Information Technology - Guidelines For Intermediaries and Digital Media Ethics Code - Rules, 2021

The Government of India (GoI), Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY), and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) jointly released the new IT Rules 2021, with significant impact on Intermediaries. The new rules impact OTT and digital media streaming services, online news outlets, social media and platforms, messaging services, among others. The new rules are available on the Gazette of India website - http://egazette.nic.in/WriteReadData/2021/225464.pdf

In this session, we will go over:

1. The brief history and background to the IT Rules.
2. Provisions of the IT Rules which impact developers and open source communities.
3. Current legal challenges to IT Rules; and what open source communities can learn from these challenges.
4. Q&A - to answer your questions and doubts about how the IT Rules may impact your work.

For a detailed background tot this session, read Privacy Mode’s ethnographic report on IT Rules.

Udbhav Tiwari is Public Policy Advisor at Mozilla.