I&B Ministry Tightens Grip On Betting And Gambling Advertisements

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) has advised media entities, media platforms and online advertisement intermediaries to refrain from carrying advertisements/promotional content of betting platforms on Friday.

The advisory has been issued to all media formats, including newspapers, television channels, and online news publishers.

The ministry reiterated that betting and gambling are illegal activities and hence advertisements/ promotion of such activities directly or indirectly on any of the media platforms fall foul of the regulations.

The ministry said it has been informed of recent instances of news publishers carrying advertisements/ promotional content of betting platforms. It also said that some of the news publishers carried advertisements of a betting platform in which the audience was being
encouraged to watch a sports league on the platform.

“The Ministry takes strong exception to such practices and urges all stakeholders, including the media platforms and the various online advertisement intermediaries, to immediately refrain from showing such advertisements/promotional content in any form whatsoever,” it said in the advisory.

Direct or surrogate advertisements of such activities fall foul of the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, the Press Council Act 1978, Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, and many other rules.

This is the third time the MIB has issued such an advisory. The ministry also highlighted the earlier advisories it issued last October when it directed online ad intermediaries to not target promotional material related to online betting towards Indian audience.

At that time, the MIB noted that betting is illegal in many states and warned TV channels and OTT players of penalty in case of violation. However, the amount of penalty was not mentioned in the advisory.

It is important to note that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on Thursday notified the rules for online gaming, where it has laid out a distinction between online gaming and betting or gambling.

The rules have defined real money gaming, the segment which is sometimes mistakenly perceived as betting, as games where a user makes a deposit in cash or kind with the expectation of earning winnings on that deposit. Under the new rules, a self-regulatory organisation would determine all online real money games as permissible.

“These rules don’t deal with all the nuances and the sophistication of games of chance games or skill. We bypass that and basically lay out a basic principle that the moment an online gaming passes into involving betting and wagering, regardless of the core content of the game, then it falls afoul of these rules,” Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said.

The betting apps have been under constant scrutiny by the government as many users, lured by the promise of high returns, have had to face financial crisis because of it, even leading to suicides in some cases.

In February, the Indian government banned 138 chinese betting apps as the apps in question were flouting Section 69 of the IT Act. The Centre also directed Google to stop overseas online betting platforms, such as Betway and 1xBet, from marketing their ads in the country late last year.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) also seized INR 212.91 Cr till December 2022 in connection with money laundering probes involving online gambling platforms.