Internet Governance

WhatsApp Channels’ EU transparency figures expose a central challenge for global platform policy: counting restrictions is easier than measuring protection. The report’s breakdowns of legal grounds, automation and appeals show why policymakers need more than headline enforcement totals to assess accountability.

Online gaming, deepfakes of prominent figures, threats to sovereignty and integrity, gender-based harassment and promoting enmity between groups drove Meta to restrict over 5.4 million items in India in January–June 2026. Meta said most were automated restrictions, including identical copies, required by the amended IT Rules. India has 403 million Facebook users and 481 million on Instagram.

A procurement correction notice published on 14 October 2026 shows the Suzhou Health Information Center buying a cross-border VPN monitoring device able to identify protocols including OpenVPN, WireGuard, Shadowsocks, V2Ray, Trojan and NaiveProxy, as part of a wider security upgrade of its health big data centre.

As mass demonstrations fill Paris and other French cities on 17 October, protesters are urging each other to use Bitchat, Jack Dorsey's Bluetooth mesh messaging app, in case networks are jammed or overloaded. The same app was pulled from Indian app stores on 3 October.

Income is one of the most powerful qualifiers for fraud, which is exactly why a reliable income filter is valuable — and risky. For a scammer it means higher return on ad spend.

Commercial IP-to-geolocation APIs sit behind fraud checks, geo-blocking, tax rules, CDN steering and content licences. They return a city, a pair of coordinates and an air of certainty. This week’s APNIC 62 Cooperation SIG in Mumbai, drawing on the IAB Workshop on IP Address Geolocation, argued that certainty is the product defect: an IP address was never a location, and treating the API as one creates bad routing, weak security and a quiet privacy leak.

An analysis of exclusive data from Telegram's official transparency bot.

Before Sahyog, the I4C catalogued the friction plainly: non-functional contact details on platforms, intermediaries with no Indian office, LEA request portals that were “complex, non-uniform and difficult to navigate,” delayed or absent responses, and no standardised way to track non-compliance.

A convincing fabricated video of a candidate conceding or committing a crime can suppress turnout or shift undecided voters in the final hours. Faster, more systematic removal obligations reduce the operational window for such interference.

A high-level global delegation from Meta, including Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan, met with Union IT and I&B Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw in New Delhi. The visit followed a government summons and parliamentary scrutiny over the brief, inadvertent removal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s video from Facebook.

In a move to protect 853 million users, Government has demanding the tech giant to halt the rollout of a new "username" feature or face potential regulatory action under the country's stringent technology laws.

An AI-powered screening system and a new domain auction portal are among the tools unveiled as the National Internet Exchange of India marks its 23rd anniversary, amid a broader push to secure the country's digital infrastructure.