Google and Meta have opposed a plea before the Delhi High Court (HC) that seeks to make social media intermediaries proactively detect and block unauthorised recordings of court proceedings, telling the Court the demand is legally untenable and impossible to implement, Bar and Bench reported.
Both companies filed affidavits in a petition by advocate Vaibhav Singh, which arose after videos of the April 13 hearing, where politician Arvind Kejriwal argued in person for Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma’s recusal in the excise policy case, spread across social media.
The case reopens a question that runs through India’s intermediary law: whether platforms can be made to police content before anyone flags it. A direction forcing them to monitor all future uploads “arguably goes beyond enforcing existing law and approaches judicial law making,” said Siddhant Saroha, partner at Raven Law LLP. Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, he said, “does not contemplate a general monitoring obligation.”
What does the petition ask for?
- Prevent uploads and re-uploads. It wants platforms to stop the upload, re-upload, and dissemination of unauthorised court recordings, and to monitor for re-uploads, with penalties for non-compliance.
- Act against the originators. It seeks action against those who recorded and circulated the April 13 proceedings, which Singh says breached the Delhi HC’s recording rules.
The HC had flagged the issue in April as one touching the larger interest of the judiciary. A Division Bench impleaded the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) as a respondent and issued notice to respondents including Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia, and journalist Ravish Kumar.
Why does Google say it cannot comply?
- It cannot judge legality. Recordings are created outside YouTube, so Google cannot tell whether a video shows court proceedings, whether the recording was authorised, or whether it breaks any law, especially since recording rules differ across courts in India.
- It can only act on identified URLs. Google said it can remove only videos “specifically identified by their URLs, once the specific videos have been adjudicated to be violative of the applicable law” by a court, according to its affidavit, and cannot sift through millions of videos to find others.
- Actual knowledge needs an order. Under Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015), an intermediary gains “actual knowledge” of unlawful content only through a court order or government notification, and cannot be made to judge third-party content.
- It has already complied on the flagged videos. Of the nine YouTube Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) named in the petition, several were already blocked in India before the HC’s interim order dated April 23, 2026, India Legal reported. Google blocked the rest as a precaution and said no further URLs have been notified since.
Why does Meta say it breaches safe harbour? Meta, which operates Instagram and…
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