Content Regulation and Censorship of Online Curated Content Providers in India
Volume III, Issue II, 2020
The Online Curated Content Providers have transformed the Indian society and witnessed a shift from cable operators to these platforms to watch their desired content. However, these platforms are completely different from the existing platforms in numerous ways and thus, the existing the provisions regarding censorship in the country fail to full govern these online providers. This has led to multiple litigations with respect to regulating these platforms somehow due to the controversial content being uploaded by them. Hence, the lack of a specific legislation has created ambiguity with regulation of these platforms. This led to the adoption of a Self-Regulation model by the OCCP. However, there was still discontent after this and this led to the Supreme Court directing the Centre to issue guidelines for the regulations of these online platforms. This paper aims to address the loopholes within the Indian framework with respect to the laws regarding regulation of these online platforms and provide suitable suggestions to overcome this challenge by analyzing the policies and legislation of foreign countries.
Keywords: Censorship, OCCP, Democracy, Freedom, Regulation, Guidelines