The Union government temporarily blocked Telegram to protect the sanctity of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test-Undergraduate (NEET-UG) 2026 re-examination by a single interpretative sleight of hand which compressed an entire intermediary platform into an expression: ‘information’.

The ban won the endorsement of the Delhi High Court by stretching the meaning of ‘information’ under the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000.

Section 2(1)(v) of the Act had traditionally defined ‘information’ in diminutive units, including data, messages, text, image, sound, voice, codes, computer programme, software, and databases. The Telegram ban changed that legal interpretation.

The government argued that an online platform like Telegram was an “aggregation” or “compilation” of these units. By reading entire platforms run by companies, which were legal entities by their own nature, under the ambit of ‘information’ under the Act, the government has effectively weaponised the content-blocking provision of Section 69A.

Section 69A of the IT Act gives the government power to issue directions to block public access to any ‘information’ through a computer resource. Here, the interpretation of the Centre has led to the successful replacement of the word ‘information’ with an ‘entire intermediary platform’.

The High Court, in its June 19 order, endorsed the Centre’s view that the “blocking power under Section 69A of the IT Act extends beyond individual pieces of content and, having regard to its wide legislative scope, encompasses the software architecture, codebase, databases, and programmatic ecosystem constituting an application”. The court concluded that the Centre’s reading was in tune with the legislature’s intention to confer a “broad and technologically neutral meaning” upon the expression ‘information’.

The Single Judge Bench also agreed that the ban satisfied the proportionality test as Telegram’s architectural design, particularly its mass-multiplication features and date-time editing capability, rendered it structurally incapable of preventing misuse during the critical examination window.

Telegram had not accepted the “expansive” interpretation of the term ‘information’ while noting that the government, acting through Section 69A, could only block access to “specific information” and not impose a blanket restriction on an entire intermediary platform.

Such a sweeping ban had disproportionately affected the very section it deemed to protect. Many of the 150 million Telegram users were students and educators who used the platform to share study material and educational resources for NEET preparation. The restriction has thrown the baby out with the bathwater by affecting legitimate content and lawful users as well.

The platform’s arguments are backed by the Supreme Court’s judgment in the Anuradha Bhasin case on digital freedoms, holding that restrictions on fundamental rights must be proportionate and only the least restrictive measure must be employed.

Telegram had contended that the standard of compliance legally expected from an intermediary was one of reasonable measures and due diligence, and not perfection.

The larger question still remains if the state’s blocking of an entire platform, curbing the rights of millions of users to target a finite group of criminal actors, by giving an expansive interpretation to the term ‘information’ was disproportionate or not.

The High Court had reasoned that the ban was of a “limited temporal scope” for “securing the stated objective”.