PRAIL1207 | Platform Regulation and Intermediary Liability

Course type: This will be a standalone course

Methodology: For classroom discussions, we will be following a combination of seminar style discussions and conventional lectures. Emphasis would be on class participation and encouraging the learning of key concepts which will involve reasoning our way to answers through the dialectical process of questions and answers between the lecturer and the students. There will also be a considerable amount of peer learning through the presentations made by the students, case law discussion, and template of complaints being filed against various intermediaries in real-time as the course progresses, among various other things.

Detailed description: Whether and when platforms like Google, Twitter, Facebook,

LinkedIn, WhatsApp etc. are liable for their users’ online activities is one of the key factors that affect innovation and free speech. Most creative expression today takes place over communications networks owned by private companies. Governments around the world increasingly press intermediaries to block their users’ undesirable online content in order to suppress dissent, hate speech, privacy violations and the like, normally referred to as content moderation (what content is to be kept, what content needs to be removed and what are the grounds which decide what content is to be removed etc.). One form of pressure is to make communications intermediaries legally responsible for what their users do and say. Liability regimes (an example of the same are our Intermediary Guidelines of 2021) that put platform companies at legal risk for users’ online activity are a form of censorship-byproxy, and thereby imperil both free expression and innovation, even as governments seek to resolve very real policy problems. Major law firms around the globe have dedicated teams catering to these platforms, with global informal estimates signaling that platforms are spending billions of dollars on litigation fees each year. This course will help you understand what the law is, and also take you through what the law should be or ought to be, and how these principles are applied in courts in India. Wherever relevant, appropriate US, UK, and EU legislations, judgments, and actions of these platforms in foreign jurisdictions will be taken to supplement the understanding and to demonstrate how such things have influenced the evolution of intermediary liability and platform regulation in the Indian context.