Digital intermediary rules confuse more than clarify

When the Indian government notified its Information Technology (Guidelines for Intermediaries and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021—its intermediary guidelines, for short—last February, it gave significant social media companies three months to comply with its additional due-diligence requirements under the new rules. That grace period just ran out, and from today these companies are going to be held to far higher standards than ever before.

As soon as the intermediary guidelines were notified, I pored over its provisions to try and figure out how exactly these new regulations would affect the wide range of businesses they applied to.