The feed is not a pipe

As deliberations on safe harbour begin in Delhi, the harder question is not whether algorithms change what a platform is, but whether the law can describe that change precisely enough to hold.

On Wednesday, the Indian Express reported that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has begun early-stage discussions on confining the safe harbour in Section 79 of the IT Act to services that only carry information, internet and telecom service providers and peer-to-peer messaging, rather than social media companies whose systems decide what users see. The same deliberations reportedly cover advance notice to authorities before major product changes that affect user safety, and complaint mechanisms for deepfakes and non-consensual imagery; the talks have been described as exploratory, and any change to the parent statute would need Parliament. The question did not arrive this week. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology has recorded the need to revisit the provision, the February 2026 amendments to the Intermediary Rules already tie synthetic-media duties to safe harbour, and the July dispute over child sexual abuse material in paid advertisements on Instagram had put ranking and promotion squarely on the table. What follows takes no side on any proposal; it sets out what the statute says, what the machines do, and what any durable answer would have to satisfy.

Begin with the text, which is stricter than its reputation. Section 79(1) grants immunity for third-party information, but only subject to sub-sections (2) and (3). Sub-section (2) offers two alternative gates and one mandatory condition: either the intermediary’s function is ‘limited to’ providing access to a system over which third-party information is transmitted, temporarily stored or hosted; or it does not initiate the transmission, select the receiver, or select or modify the information; and, in either case, it observes due diligence. Because the gates are disjunctive, a platform need pass only one, yet both describe a service whose role ends at carriage. Equally important, and often lost in public debate, safe harbour is not a licence that the State grants or withdraws. It is a defence, raised when a platform is sued or prosecuted over a particular item, and decided by a court on those facts. Any recalibration therefore has to live in the statute’s words, or in a settled judicial reading of them; it cannot be achieved by labelling a company.

Now look at what a modern feed actually does, because the engineering decides which of those words bite. A large recommender runs in three stages. Candidate generation uses learned embeddings and approximate nearest-neighbour search to pull a few thousand items from an inventory of billions. Ranking then passes each candidate through a multitask neural model that predicts the probability of a like, a comment, a share, a long watch, a report, and folds those predictions into one score using weights the operator sets, what engineers call a ‘value model’. Re-ranking applies business and integrity rules: advertisements are interleaved, diversity is enforced, borderline material is demoted. Nothing in this chain alters a single character of a user’s post. What it alters, decisively, is who receives the post and when. That is why “modify” is the weaker statutory hook and “select the receiver” the stronger one.