Govt to come up with a SOP on new IT rules as industry awaits clarity

The government will bring out a standard operating procedure (SOP) on the new Information Technology Rules in consultation with the industry concerned and stakeholders, addressing some of the concerns raised by them, a government official said.

In addition, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology will be soon releasing a set of “frequently asked questions” (FAQs) to simplify the requirements in the rules on lines similar to what was done by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting a few days ago.

“The FAQs will be in a very simple format, explaining the IT rules, but the SOPs might take longer because we will have consultation with stakeholders. It is a procedural document,” said the official.

The industry has been asking for clarity on several issues apart from appointing officers under the new IT Rules, or the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, notified by the government on February 25.

The I&B Ministry had, a few days ago, released FAQs for the Digital Media Ethics Code, which is part of the IT Rules, 2021.

Industry concerns

The industry has been awaiting the SOPs on the new IT Rules, 2021 because they require more clarity on certain matters. One of the most pressing ones is that of publishing monthly compliance reports. The rules ask significant social media intermediaries, or those with over five million users, to publish a compliance report every month, mentioning the details of complaints received and action taken, the number of specific communication links, or parts of information that the intermediary removed or disabled access to as a result of proactive monitoring conducted by using automated tools or any other relevant information as may be specified.

The first of these reports should start getting published by June 25, considering the fact that it will be a month since the IT Rules, 2021, came into force. Many intermediaries are unclear as to the format of these reports. While most significant social media intermediaries publish annual or bi-annual transparency reports and would most likely publish compliance reports in a similar pattern, there was little clarity on whether those would be compliant with the new rules.

“As mentioned in Section 4(d), Part II of the rules, the compliance report should have bare minimum detail on what type of content was removed or what other action was taken,” the official said.

Another issue significant social media intermediaries are awaiting clarity on is the time required before which a user needs to be informed about their content being taken down.

An executive with a social media firm said while it would be all right to give notice in most cases, in cases involving, for example, material with child pornographic content, or terrorism-related matter, giving notice to a user posting such material would mean increasing the scope of harm and circulation.

"For content that platforms remove on their own, they know what content is harmful. Some content will have to be taken down early to reduce harm. They may have to make some changes in their policies to inform the user first," said the government official.

Emails sent to Google, Twitter, Facebook (including WhatsApp and Instagram) did not elicit any response.

"As an India registered company, we haven't found it difficult to follow the guidelines. So leave alone just the officers being appointed, our whole staff is Indian. As much as we are responsible for the experience of the user, as an India registered company, I think the same responsibility is being put on everybody else, making it a level playing field. So if you look at all the guidelines, everything is user centric, and hence, we haven't had a problem with any of those," said Aprameya Radhakrishna, co-founder and CEO of Indian microblogging platform Koo.

He added that while there was scope to engage with the authorities to weed out some grey areas, the Rules were largely clear. On the quetsion of content takedown, he said, content like pornography shouldn't be on a platform in the first place, and hence would be removed.

Similarly, another regional language platform executive said, "The Rules are very clear. There are some SOPs required for some of these issues, but beyond that, I think, unless you choose not to comply. And there are companies that seemingly don't want to comply."