The Framework

India’s Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, as amended in 2022 and 2023, establish a comprehensive content moderation framework. The regulations classify social media intermediaries with more than 5 million registered users as “Significant Social Media Intermediaries” (SSMIs), triggering enhanced compliance obligations including mandatory appointment of India-resident Chief Compliance Officers, Nodal Contact Persons, and Resident Grievance Officers; requirements to enable identification of message originators; deployment of automated content detection tools; monthly compliance reporting; and adherence to government-established Grievance Appellate Committees.[1] The 2023 amendments further expanded government control by establishing a Fact Check Unit empowered to label content about government business as false or misleading, with platforms required to remove such content or lose their safe harbor protection under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act.^[2] Noncompliance results in loss of intermediary liability protection, exposing platforms to criminal and civil liability for user-generated content, effectively forcing compliance through the threat of operational shutdown.^[3]

Implications for U.S. Technology Leadership

These regulations undermine American competitive advantages by imposing compliance costs and operational constraints that disproportionately burden U.S. technology leaders. Leading U.S. platforms, all exceeding the 5 million threshold, must maintain extensive in-country compliance infrastructure and dedicate engineering resources to building features that conflict with their global standards.^[4] The requirement to enable message traceability forces U.S. companies to fundamentally alter their privacy-preserving architectures, while the mandate to deploy automated content detection systems diverts critical resources from developing next-generation capabilities to building real-time filtering algorithms and maintaining databases of previously blocked content.^[5] These compliance burdens create structural disadvantages for U.S. platforms that have invested heavily in encryption and privacy technologies, forcing them to choose between abandoning core security features or losing access to one of the world’s largest digital markets.

The regulations establish a precedent for content control that fragments the global internet and systematically weakens U.S. technological leadership. By granting the government direct authority over content moderation through Grievance Appellate Committees and the Fact Check Unit, India’s framework transforms U.S. platforms from neutral intermediaries into extensions of state control, preventing them from maintaining consistent global policies.^[6] The deliberately vague content categories—such as threats to “sovereignty and integrity of India,” “public order,” and “decency or morality”—create perpetual uncertainty that forces platforms to over-censor to avoid losing safe harbor protection, chilling innovation in features that might be deemed controversial. As other nations observe India’s success in forcing compliance from major U.S. platforms through the threat of criminal liability, similar frameworks proliferate globally, creating an expanding patchwork of conflicting requirements that compounds compliance costs and operational complexity for U.S. companies while eroding their ability to set global standards for open communication platforms.^[7]

Endnotes