WhatsApp has filed a legal complaint plea against the Indian government, in Delhi, seeking to block the new rules and regulations coming into force on 27th May, that experts say would force the California-based Facebook unit to break privacy protections.

About the Lawsuit

The lawsuit, described to Reuters by people who are familiar with it, asks the Delhi High Court to state that one of the new rules is a violation of privacy rights in India’s constitution since it requires social media companies to identify the “first originator of information” when authorities demand for it.

Reuters could not directly confirm the complaint had been filed in court by WhatsApp, which has nearly 400 million users in India, nor when it is going through the procedures by the court. The people who have specific knowledge of the matter denied to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue and its raging impact.

While the law requires WhatsApp to reveal only people credibly accused of doing wrong, the company says it cannot do that alone in practice. Because messages are end-to-end encrypted, to keep up with the law WhatsApp says it would have break encryption for receivers, as well as “originators”, of messages.

The lawsuit escalates a raging rapid struggle between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and the tech megastars including Facebook, Google parent Alphabet and Twitter in one of their key global growth markets.

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Twitter and the action against the lawsuit

Police made a visit to Twitter’s offices earlier this week. The platform had labelled posts by a spokesman of the governing party and others as ‘manipulated media’ saying disruptive content was included.

The government has also pressed the tech companies to remove not only what it has described as misinformation on the COVID-19 pandemic ravaging India, but also some critic shots of the government’s response to the crisis.

The Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code, regulated and guided by the ministry of information technology, marks “significant social media intermediaries” as standing to lose protection from lawsuits and criminal prosecution if they fail to move and work according to the conducted code.

WhatsApp, its guide and parent-firm Facebook and many tech companies have all invested heavily in India. But company officials worry privately that increasingly heavy-handed regulation by the Modi government could bring a downfall to those prospects.

Facebook has said that it agrees with most of the provisions but they are still looking to negotiate some aspects. On the other hand, Twitter, which has come under the most limelight for failing to take down posts by government critics, has denied to comment. Some in the industry are hoping for a delay in the enforcement of the new rules while such objections are heard.

The WhatsApp complaint covers up a 2017 Indian Supreme Court ruling supporting privacy in a case known as Puttaswamy, the people knowledgeable to this matter approved it.

The court found then that privacy must be the first priority except in cases where legality, necessity and proportionality all weighed against it. WhatsApp argues that the law fails all three of those tests, starting with the lack of explicit parliamentary backing.

In March Stanford Internet Observatory scholar Riana Pfefferkorn wrote that, “The new traceability and filtering requirements may put an end to end-to-end encryption in India.” Meanwhile, other court challenges to the new rules are already pending in Delhi and elsewhere.

In the conclusion the Journalists argue that the extension of technology regulations to digital publishers, including the imposition of decency and taste standards, is unsupported by the underlying law and this can supress the digital growth.

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