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India’s online gaming industry has grown at lightning speed, drawing millions of users across age groups. From casual games and e-sports to fantasy leagues and online poker, digital entertainment has become both a social and economic phenomenon. But with this growth came rising concerns of addiction, financial loss, misleading ads, and even criminal misuse of gaming platforms for illegal betting. To address these concerns, the Government of India introduced the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act and draft Rules in October 2025. While the Act represents a crucial step toward accountability and user protection, it also raises difficult questions about freedom, innovation, and investor confidence.

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The Current Legal Framework

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The 2025 Act, along with corresponding changes in the Information Technology and GST laws, aims to create a safer and more transparent gaming environment.

1. Ban on real-money games:

Any online game where money is involved, whether it’s entry fees, bets, or prizes, is now banned, regardless of whether it is based on skill or chance. As a result, previously permitted formats such as fantasy sports, rummy, and poker once defended as “games of skill” now fall within the category of banned activities.

 2. Promotion of e-sports and social gaming

Not all gaming is banned. Casual games, e-sports, and social games that don’t involve money are fully allowed. The government is encouraging these as part of India’s growing digital economy.

3. Advertising and financial restrictions: Banks, payment gateways, and advertisers cannot facilitate or promote real-money games. Any platform offering deposits or prize pools can be blocked.

4. Central regulatory authority: The law establishes a national body to classify games, monitor compliance, and address complaints. It has the power to order the locking of violative content and websites.

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Why Regulation Was Needed

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The push for regulation came after a surge in online betting scams, debt-related suicides, and disputes about whether certain apps were skill-based or chance-based. State governments had taken conflicting positions, some banning, others licensing such games. Meanwhile, offshore gaming apps operated freely in India’s grey market.

The 2025 Act thus attempts to impose uniformity, protect minors, and bring moral and fiscal discipline to a rapidly expanding digital frontier. Its underlying philosophy resembles that of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, encouraging responsible use of technology rather than an unregulated free-for-all.

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Key Challenges and Gaps

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(a) Clarity of Definitions

The Act bans all real-money games, ignoring the difference between skill-based games and chance-based games. This could lead to legal challenges under Article 19(1)(g), which protects the right to do business. Games like rummy or fantasy cricket, which need real skill, arguably shouldn’t be banned outright

(b) Weak Consumer and Child Protection

Although age verification and KYC are mandated, compliance at the user-end remains uncertain. India needs a Responsible Gaming Code covering:

• Spending limits and cooling-off periods;
• Self-exclusion options;
• Transparent disclosure of odds; and
• Algorithmic fairness audits.
  These measures can help mitigate addiction and prevent exploitation of minors.

(c) Federal Conflicts

“Betting and gambling” fall within the State List under India’s Constitution, yet the 2025 Act seeks national uniformity. States like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka already have independent bans. Without harmonisation, legal disputes between state and central authorities could multiply. A cooperative federal framework allowing states to adopt central norms voluntarily could offer flexibility without fragmentation.

(d) Regulatory Transparency

The gaming regulator has a lot of power, like deciding which games are allowed and blocking websites. But it’s not clear who chooses its members or how people can challenge its decisions. Including court oversight, public input, and regular reporting would make the regulator fairer and more reliable.

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What’s Next for India’s Online Gaming

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India’s online gaming scene is at a turning point. Banning all money-based games might reduce risks, but it also slows innovation and limits opportunities. A better approach could be to license skill-based or low-risk games with proper KYC and audits, set up a Responsible Gaming Charter with input from government, industry, and civil society, and create rules for offshore platforms targeting Indian players. Player data should be protected under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, and the law should be reviewed every few years to keep up with new tech like the metaverse, NFTs, and AI-powered games.

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Conclusion

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CyberPeace has already provided its detailed feedback to MEITy as on 30th October, 2025 hopes the finalised rules are released soon with the acknowledgment of the challenges discussed. The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025, marks an important turning point since this is India’s first serious attempt to bring order to a chaotic digital arena. The goal is to keep players safe, stop crime, and hold platforms accountable. But the tricky part is moving away from blanket bans. We need rules that let new ideas grow, respect people’s rights, and keep players safe. With a few smart changes and fair enforcement, India could have a gaming industry that’s safe, responsible, and ready to compete globally.

