notified months after it was proposed…

You know why it has taken so long? Nobody is asking me why it has taken so long. I am not an inefficient guy…

Why did it take so long? 

Because the industry kept insisting on an SRO (self-regulatory organisation). And what had I said during the consultation? I had said that the government is open to an SRO, and I’ll wait. I waited for three months and they did not give me an SRO. We were ready with this (final draft) in July.

Was there no consensus among the industry regarding the SROs? 

I don't know what the reason is. I offered to the industry that you can come back with an SRO structure that meets the following criteria: include consumers, industry and the government, and it should be distinctly separate from the first level of grievance redressal mechanism the industry has.

I said very clearly that the government has absolutely no intention, no desire to become the ombudsman of the internet. And the only reason we are talking about this is because we have got lakhs of citizens saying that the grievance redressal mechanism is not working.

What about the option to establish appellate committees within intermediaries? 

They wanted an appellate committee, yes. But what happens if the first level of the structure itself is not working? What is the assurance that the second level will work properly?

When it comes to grievance redressal outside India, a lot of it is done with the help of algorithms. Only a very small percentage is done with human reviewers. Industry insiders say that, for India, they don't have enough people who can work on this. 

It’s a question of capacity. If you take a model that is working in Lichtenstein or Luxembourg, which is a fraction of our population and is not as diverse as ours, and you say I want to use a model that is working in the back of beyond some place in Europe, you are not understanding what the government's goals are.

For us, accountability is not optics. It is a boundary condition around which we want to build the internet. Around 1.2 billion Indians are on the internet, and they are not internet-savvy people like those in western Europe and so on.

Your grievance redressal mechanism should be different. Now, if you don't understand that, the only way is for us to create an appellate committee.

I will spend a lot of time over the next one month, sitting with intermediaries and trying to evangelise and advocate the need for them to build capabilities and capacities that are very India-specific.

How do you enforce compliance and decisions taken by the GACs? 

It’s in the rules (IT Rules). If you don’t follow the directions of the GAC, you are no longer an intermediary. It’s there in Rule 7 of the IT Rules 2021.

By the way, if you don’t like a GAC decision, as an intermediary, you can challenge it in the court. But non-compliance is not an option.

Rule 7 is loud and clear: if you don’t comply, you are no longer an intermediary, and you won’t have a safe harbour. Then you deal with the laws – criminal procedure code, breach of trust and so on.

But as you said, you are doing this reluctantly…

I have evidence. For nearly three months, I was sitting and playing violin, waiting for an SRO! Even today, we are saying that we are very happy to give it a chance, if there is a viable structure. But it has to meet the principal test of satisfying the digital nagrik (citizens).

If the question is about capacity, have you considered bringing in a legal provision that mandates a certain amount of capacity?

That is micromanaging. We are interested in regulating outcomes.

But the economics and the logistics of this entire exercise will be humongous for the GAC, right?

You think this is something I’m excited about doing? Not at all. Nobody in the ministry is excited. But we have to do it.

This could open the floodgates of grievance appeals. There is so much misinformation about products on e-commerce platforms.

Since it will be a digital platform, the GAC will become like a traffic light. Let us say a patent or an IP dispute comes up. The GAC will say I'm not equipped to deal with it and point you in the direction of the tribunal that deals with it.

It is going to be like a traffic sign on the internet for appeals. It is not like it is going to deal with a patent issue or a financial fraud issue.

So the GAC will only handle social media-related grievance appeals?

Yeah. It would handle whatever falls under the MeitY (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology) domain. But it will have redirection capabilities. I call it a traffic sign on the internet for appeals.