“Age rating to a list of don’ts” marks a shift in India’s approach to regulating online obscenity. Examine the rationale and challenges.

Rationale

• The new rules are trying to deal with the problem of children seeing things online.
• The digital content is classified based on age which helps the users and the parents to make a choice.
• This way the digital content is clear, about what’s not allowed and that makes it easier to know what is bad.
• The main idea of the rules is to stop things from happening in the first place rather than punishing people after something bad has happened to the digital content.

Challenges

Obscenity remains culturally subjective, risking inconsistent enforcement in a diverse society. Over-regulation may chill artistic and social expression. Age-verification mechanisms also raise privacy and data protection concerns, especially in the absence of robust safeguards.

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About the Author: Jyoti Verma