Online media regulation has garnered significant attention in debates and discussions today, following an Information and Broadcasting Ministry order to form a 10-member committee “to frame and suggest a regulatory framework for online media/news portals including digital broadcasting and entertainment/infotainment sites and news/media aggregators”.

In the light of this contentious move, Medianama organised a discussion at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi, with support from STAR India, Amazon and Google. It hosted a panel consisting of media and law personalities – HR Venkatesh from International Centre for Journalists, Durga Raghunath, CEO of Indian Express Digital, Abhinandan Sekhri, Co-founder of Newslaundry, Siddharth Varadarajan, founder of The Wire and former editor-in-chief of The Hindu, along with Amba Kak, Tech and Legal policy fellow at Mozilla.

The discussion commenced with the question about what news is in the first place.

Durga called news a “process”, saying: “For me, journalism would mean some kind of process, and that process definitely includes people with certain kinds of specialised skills…and — at least in the past — a certain defined period of time to carry out that process. I think that process has definitely gone through different versions, as we live-blog, as we tweet, as we do a lot of threads, our storytelling has changed.

“But reporters and editors have an additional responsibility now than they had in the past, and the wicketkeepers have given way. But when you don’t have a process, mistakes are going to be greater, and the velocity of distribution and consumption is fast, because mobile, internet and television journalism has become phenomenally different from what they were three years ago.”

Speaking about whether online media needed any regulation at all, Varadarajan said it was already excessively regulated.

He substantiated his stand by saying: “A cartoon in the newspaper which was perfectly legal if put on a website, turns illegal…if anything, digital today is excessively regulated. I’m not saying I want all this to go away overnight, but if anything, we are overly regulated. There are already rules. I’m not sure what new rules the government wants to come up with.”

He added: “The boundaries between digital, newspapers and TV channels and even private blogs etc, have increasingly got erased. So when we think of any kind of discussion on content, it would seem logical that there should be no discrimination between platforms…You shouldn’t have one yardstick for digital and one for everybody else.”

Sekhri termed himself a “free speech absolutist” when he agreed with Siddharth. Put simply, he said: “You cannot justify regulation. It’s a battle that cannot be won.”

While everyone else shared the common belief of blurring of lines among various media platforms, Amba Kak said it may be hard to transport regulations from traditional media to digital media.

“We already have a lot of laws on hate speech that already regulate content and are medium agnostic, whether online or offline. If I take the example of paid news, it’s an interesting example. We have a set of guidelines from the Election Commission, and they’ve consulted with the Press Council of India on paid news — the issue that there’s editorial content but there isn’t a disclosure that it is paid for. And many are now saying that this whole problem with political advertising is exactly the same. Again, you don’t have enough disclosure. If we dig deeper and look at the rules, we find that it’s not easy to transport rules that were made for a different medium onto the internet,” she said.

Check out the video for the rest of the discussion.