The Delhi High Court’s recent decision upholding the temporary nationwide blocking of Telegram may appear to be a public-order case. Yet, beneath the surface, it imports a deeper logic from copyright enforcement jurisprudence: that a platform’s architecture can itself justify expansive regulatory intervention. In this post, Anushka Aggarwal examines the emergence of “architectural liability” and its implications for intermediary regulation. Anushka is a fifth year student at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. She would like to add the following clarification-This piece develops an argument provoked by Tanmay Durani’s analysis of the same judgment. While Durani focuses on the interpretation of “information” under Section 69A and the administrative law question of the Secretary’s satisfaction, I focus on the doctrinal import of copyright law and the impact of architectural liability on a constitutional law-centric proportionality analysis.
How Telegram Imports Copyright Doctrine Into Public Law
By Anushka Aggarwal
The Delhi High Court decided on 19 June 2026 in Telegram FZ LLC v Union of India that the order for a nation-wide platform-level block was valid. It did not consider Telegram’s architecture illegal per se. The real problem lies in its holding that Telegram’s architecture, including cloud computing infrastructure, bot ecosystems, message editing function, fast channel reintroduction, among others, made specific law enforcement futile to an extent that it warranted the shutdown of the whole platform. Its architecture became the proof for the block. This line of reasoning had been developing in copyright law for almost a decade (evident from the discussion below). Now, Telegram brings it to public order-based blocking. What courts rarely acknowledge is that treating a technology’s resistance to state control as justification for controlling the technology is not interest-balancing. It is declaring architectural design as a regulatory liability. By this logic, any platform protected by encryption from state surveillance or decentralised from takedown becomes prone to blocking.
Architecture as Liability
This reasoning has been developed out of copyright enforcement proceedings against file-sharing websites. It has been an issue that has arisen from rights-holders obtaining injunctions which prohibit certain URLs, followed by the URL mirrors being generated and the list of blocked URLs soon becoming obsolete.
In R.K. Productions v. B.S.N.L. (2012), the Madras High Court legitimises dynamic injunction by allowing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block URLs that were “substantially similar” to URLs that were found to be infringing copyrights. The ability of the piracy site to generate mirrors became the basis for extending the scope of the remedy. In UTV Software v. 1337x (2019), the Delhi High Court adopted the same reasoning while dealing with a website that distributed files through users’ nodes making both geofencing and specific takedowns impossible. (More can be read about the issues with the jurisprudence on dynamic injunctions here, here, here and here.)
What is clear is that in each scenario, the courts’ reasoning works similarly, which is that the very architecture of the website, its inability to be subjected to targeted interventions, ends up serving as a reason to stop using targeted interventions. It should also be pointed out what does not happen in the process. The requirement under the copyright law to identify the infringer prior to any enforcement actions towards the intermediary is bypassed through an appeal to architecture- that because of mirroring, identification and then enforcement will be pointless.
Telegram Adopts Copyright Logic for Public Order
The approach adopted in Telegram brings the logic of that to a domain where it had never been applied before. This is explicit in Para 29 where it is stated that blockage of specific content is covered by the 2021 intermediary rules but “the Impugned Order under Section 69A of the IT Act was passed upon consideration of the overall architectural features of Telegram.” Architecture, not content, drove the decision.
The line of reasoning is remarkably similar to that of the copyright case: The government asked for takedown notices on those channels related to fraud. The operators repopulated the same channels under different names. Blocking did not work, and so the courts recognised factors, including the existence of cloud systems which made it possible to quickly activate backups, the existence of bots which could generate channels, the ability to use username and not identifier in order to hide identity, and the ability to edit messages to falsify leak evidence. The only solution left was to block the entire platform till the NEET exam.
What differs is the doctrinal context, and the difference is not minor. Copyright infringement is a matter of individual rights. A recognised rights owner with sufficiently provable (economic) damage sues the offender. There is something tangible for proportionality to measure: some form of damage to the rights owner and economic benefits of blocking. By contrast, public law enforcement is a harm-centric. There is usually no specific plaintiff in this case. The State claims a generalised threat posed by the architecture; here it was that the Telegram architecture allowed examination fraud, theft of information, and loss of institutional confidence. The State did not come up with any numbers of how many students were frauded or how much data was stolen or likelihood of it happening again if the blockage was removed. The harm is speculative and aggregated. When architectural liability migrates across this divide to public law, the proportionality test does not travel with it intact.
Further, in any case of copyright infringement, the copyright courts require the rights’ owner to show the content that is being infringed, before the ISPs can proceed with the blocking order. Further, the decision of the ISP is confined to categories, i.e., the ISP will only have the authority to block the URLs “substantially similar” to the ones involved in the alleged act of infringement. In Telegram, the government identified no specific individuals and quantified no concrete harm. Yet, the court seems to reaffirm the National Testing Agency’s claim that targeted action had been “rendered inadequate by rapid creation of replacement infrastructure” (para 14.8). The Attorney General’s submission that the architecture was “structurally incapable of ensuring accountability” was upheld by the court as the standard for Section 69A order (paras 14.14, 15) – logic so far absent from Section 69A jurisprudence.
Why Should We Be Concerned
A generalised architecture liability-based reasoning has severe consequences. Firstly, platforms become susceptible to blocking based on their designs and not on the content provided through them. There is no necessity for any platform to host illegal content; all a platform has to do is to incorporate certain technical elements such as end-to-end encryption, user-based authorization systems, easy account registration, etc. All these elements are created in order to provide for legal purposes but under architecture-based liability, they become loopholes.
Secondly, the line drawn by Parliament between Sections 69A and 79 also begins to break down. Section 69A mandates identifying and deleting certain information. The 2021 Rules read with Section 79 dictate how intermediaries should deal with content on their platforms. Parliament made sure to distinguish between the two intentionally. Telegram confuses the issue, making content-based takedowns the primary measure taken, which if unsuccessful, as in all likelihood will be, makes the platform itself an option for recourse.
Lastly, the copyright dynamic injunctions are now under the pressure of the Telegram logic. Copyright courts become prone to rely more on the distributed network, automatic upload of materials, domain rotation and other technological characteristics which are the same reason to block the platform rather than the content.
Conclusion
The reasoning of the judgment asks courts to view a technology’s resistance to state control as an indicator of the need for controlling that technology. In the case of the old “blocking” doctrine, the government needs to prove why certain content is harmful. With architectural liability, the company needs to prove why its platform should not be taken down. The positions are reversed. Technology is treated as suspect until it can prove accountability, and no design can prove itself accountable in advance against a standard the government defines.
In such a scenario, platforms that are designed with the principle of user freedom in mind, including encryption and decentralisation of messages, are subject to prohibition because of those very characteristics. Telegram does not answer how courts would evaluate this balance. If they do, however, then Section 69A will turn into something that the statute never anticipated: instead of serving to remove unlawful content, this will serve to remove any platform whose architecture makes it inconvenient for law enforcement to monitor it. And the courts in copyright disputes can transport this logic back.