The withdrawal of this secretive draft of India’s Broadcast Bill is welcome, but it shouldn’t have existed anyway. We need more transparency and accountability from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which has held private closed door meetings with the industry over the last few months, and excluded online content creators, digital rights groups, and digital news publishers from these discussions.
MIB has issued a statement on Twitter, from which it appears that they’ve gone back to the previous draft (of November 2023), and will continue to do closed door consultations with the industry till October 15th.
This suggests that there’s no plan for a public consultation, and the Bill can be expected to be tabled in the Winter Session of Parliament. This is unacceptable.
There should be another draft for public consultation, instead of private industry consultations. I expect, in the final version, that the Ministry will limit the scope of the Bill to online news entities and streaming services, because they still need to validate the IT Rules (2021) and their subsequent versions, which are being challenged in Court as being not backed by law. They’ll also incorporate all the provisions from the Cable Television Networks Act because this Bill is supposed to replace it. The advertising industry is still likely to be covered because the industry has been silent in its response to this Bill. The tricky part for the Ministry relates to covering online influencers and social media users under this Bill: there are already online influencer guidelines, but the withdrawal of this Bill is largely owing to their backlash to this Bill. Importantly, I expect applicability of the Bill to be restricted to Indian citizens, given the backlash regarding the global applicability of the secret draft, which was unenforceable to begin with.
However, this doesn’t mean that Indian citizens and their right to consume and create content won’t be affected, and that we won’t be left with regulatory burdens as a form of censorship.
There should be another consultation, given the scale and scope of impact on our fundamental rights, and the path taken should reduce burdens on legal speech rather than adding to them.