Neutral Citation Number: 2023:DHC:2806 that they are hosting NCII. However, a user may complain directly to a website (identifying NCII content). Because websites host the third-party content, unlike ISPs, they have the ability to remove any unlawful content at source. Removal at source is preferable to blocking by ISPs, as it ensures the deletion of the content for every user on the internet, irrespective of which ISP they use or which country they attempt to access the content from. Social media platforms: are similar to websites hosting third-party content but may be distinguished by their size and efforts to curate the content their users see (and don‘t see). The Intermediary Guidelines recognises that social media platforms with more than five million subscribers in India (termed ‗significant social media companies‘ or ―SSMIs‖) are subject to heightened obligations vis-à-vis unlawful content. Like websites (but unlike ISPs and search engines), SSMIs have control over third-party content on their platforms and can remove content at source if necessary. Further, SSMIs proactively detect unlawful content (including NCII) voluntarily because it is in their commercial interests to keep their platforms free of such Search engines: do not themselves store and transmit content but allow users to locate and visit content. Search engines ‘crawl’ web-pages across the internet, extracting key-words and metadata to identify the type of content on these pages. Search engines then ‘index’ the extracted data to make it accessible for future use. When a user submits a query, the search engine matches the query against pages in its index that likely have content useful to the user’s query and displays them. Because search engines do not themselves host the content (such as NCII) on these pages, they cannot take down or remove unlawful content on websites. For the same reason, search engines cannot proactively detect unlawful content Signature Not Verified Digitally Signed By:SHAZAAD ZAKIR Signing Date:26.04.2023 17:19:50 W.P.(CRL) 1505/2021 Page 35 of 88