amendment to the IT Act was first approved, this phrasing was considered a substantial improvement over the earlier version of this section in the IT Act of 2000, and was as such welcomed. But the additional guidelines that the central government prescribed in April 2011, as it is authorised to do under section 79 of the Act, undid much of the protection and clarity the section was intended to provide. Known as the Intermediary Guidelines Rules 2011, these made it obligatory for intermediaries to inform their users, by means of their terms of service, not to host, display, upload, modify, publish, transmit, update or share a broad range of types of content. In addition to content prohibited by article 19(2) of India’s Constitution, this included content deemed “grossly harmful”, “harassing”, “blasphemous”, “hateful”, “racially, ethnically objectionable”, “disparaging” or that “impersonate[d] another person” or “harm[ed] minors in any way.” As many of the grounds for censorship included in the latter group go beyond the grounds of reasonable restrictions established by India’s Constitution and are not defined under any other Indian statute, intermediaries were left without any guidelines to judge content. Moreover, under the Intermediary Guidelines Rules, anyone could file a complaint with the intermediary, who then had to act within 36 hours. The intermediary did not have to inform the party who posted the content, and the Intermediary Guidelines Rules did not provide for an automatic right to respond for the aggrieved party, nor for an appeals mechanism. The privatisation of censorship that the Indian intermediary liability regime thus put into place had the potential to have a deeply chilling effect on free speech in the country. In informal conversations, representatives of several major intermediaries indicated over several years that the number of takedown requests by both government and private parties had grown substantially since the Rules were notified. Moreover, at least in some cases these requests were accompanied by significant political pressure that might have affected intermediaries’ decisions. For example, on 5 December 2011, The New York Times reported that the then Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Kapil Sibal, had, over a stretch of several months, had a string of meetings with some of the major intermediaries in which he had tried to convince them to manually pre-screen content and remove any objectionable material.102 Content that Sibal showed to the intermediaries is said to have included both religiously sensitive material that he believed could potentially cause riots and political speech that he deemed unacceptable – including a Facebook page that maligned the president of the Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi. In the same year, a study conducted by Rishabh Dara, then Google Policy Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society, clearly brought out that intermediaries tend to err on the side of caution when faced with government requests to take down content.103 Dara sent rather frivolous takedown notices to seven major intermediaries. Six of them complied, with some even taking down more content than Dara had requested. Strictly speaking, affected parties could have gone to the courts in response. Yet as the notice-and-takedown system that was put into place under section 79 lacked transparency, they in many cases might not even have become aware that their rights had been violated. In Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, concerns about the potential for misuse of these provisions, and the weakening of the protections for freedom of expression that they therefore entail, were brought to the Supreme Court. The privatisation of censorship that the Intermediary Guidelines Rules and its parent section entailed, as well as the lack of safeguards in the Rules, were all called into question by the petitioners. In addition, the petitioners argued that the grounds on which both the rules and parent section allowed for censorship were vague and over-broad and went well beyond the subjects specified under Article 19(2) of the Indian Constitution. The Supreme Court was receptive to the petitioners’ arguments, and while stopping short of striking down the section and rules, it read down both. From here onwards, intermediaries have been only obliged to take down content upon receiving “a court order or on being notified by the appropriate government or its agency that unlawful acts relatable to article 19(2) are going to be committed.” In such cases, intermediaries are expected to remove content expeditiously. Where the content in question does not fall within the reasonable restrictions mentioned in Article 19(2) of the Constitution and/ or where an intermediary has not received a court order or a notification from a relevant government agency, it is not obliged to act. While the Supreme Court’s judgement may have strengthened the legal certainty for both 102 Timmons, H. (2011, 5 December). India Asks Google, Facebook to Screen User Content. The New York Times. www.india.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/ india-asks-google-facebook-others-to-screen-user-content 103 Dara, R. (2012, 27 April). Intermediary Liability in India: Chilling Effects on Free Expression on the Internet. Centre for Internet and Society. https://www.cis-india.org/internet-governance/ chilling-effects-on-free-expression-on-internet INDIA / 69