AMCHAM’s submitted a request for consideration on the Draft Amendments to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 202, with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Inter-alia, the following issues were highlighted:
- Preserve legal sanctity of clarifications, advisories, and directions in their present form, thereby allowing enforcement mechanisms only through the existing consultative framework anchored in primary legislation and subject to parliamentary scrutiny
- Preserve intermediary liability in relation to Part III of IT Rules while keeping the definition of news and current affairs objective and narrow and ordinary users out of scope from frameworks designed for professional publishers
- The oversight mechanism (Inter-Departmental Committee) should retain existing functions without an extension in the scope or mandate
- Due diligence by intermediaries on extended data retention obligations should be purpose-based, proportionate and harmonize legal retention obligations
- Synthetically generated information visual mandate should not be consistent labelling, but rather limited using a principle-based approach integrating risk-based implementation, ultimately harmonizing global industry standard metadata markers
