Government of India to introduce legislation for online content monetisation: Report

Social media companies will face penalties for violating rules and will not appoint a compliance officer to enforce these regulations.

According to a report on ToI, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, minister of state for electronics and IT, announced that the government intends to develop legislation for huge platforms that act as gatekeepers of online content monetisation or advertisement technology during its third term in office.

The minister stated that there is a significant disparity between individuals who produce content and those who assist content creators in making money off of their work during her speech.

He stated that the government opposes the control or dominance of only one, two, or three businesses over the internet or its monetisation. "Digital India Act during consultation laid out this as one of the issues that we are going to deal with this very pronounced and very visible asymmetry between the small guy or even the medium to the big guy in the Indian content creation ecosystem and these big platforms that are, in a sense, the gatekeepers to monetising the content."

He pointed out that the government does not believe that large online companies in the fields of e-commerce, search, social media, or ad tech should dominate the Indian internet market. "I think that this imbalance ought to be regulated by new laws, or at the very least, put into writing. I hope that this would be PM Narendra Modi's first priority when he returns to work," Chandrasekhar stated.

He stated that the government has made it clear to social media companies that they will face consequences for breaking rules and that it will not designate a compliance officer to take action against them.

According to the minister, the government took action against deepfakes before anyone else did. "There are many around us who have a strong desire to impede India's progress. They realise that using terrorism as a weapon to combat us at the border is no longer an option.

They saw it as a very fragile, susceptible underbelly of Indian democracy, with the ability to use the internet to spread misinformation and undermine law and order, anarchy, and upheavals in India "spoken with clarity." The minister went on to say that the government has statutory safeguards in place to shield individuals from harmful content on the internet while also viewing itself as a trustee for defending citizens' fundamental rights.