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References 

1. https://ssrana.in/articles/indias-online-gaming-bill-2025-regulation-prohibition-and-the-future-of-digital-play/ 
2. https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.economictimes.com/news/economy/policy/new-online-gaming-law-takes-effect-money-games-banned-from-today/amp_articleshow/124255401.cms 
3. https://www.google.com/amp/s/timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/government-proposes-to-make-violation-of-online-money-game-rules-non-bailable-draft-rules-ban-/amp_articleshow/124277740.cms 
4. https://www.egf.org.in/ 
5. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressNoteDetails.aspx?NoteId=155075&ModuleId=3 

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Introduction
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Meta Platforms is experiencing a long-term surge of lawsuits that not only question particular practices, but also the very design and governance of its platforms, across the United States and beyond. This range of privacy breaches to youth mental health damages and antitrust issues are all indicative of a new era of judicial, regulatory, and civil society scrutiny of the duties of big tech firms. The main question is no longer whether harmful content is placed on platforms, but to what extent they are actively creating harm-producing environments.
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From Content to Conduct: A Turning Point in Legal Strategy
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Over the years, Meta and other sites have depended on legal safeguards like the US Communications Decency Act, Section 230, which protects companies against liability due to user-created content. New ways of testing that protection are now being tried.

Recent incidents have shifted off the blame of particular content and has placed the emphasis on the design of the platform. Courts are becoming more receptive to consider whether the characteristics of infinite scroll, algorithmic amplification, and engagement-based ranking systems are contributing to quantifiable harm.

In March 2026, a California jury declared that Meta and Google were negligent in creating platforms that led to youth addiction and mental health problems. The jury decided that Meta and Google were to pay off a joint sum of 6 million dollars in damages, with 70 percent of the sum being charged on Meta. It is a bellwether case, which means that it is related to about 2,000 other pending cases by parents and school districts. This change is important as it avoids legal barriers. When the liability is linked to the design decisions instead of user-created content, accountability begins to shift. 
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The Youth Harm Cases: A Big Tobacco Moment
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Social media are becoming the subject of increased scrutiny by courts and regulators as products that have quantifiable psychological impacts. The most impactful group of lawsuits against Meta is, perhaps, the one concerning youth mental health.

A day prior to the California verdict, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million in damages due to failure to safeguard young users against child predators on Instagram and Facebook, and found that the company had lied to consumers about the safety of its products and violated state consumer protection laws.

Similar arguments have been presented in other lawsuits filed by attorneys general in over 30 states, and the cases reflect previous regulatory turning points in other industries such as tobacco. The question that courts are not merely asking is whether there is harm or not. They are questioning whether businesses were aware of creating systems that capitalize on behavioral weaknesses. It has been reported in internal documents and accounts of former employees that Meta made a profit by intentionally turning its platforms into addictions to children, with algorithmic functions tailored to drive users into engagement loops, maximising time on platform to the detriment of wellbeing.

Meta has refuted these characterisations, claiming that teen mental health is multifaceted and cannot be blamed on an individual app. The companies have indicated that they will appeal the verdicts.
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Privacy and Data Misuse: An Ongoing Fault Line
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Platform design is not the only issue that Meta faces in legal matters. Cases centered on privacy have been a recurrent problem in the last ten years, and previous cases have claimed that Facebook monitored users even after they have logged out, scanned personal messages, and utilized personal data in a manner that was beyond user expectations. In more recent times, in April 2026, a class action suit was filed claiming that WhatsApp messages were accessed by Meta employees and third-party contractors, despite the long-standing end-to-end encryption guarantees of the platform.

These instances indicate a structural problem that is consistent. Consent mechanisms and privacy policies tend to be out of date with the reality of data use, and the gap between legal compliance and what users actually know or expect.
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Antitrust: A Win, But Not a Clean One
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One of the legal fronts was Meta all the way. In November 2025, a judge in the US District Court, James Boasberg, declared that Meta was not a social networking monopoly, finding that the FTC did not demonstrate that the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp by the company were against the antitrust law. The decision has since been appealed by the FTC, which continues to argue that "Meta broke our antitrust laws by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp, and that American consumers have been harmed by it.

The case also demonstrates a significant drawback of the antitrust law as a form of regulation of tech companies. By the time the trial occurred five years after the lawsuit was initiated, the social media market had evolved such that Tik Tok was a major competitor, undermining the market definition claims of the FTC. The structural issue of whether a few platforms are too powerful in the communication of the masses is not answered, although the legal claim in this instance might have been unsuccessful.
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Policy Takeaways: What This Means Going Forward
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The accumulating number of lawsuits against Meta provides a number of valuable lessons to policymakers.

1. Platform design has become a regulatory topic. Laws should go beyond content regulation and deal with the construction of systems. Engagement maximising features can also increase harm, and this trade-off must be governed explicitly.
2. Transparency should be mandatory and not discretionary. Privacy policies and disclosures on platforms are usually too complicated or ambiguous. Regulators might be required to make more transparent and standardised disclosures regarding the use of data and the operation of recommendation systems.
3. Section 230 safeguards are under reinterpretation. Courts are becoming open to restrict immunity in cases where the harm is associated with the conduct of the platform and not the content of the user. This would redefine the law of all digital platforms, and not only Meta.
4. Cross-border coordination is needed. Meta is an international company, yet the regulatory reaction is still divided. This will require more coordination among jurisdictions to guarantee uniform enforcement and to eliminate regulatory arbitrage.
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Conclusion
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The lawsuits of Meta are not single cases. They are a more general reconsideration of the regulation of digital platforms and the accountability of those responsible when design decisions have harm at scale. In the wider context of the technology ecosystem, the implications are structural. Courts are starting to question not only what is hosted on them, but how they work and why they are constructed in the manner they are.

