As announced by the Indian government last December, changes will be made to the guidelines of the rules that govern how content is operated and hosted in India for more than 5 million users. Under the proposed amendments, intermediaries are required to:
- Create a permanent base in India with a physical address
- Appoint a specific person to liaise with law enforcement agencies
Amanda Keton, general counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit group to which Wikipedia belongs, has sent an open letter to India's Minister of Electronics and Information Technology, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad, expressing her concerns about these new provisions.
In her letter, she writes that Wikipedia operates under an open editing model and that the required provisions could lead to a “significant financial burden” for non-profit technology. It could also limit free expression rights for internet users in the country.
The proposed changes to the intermediary guidelines aim to make the internet safer for Indian citizens by setting rules for this purpose. The rules also require intermediaries to automatically filter out illegal information and content by developing automated tools.
Other nonprofits, including Mozilla and Github, also wrote a joint letter, saying the upcoming rules “will significantly expand surveillance requirements on internet.”
Last month, Wikipedia received 771 million views from India, which is the fifth largest market in the world.
In her open letter, Keton asked the ministry to issue a new set of rules that would take into account all the concerns she expressed.
