Information Society Watch

October 14, 2007, Rishi Jaitly, Google Public Policy Blog

The author examines the issue of intermediary liability in the Internet world and presents his viewpoint on the Government of India's take on the same. Internet content reaches the end consumer through a variety of intermediaries such as ISPs, search engines, email services etc. In the case of objectionable or unlawful content being transmitted to the user, a point of contention is to fix liability for such a case. The Parliamentary Standing Committee is differing from the DoIT in its opinion and is recommending to hold the intermediaries responsible for the transmitted content. The author argues that this is a regressive step as the intermediaries cannot exercise fine grained control over all content stored or transmitted by them and such policies will impede the growth of the internet services in India.

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