Just a few months ago, I wrote this piece[1] that wondered whether India would bring Amazon and Netflix to heel by regulating them.
Last Wednesday, a major development indicated which way the wind would blow, according to many industry watchers, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist government introduced a notification[2] that may just be the beginning of things to come.
The rule, that has shocked many, simply states that digital media -- from Netflix, to news sites like thewire.com, to social media sites like Facebook, to photos of your labrador that you have uploaded onto the internet -- will now be regulated by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.
Until now, this division[3] of the government only censored and regulated print newspapers, television, films and theatre while digital content effectively slipped under the radar, but this luck seems to have run out.
So, what exactly does rule this portend? It's not entirely clear. To some who earn their bread and butter monitoring these industries, the prognosis is dire.
Nikhil Pahwa, a digital rights activist and founder of prominent website MediaNama that writes about these industries said[4] this to the Guardian: "The fear is that with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting -- essentially India's Ministry of Truth -- now in a position to regulate online news and entertainment, we will see a greater exercise of government control and censorship."
If this becomes reality it would wreck the plans of companies such as Netflix and Amazon that have seen their fortunes rise dramatically in the last few years with the spectacular boom of smartphones and cheap data, both goldmines that keep on giving. The COVID era has only added more fuel to this trend.
Eager to capitalise