The Delhi High Court issued notices to Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and Google over blocking of 4 PM News YouTube channel. Justice Purushaindra Kumar Kaurav sought responses from authorities in the petition.
NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court issued notices to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) and Google in a petition filed by the 4 PM news platform challenging the blockage of its YouTube channel.
Justice Purushaindra Kumar Kaurav issued the notice and asked the government and the search giant to file their responses.
The petition was brought by the YouTube channel 4PM News and its editor-in-chief, Sanjay Sharma. The applicants say their channel had more than 8.4 million subscribers and had been ranked at the top for the past three years.
They allege that in March 2026 their channel and 26 videos were blocked after Google acted on a legal request from the government. The petitioners say neither Google nor MEITY provided any formal order or explanation.
According to the plea, the blocking was done without prior notice and requests for the underlying documents were refused on grounds of “confidentiality.”
The court was told that a hearing before an Inter-Departmental Committee was scheduled on under 24 hours’ notice, with no clarity on whether it related to the entire channel or particular videos.
The petitioners contend that even at the hearing, undisclosed material was relied upon, leaving them without a fair opportunity to respond.
The petition asserts that the procedure violated natural justice and infringed constitutional protections under Article 19(1)(a), which secures freedom of speech and expression. It argues that a YouTube channel cannot be treated as “information” under the Information Technology Act, 2000, and therefore should not be blocked in its entirety; any restriction, it maintains, must be confined to specific offending content.
The plea also describes the use of emergency powers under the Information Technology (Guidelines for Intermediaries and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 as a “gross abuse of process,” noting that some of the blocked videos date back to April 2025.
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