Even as the Centre has threatened to remove  Wikipedia’s intermediary status, IT law experts say that the existing rules do not give the government the authority to change any entity’s status from intermediary to publisher.

Pranesh Prakash, Principal Consultant at Anekaanta Advisory and Co-Founder of the Centre for Internet and Society, told businessline that the distinction between an intermediary and a publisher does not exist in the Information Technology (IT) Act. Prakash was among the many digital policy experts who took to social media after the Centre reportedly asked why Wikipedia should not be treated as a publisher instead of an intermediary. While Wikimedia Foundation told businessline it has yet to receive the notice, experts questioned the rationale for terming Wikipedia as a publisher.

Prakash said an intermediary is defined in the IT Act, while a publisher is mentioned in the IT Rules. Stating that the Rules can’t go beyond what the Act allows them to, he argued that the term publisher cannot strip away Wikipedia’s designation as an intermediary.

“This idea of losing intermediary status, I don’t understand where it comes from. You can lose intermediary protection, and not all intermediaries at all points qualify for such protection, but what is and isn’t an intermediary is decided by Section (2)(1)(w) of the IT Act. The government doesn’t have power to make something an intermediary or a publisher,” he said.

Prakash also questioned why an intermediary cannot also be a publisher by saying, “An intermediary includes those entities that provide services like web hosting and hosting providers can very much be publishers.”

As per media reports, the Information and Broadcasting Ministry claimed in its notice that a small group exercises editorial control on Wikipedia’s pages. It is alleged that Wikipedia advertises itself as a free online encyclopaedia where volunteers can create or edit pages on personalities, issues, or various subjects. However, Mishi Choudhary, Founder of Software Freedom Law Centre India (SFLC.in) said that the authorities failed to appreciate Wikipedia’s editorial structure.

“Wikimedia Foundation only provides infrastructure and doesn’t control any content. Volunteer Editors have a public process by which content is vetted per rules. The Court must be assisted to understand that Wikimedia Foundation is not like Twitter or Facebook where a centralized entity controls what’s published on it. We cannot force the only place on the Internet that is trustworthy and doesn’t surveil its readers for advertisements to be subjected to arbitrary Rules because of our inability to appreciate the editorial and technical architecture,” said Choudhary.

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