Govt introduces strict guidelines for the online gaming industry to ensure safety: Check details

There has been considerable growth in the online gaming industry in the past few years. However, the cases of online fraud have also gone up at the same pace, as highlighted by the government. To combat that, the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) has introduced various checks and balances through relevant amendments to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, notified on April 06, 2023. The purpose of these amendments is to control the unabated and unwarranted negative impact of online gaming activities on users, especially children and other vulnerable sections of society.

The government pointed out that despite this existing legal landscape, various social and economic concerns have emerged from this industry over the past few years, which include user harm in the nature of addiction-related concerns among children and adults, especially in terms of financial losses incurred by adult users due to such addiction.

The purpose of the rules is to provide adequate controls to protect Indian Digital Nagriks from illegal gambling and betting websites and apps, mentioned by the ministry in its release.

The new regulations even disallow intermediaries to host or display any advertisement, surrogate advertisement, or promotion of an online game that is not a permissible online game. This will help address the growing menace of online ads for illegal betting and gambling operations targeting Indian users.

The ministry clarified that these rules will ultimately allow only such online real money games in India that are verified by the self-regulatory body (SRBs). 

"The rules ensure transparency and full accountability of online gaming intermediaries enabling access to online real money games through mandatory KYC, discouraging providing credit financing options to users, conformity with the requisite framework of SRB and other monetary protection measures," added the release.

This framework will mandatorily include at least the following safeguards:

a. measures to ensure that such an online real money game is not against the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, and public order;

b. safeguards against user harm, including self-harm and psychological harm;

c. measures to safeguard children through parental controls and age-rating mechanisms, and

d. measures to safeguard users against the risk of gaming addiction, financial loss, and fraud through measures such as repeated warning messages at a higher frequency in long-gaming sessions and provision to enable a user to exclude themselves upon user-defined limits being reached for time or money spent.