Govt might have faced strong resistance on Broadcasting Bill from big tech too: Anant Nath

In an unexpected twist, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) on Monday withdrew the latest draft of the Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill, 2024, after circulating it discreetly with select media outfits early this month.

Initially released on November 10, 2023, the draft aimed to overhaul the current broadcasting regulations to address the modern media landscape better.

However, the ministry on Monday said on X, “The Ministry is holding a series of consultations with the stakeholders on the draft bill.  Further additional time is being provided to solicit comments/ suggestions till 15th October, 2024. A fresh draft will be published after detailed consultations,” MIB posted on its X account.”

e4m spoke to the President of Editors Guild of India, Anant Nath, on Tuesday. The Editors Guild has been critical of the bill and has been voicing its concerns against certain provisions in the draft for a long time.

Excerpts from the conversation:

Why do you think has the government withdrawn the draft broadcasting bill?

The Editors Guild is one of the organizations leading the discussion on the broadcast bill. The initial draft of the bill was introduced in November. We had submitted a very detailed representation to the ministry, citing three or four broad concerns.

Firstly, there is a lot of subjectivity being introduced in various clauses in terms of giving the government a handle for labelling certain content as “problematic”.

Problematic would mean that it is against the security of the state, public order, morality, and decency. And once your content is problematic, it is giving the government a handle to pull it down.

The second is - who is going to decide the content is problematic, where they have recommended or mandated a three-tier structure - the first two being more or less self-regulatory, but the third one being government-appointed, which is the highest level.

So, the ultimate decision or power to brand a certain content wrong or problematic relies on the government, which is where the biggest problem was that this is nothing different from a censorship regime where there is subjectivity in terms of subjectivity associated with labelling what the content is, whether it is right or wrong and that subjectivity is in the hand of the government. 

This would like to ensure that only content that is beneficial to them remains. Anything problematic is removed. So, this was the primary problem.

A fortnight ago, the government introduced very selectively the new draft of the broadcast bill to a few stakeholders. It was not an open public consultation. So, our bigger problem, which we wrote to the ministry, was that we need a copy of the bill and that needs to be generally put out for an open debate.

The other part was that it carried the same provisions as the previous bill, plus it extended it to social media content creators on YouTube, Instagram and Twitter. And the idea being here is to put controls on even the independent voices, which are operating outside the domain of traditional broadcasting, and bring them within the ambit of broadcast. It puts the same cumbersome regulatory and control content monitoring system on them, which will make their content production unfeasible. So, the whole idea was to kill the voice.

And we had raised a lot of voices. We had written to the ministry. We had done some press conferences also. And fortunately, it's encouraging that the government is rethinking about it. I don't think they are saying that they have officially withdrawn it. They are saying that they will redraft a new bill.

I hope the ministry does redraft this bill with a proper open consultation with all stakeholders, including big media houses, small independent publishers and media associations like the Editors’ Guild, the DigiPub and the other such bodies that represent the voice of journalists.

With the provisions related to creators, the business model of all the social media platforms was also at stake. Do you think there would have been some pressures from those platforms as well?

I don't know. I can only imagine. I wouldn't be surprised if they even came back with very strong reservations. I am pretty sure that could have been a possibility. I can only guess that they might have faced strong resistance from even the big tech.

What is your expectation now with the new broadcast bill, which the government may come out with later?

I don't want to put my expectations up. I don't want to speculate what will happen. But I want to put forth our demand that they do engage with bodies across the spectrum and be inclusive and respect constitutional democracy which includes respecting press freedom.