The age of minimal responsibility is being supplanted by a more challenging requirement: that platforms should foresee, quantify, and alleviate the harms they produce. The result of these cases will not only decide the future of Meta in terms of legal matters. They will influence the regulations of the digital economy in the years to come.

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References
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1. https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5746125/meta-youtube-social-media-trial-verdict 
2. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/jury-finds-meta-and-youtube-liable-in-landmark-youth-addiction-case
3. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/meta-ftc-whatsapp-instagram/
4. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/20/ftc-appeals-metaruling-antitrust-instagram-whatsapp.html‍
5. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czjw0zgz9zyo

Introduction

In July 2025, the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership (DTSP) achieved a significant milestone with the formal acceptance of its Safe Framework Specification as an international standard, ISO/IEC 25389. This is the first globally recognised standard that is exclusively concerned with guaranteeing a secure online experience for the general public's use of digital goods and services.

Significance of the New Framework

Fundamentally, ISO/IEC 25389 provides organisations with an organised framework for recognising, controlling, and reducing risks associated with conduct or content. This standard, which was created under the direction of ISO/IEC's Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1), integrates the best practices of DTSP and offers a precise way to evaluate organisational maturity in terms of safety and trust.  Crucially, it offers the first unified international benchmark, allowing organisations globally to coordinate on common safety pledges and regularly assess progress.

Other Noteworthy Standards and Frameworks

While ISO/IEC 25389 is pioneering, it’s not the only framework shaping digital trust and safety:

• One of the main outcomes of the United Nations’ 2024 Summit for the Future was the UN's Global Digital Compact, which describes cross-border cooperation on secure and reliable digital environments with an emphasis on countering harmful content, upholding online human rights, and creating accountability standards. 
• The World Economic Forum’s Digital Trust Framework defines the goals and values, such as cybersecurity, privacy, transparency, redressability, auditability, fairness, interoperability and safety, implicit to the concept of digital trust. It also provides a roadmap to digital trustworthiness that imbibes these dimensions. 
• The Framework for Integrity, Security and Trust (FIST) launched at the Cybereace Summit 2023 at USI of India in New Delhi, calls for a multistakeholder approach to co-create solutions and best practices for digital trust and safety.
• While still in the finalisation stage for implementation rollout, India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act) and its Rules (2025) aim to strike a balance between individual rights and data processing needs by establishing a groundwork for data security and privacy.
• India is developing frameworks in cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence. Using a hub-and-spoke model under the IndiaAI Mission, the AI Safety Institute was established in early 2025 with the goal of creating standards for trustworthy, moral, and safe AI systems. Furthermore, AI standards with an emphasis on safety and dependability are being drafted by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS). 
• Google's DigiKavach program (2023) and Google Safety Engineering Centre (GSEC) in Hyderabad are concrete efforts to support digital safety and fraud prevention in India's tech sector.

What It Means for India

India is already claiming its place in discussions about safety and trust around the world. Google's June 2025 safety charter for India, for example, highlights how India's distinct digital scale, diversity, and vast threat landscape provide insights that inform global cybersecurity strategies. 

For India's digital ecosystem, ISO/IEC 25389 comes at a critical juncture. Global best practices in safety and trust are desperately needed as a result of the rapid adoption of digital technologies, including the growth of digital payments, e-governance, and artificial intelligence and a concomitant rise in instances of digital harms. Through its guidelines, ISO/IEC 25389 provides a reference benchmark that Indian startups, government agencies, and tech companies can use to improve their safety standards.

Conclusion 

A global trust-and-safety standard like ISO/IEC 25389 is essential for making technology safer for people, even as we discuss the broader adoption of security and safety-by-design principles integrated into the processes of technological product development. India can improve user protection, build its reputation globally, and solidify its position as a key player in the creation of a safer, more resilient digital future by implementing this framework in tandem with its growing domestic regulatory framework (such as the DPDP Act and AI Safety policies).

References 

• https://dtspartnership.org/the-safe-framework-specification/
• https://dtspartnership.org/press-releases/dtsps-safe-framework-published-as-an-international-standard/?
• https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/04/united-nations-global-digital-compact-trust-security/?
• https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/google-releases-safety-charter-for-india-senior-exec-details-top-cyber-threat-actors-in-the-country/articleshow/121903651.cms? 
• https://initiatives.weforum.org/digital-trust/framework 
• https://government.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/secure-india/the-launch-of-fist-framework-for-integrity-security-and-trust/103302090 

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