Signing you in

The Aayog sought views on a wide range of regulatory issues, covering laws impacting social media companies and other online intermediaries, cybersecurity, data protection, and online gaming, among others.

Executives of technology industry bodies, who represent several Big Tech companies, took part in the meeting held on June 25.

A presentation including questions was shown to the stakeholders during the meeting. In the section covering platform governance, the NITI Aayog asked: “Are current takedown, grievance, and transparency timelines operationally feasible across different categories and sizes of intermediaries?” Another question said: “Which intermediary due diligence obligations impose the highest recurring compliance burden, and what specific operational simplifications would be most impactful?”

Representatives of industry groupings such as Nasscom, Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), and Broadband India Forum (BIF), among others, are learnt to have taken part in the meeting. Many of these groups represent major American tech companies such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Tech companies, through these industry groupings, are expected to respond along likely lines, and pushback against India’s shortened takedown timelines, as they have done on several occasions, publicly and privately. The NITI Aayog is expected to go through the industry’s responses and then send a detailed note to the IT Ministry for its comments and feedback on the Aayog’s recommendations. The IT Ministry may or may not agree with the Aayog’s recommendations.

Queries sent to the NITI Aayog and IT Ministry did not elicit a response till the publication of this news.

These discussions are happening under the NITI Aayog’s new ‘Jan Vishwas Siddhant’ initiative, an effort at creating a trust-based regulatory environment, under which the government think tank is collecting inputs from various sectors on deregulation and rationalisation of existing laws.

Speaking at the CII Annual Business Summit 2026 earlier this year, NITI Aayog member Rajiv Gauba said that the move was aimed at clearing the system’s “regulatory cholesterol”.

In February, the IT Ministry notified amendments to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. One of the changes it has implemented is that social media platforms must now remove problematic content within two-three hours as opposed to 24-36 hours before. Industry executives had earlier said that the new timeline is the shortest takedown window prescribed by any government in the world.

Raising concerns over the shortened takedown timelines, social media giant Meta, which operates platforms like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, had said at the time that the norms might be “challenging” to comply with from an operational standpoint.

Rob Sherman, Meta’s vice president policy and deputy chief privacy officer, said in February that when social media companies receive takedown notices from the government, there is a certain time it takes for them to investigate and validate the flagged content, and three hours might not be enough time for that.

“Whenever we get the request from the government (to take down content), we will have to look into it, we will have to investigate it and validate it ourselves. And so that’s just something that takes some amount of time, particularly if there’s something that we need to look into. That’s often not possible to turn around in three hours,” he had added.