The Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code - How Tech Giants are dealing with the pressure!

WhatsApp is not only a messaging platform. Twitter is not merely a micro-blogging site. In the past 2 years of COVID-19, these social media platforms have become the lifeline of a majority of our population. Connecting rural parts of the country to the mainstream, highlighting crucial socio-legal issues across state borders, and bringing together the community at large to fight the pandemic. These platforms have done that all.

Off late, there's been a lot of buzz about WhatsApp 'Ban'. Here's what we need to know:

WhatsApp has recently filed a complaint against the Government of India seeking to block the Intermediary Guidelines from coming into force. The tech giant claims that if such guidelines come into force, they would force WhatsApp & Facebook to forego their privacy protection. Let's see how!

The Intermediary Guidelines & Digital Media Ethics Code, promulgated by the Ministry of Information Technology, emphasize that 'significant social media intermediaries' would be vulnerable to lawsuits and criminal prosecution if they fail to adhere to the code. The code asks the 'intermediaries' to identify the 'first originator of information whenever the authorities demand. Intermediaries are third parties that facilitate a service.

Sounds fair enough, right? Such regulations asking WhatsApp and other intermediaries to unmask only those people who are accused of wrongdoing and spreading misinformation. Well, here's the catch.

Remember the pop-up we often see whenever we connect with someone for the first time over WhatsApp.

WhatsApp says that all messages are end-to-end encrypted. To comply with the guidelines, they'll have to call off the encryption for the 'receiver' as well as the 'originator' of the message. WhatsApp has nearly 400 million users in India. WhatsApp, its parent Facebook and tech rivals have all invested heavily in India. The ongoing situation and new rules could easily jeopardize their growth prospects. The situation presents an ongoing tussle between the government and tech giants such as Facebook, Google's parent Alphabet and Twitter in one of the most diverse and booming markets in the present century. The new rules were released in February (some 90 Days back) and WhatsApp's position has been under severe scrutiny and speculations ever since.

While WhatsApp has highlighted a 2017 Indian Supreme Court Puttaswamy judgment supporting privacy, the court found then that privacy must be preserved except in cases where legality, necessity, and proportionality all weighed against it.

Hence, it's not absolutely right to call it a WhatsApp 'Ban', but the tech giant is indeed vulnerable to wrapping up its operations in India if it doesn't comply with the guidelines.