Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021

What it does

The Rules are made under the Information Technology Act, 2000 and set the due diligence that an intermediary must observe if it is to keep the protection that the Act gives it against liability for content posted by others. They replaced the Intermediary Guidelines Rules of 2011. They require an intermediary to publish its rules and terms, to act on notice of unlawful content, to appoint officers to receive grievances, and to resolve a grievance in a stated time. A separate Part applies a code of ethics to publishers of news and current affairs content online and to publishers of online curated content.

The February 2026 amendment added a definition of synthetically generated information, and attached duties to it. Information of that kind must carry a prominent and easily noticeable label, and must be embedded with permanent metadata or another provenance mechanism, and the intermediary must not enable the label to be modified, suppressed or removed. The same amendment cut the takedown windows.

Who it binds

Intermediaries in the statutory sense: a person who, on behalf of another person, receives, stores or transmits a record, or provides a service in respect of it. The duties are heavier for the larger platforms the Rules class as significant social media intermediaries. The labelling duties fall on intermediaries and on a resource that enables a user to create or alter synthetic content.

A company that publishes its own material on its own website or channel is not acting on behalf of another person and is not an intermediary, so these duties do not reach it. The position changes when its resource carries other people's content: a customer forum, a review section, a comment field, an upload feature or a marketplace. The test is functional. The Delhi High Court held in the Louboutin case that a platform stays an intermediary only so long as it is a mere conduit, and that active contribution removes the exemption. A moderated brand community should assume it is on the active side of the line.

What has changed, and when

The Rules were notified in 2021 and amended since. The February 2026 amendment, which incorporates G.S.R. 120(E), is dated 10 February 2026. From November 2025 the Rules define how an intermediary acquires actual knowledge of unlawful content: by a court order, or by a reasoned written intimation from an authorised officer not below the rank of Joint Secretary.

What turns on it in practice

Both of the site's notes on the Rules turn on timing. The February 2026 amendment is reported as a three hour takedown rule. The note on a deepfake of a chief executive explains that the three hour clock in rule 3(1)(d) starts only on actual knowledge, and that actual knowledge arises in the two ways just named, so a letter from a company's lawyers starts nothing. The two hour clock belongs to an individual complaining of impersonation or intimate imagery of himself, and not to a company complaining about its brand. What a company gets by right is the grievance route: acknowledgement within twenty four hours and resolution within seven days, and then the Grievance Appellate Committee, with thirty days to appeal. The remedy against mirror copies is an order of a court, which is why the orders in this field in 2025 and 2026 are injunctions. The chief executive personally can use the two hour route for the impersonation of himself, which the company cannot.

The second note, on what binds today in artificial intelligence law, places these Rules among the few live duties. There is no statute on artificial intelligence in India, and the synthetic media provisions are the sharpest live obligation. They do not reach a company that simply uses a model on its own data. They reach a business that runs a platform on which others create or share synthetic content.

The technology, data and product practice area and the practice area on artificial intelligence advise on whether a business is an intermediary at all, which of its features take it across the line, and what its terms, labelling and grievance procedure must say.