Coming Soon - a Regulatory Regime for Bloggers

Caution: Long Post ahead! IMPORTANT for bloggers please!

Several netizens have taken to blogging in the past 7-10 years for varying purposes –some to share ideas/information with a close-knit friend circle, while others to voice their opinion about current events with the public at large. The internet web pages have offered a blank canvas to these scribes to record their concerns, rant about their government actions – or inactions, showcase their skills or even just to entertain everyone with their humorous banter. Never before the advent of the phenomenon of blogging, did these ordinary folks ever deal with the issues involved in hosting their own blog – a website created and managed all by themselves!

Although the facility may have been a boon to post your creations and creativity, it is now time to also deal with some irksome laws and government regulations that have been framed and are in various stages of implementation. This post is to apprise all bloggers with the facts as they stand today while also get into further discussions about some of the irritants that may have crept in while drafting the rule-books for the fast-growing world of bloggers.

Before one gets to the usual bureaucracy-bashing, let us all understand that the Government of India is usually fair enough and open to suggestions from its citizens at the time of framing laws and procedures in all fields. The GOI usually puts up the draft acts and rules for public opinion and feedback. The feedback is discussed with industry/trade/financial bodies representing the affected sector and tweaked to accommodate any real concern to the best of their ability. However, the GOI prefers to listen to the voices through a single representative voice of the sector rather than all of them – so that internal differences about the same can be sorted out by the individual stakeholders before they approach them with their suggestions.

The recent article published in the Times of India “Plan to muzzle bloggers sparks outcry” has evoked high amount of anguish amongst the blogging community. The immediate knee-jerk reaction is “The government curbing our freedom of speech!”

As per the TOI article, according to Pavan Duggal:
“This will curtail the freedom of expression of individual bloggers because as an intermediary they will become responsible for the readers' comments. It technically means that any comment or a reader-posted link on a blog which according to the government is threatening, abusive, objectionable, defamatory, vulgar, racial, among other omnibus categories, will now be considered as the legal responsibility of the blogger,"

Fellow blogger, IHM, shared this blogpost, which says that the current rules stipulate that:
You’re not allowed to “annoy” people
You can’t indulge in “blasphemy”
Your blog can’t “incovenience” people
You can’t “disparage” someone
Obviously the rules have been framed without much application of the mind and are vague and prone to mis-interpretations and likely to end in disputes, if implemented as such.

While, there is no doubt that the government intends to have some laws and rules in place to take action against websites and blogs that post information which could be of sensitive nature and be considered to be harming national interest, which may need to be blocked from public view, one is not apprehensive about how the rules will be formulated and implemented in actual practice.

I then discovered, upon some googling, that the Center for Internet and Society (CIS) has been studying the draft rules framed under the Information Technology Act as Amended by the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008 and their comments have been submitted to the Government and also put up as early as in July 2009 here.

“Submitted by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore
Prepared by Ananth Padmanabhan, Advocate in the Madras High Court”

Bloggers are requested to read the recommendations given by CIS so that they appreciate that their concerns have been well addressed and some suggestions to protect the interest of the bloggers (referred to as ‘intermediaries’ Further after some more googling, I came across the link of Nikhil Pahwa’s blogpost, which talks about some blogs that have been blocked by Government.

Nikhil Pahwa is a Blogger/Journalist. Editor of Medianama.com and blogs at Media Junkie. Apparently, some bloggers had already tasted the displeasure of CERT-In, the monitoring agency of the Government – see the list of sites banned in India, way back in July 2006 even before this law came into force!

So what is the way ahead for bloggers? Firstly, bloggers should actively participate in discussions. Although with the efforts of Nikhil Pahwa (Twitter Id: @nixxin), the government is not taking such actions in recent times, it is quite possible that anyone of us, who have not really violated the rules in anyway may get blocked for no fault of his/her. We need to know how to go about it. My suggestion is that some of us bloggers should join and augment the efforts of Nikhil Pahwa. Already there is a Blogger’s Collective Group, would we need an association to be formed to represent Bloggers’ concerns and difficulties in the event of any such punitive action taken against bloggers or what role can a site like Blogadda play in this matter? We need to work out the modalities of how the movement can be taken forward with the help of our own Blogadda, who has already called for a discussion on its Facebook page agreed to participate in this movement.

Until then, please await announcements as we have some more information/action plans may merge from our discussions/ interaction in this regard. Readers may leave their comments / suggestions in the comment space of this blog.