Streaming Apps And Censorship In The Bedroom

At the beginning of 2019, nine content providers, including Netflix, Disney-owned Hotstar, Zee5, Arre, SonyLIV, ALT Balaji, Reliance Jio and Viacom18, signed a content code, which is essentially a code of practices that they will follow for what they live stream. This has precedence. Around six months prior to this move, in the ASEAN region, AVIA (then CASBAA) which is an Asian video industry association, announced a similar code. Common signatories to the two codes: Disney and Netflix.

Absent from the signatories to the codes was one key online content player, which along with Hotstar and Netflix, makes up the ‘Big Three’ of subscription-based online streaming services in India: Amazon Prime. While none of the companies have so far spoken publicly about signing the code, for those of us watching these developments closely, it’s fairly evident that Disney/Hotstar and Netflix were pushing strongly for this code.

Netflix, in particular, has been facing several court cases in India, especially related to Sacred Games, its first mega-scale production in India. The show, meant for adults, has nudity, violence, and some political commentary. Another show, Leila, has raised the hackles of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organisation of Bhartiya Janata Party, the political party currently in government in India, for the way it has depicted a dystopian, Hindu-nationalist future.

India is a country where anything you say is likely to offend someone. Over the years, theatres have been subject to political activity, including stoning and mob violence. Online streaming services present a more difficult proposition for political activists. It’s unlikely that they’ll break their own phones or TV sets to protest content that they find offensive. Thus, many are seeking a legal route, and pressuring the government to do something.

From Informal Code To Formal Censorship?

The creative industry has always pushed at the boundaries of what is acceptable in an overtly moralistic society. In the 1990s, mobs took to the streets to protest a song that included the word ‘sexy’, and forced the filmmakers to change the word to ‘baby’. The word sexy is fairly commonly used now. The internet has been even more critical to pushing boundaries of content: for a generation exposed to edgier foreign films from Hollywood, online streaming services have pushed at the boundaries even more: depicting meaningful LGBT characters, showcasing a dystopian possibility, and providing edgy entertainment.

What India’s certification board (better known as the Censor Board) and the regressive broadcast content code don’t allow, the internet has enabled. If the broadcast content code was applicable to the Internet, iconic shows like Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and even Sacred Games (an illustration here), would not have been shown in India because the cuts and bleeping out of words would have made it impossible to tell these stories meaningfully.

The Government of India, via an opaque Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (essentially, India’s ‘Ministry of Truth’) has begun a process to create its own content code, and we might soon find that the relatively progressive norms that the informal content code has, has been used to create a regime for online censorship. Hotstar, Netflix and the others who signed that code have, naively or knowingly, created a baseline for an online censorship code by showing the government the way.

While the content code was created as a reaction to what the government could possibly do, the thing is, they really didn’t have to bring the cable television-era mindset to the internet: The traditional approach of cable, where there are content creators and consumers, really doesn’t apply.

On the internet, there are only two types of entities: users, who create and consume content or services, and intermediaries, who enable access to this content and services. Just like an ISP is an intermediary that enables access to Hotstar, YouTube is an intermediary that enables access to my uploaded videos. This structure means that anyone can start a video service, and the internet has enabled thousands of such content creators to find their audience, by the sheer strength of their creativity. By creating the code and carving out a separate category of users online, called the Online Curated Content Providers, Hotstar, Netflix and others created a situation where they would be regulated separately from everyone else. In Asia, they carved out a category for Subscription Video on Demand services, and contrasting themselves with pornography.

How Will This Work?

These services aren’t subject to public viewings, such as in a theater or the drawing-room of a household, or in screens in restaurants etc. These shows are essentially being watched privately, on our own devices, or typically in the privacy of our bedrooms. Creators of content for the internet, including streaming services, even tend to shoot more close-ups because much of the viewing is on mobile.

Any code that will be enforced by the government will be just as applicable to you and me, as it will be to a Hotstar and Netflix, unless it creates a category of content providers to which the code will be applicable. How will this work? Will they be regulated on the basis of the number of users on the service? What about all the international video content that is currently available for viewing in India, that might have more than a certain number of users? Will they be blocked in India if they don’t sign up? There are millions of minutes of video uploaded on the Internet every minute. How will a censor board, which struggles to certify around 21,000 films a year in India, actually have the capacity to deal with the volume of video that the Internet has to offer?

The government of India should let internet content be. Back in 2015, the then Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi, arguing for the government in the case seeking to ban pornography in India, said that the government doesn’t want to do moral policing.

The best filter is not to stop it at the gateway of the country, but at the home”, he said then. “If two adults feel it is entertainment…we cannot be present in everyone’s house. Some kind of self-regulation has to be done. That is how it works across most of the developed countries. Otherwise, it becomes a totalitarian state. What happens to 19(1) [freedom of speech and expression]? Tomorrow they will say stop this, stop that.”

Amazon probably didn’t sign the industry content code because they saw this coming. As an e-commerce platform that already seems to be facing overbearing regulation from the Indian government, they probably wanted to avoid the creation of grounds for more government regulation and censorship. Hotstar, Netflix and the others should have done the same.

Nikhil Pahwa is the founder and editor of MediaNama.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.