India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has ordered WhatsApp not to roll out its planned username feature in the country until further consultations are completed, according to a letter seen by Reuters.
The service, known as MeitY, gave Meta three days to explain why regulatory measures should not follow the announcement of the feature.
WhatsApp said on June 29 users will be able to set a unique username, allowing people to start conversations without sharing a phone number. Within 48 hours, MeitY had sent an official notice telling the company to pause the release “until consultation on this point is reached to the satisfaction of the Government.”
The concern mentioned by the minister is fraud. Its notice warns that usernames “may facilitate impersonation and identity theft, including impersonating government authorities, financial institutions, and government agencies,” by allowing people to use handles that closely resemble real institutions.
Those concerns are among a wide-ranging series of digital arrest scams and phishing schemes that Indian regulators have spent much of the past two years trying to contain.
TNW City Coworking Space – Where your best work happens
A workplace designed for growth, collaboration, and endless networking opportunities at the heart of technology.
A Meta spokesperson said the feature is not yet live in India and the company has already reserved usernames like those of famous people, government organizations and verified Meta accounts to stop impersonation.
Whether those safeguards will satisfy MeitY’s objections remains unclear, and the service’s letter gives no indication that the list of reserved names alone will be sufficient to remove the hold. This is not India’s first battle over anonymity features included in the messaging app.
Telegram challenged the temporary, nationwide ban in the Delhi High Court in early June, after the government said the app’s channels were being used to sell leaked papers for the NEET medical entrance exam, which were lost.
At the time, officials specifically noted that username-based communications and hidden phone numbers made it difficult for law enforcement to track down who was really behind the account.
That argument is consistent with the complaints now being raised against WhatsApp. WhatsApp, however, occupies a different place in India’s digital economy than Telegram once did.
It is one of Meta’s most important markets around the world, and the company has spent years trying to turn the app into a trading platform rather than just a messaging tool, most recently by taking a stake in the fintech company Cred and installing its founder as the new head of WhatsApp. The misunderstanding of long-term control over usernames could come at the wrong time for that broader ambition.
Not everyone accepts that MeitY has the legal grounds to issue this type of order in the first place. The Internet Freedom Foundation argued that the minister relied on Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, a safe harbor provision that regulates platform liability, to act closer to overseeing the creation of the product, a group that says there is no enabling law.
The foundation’s position is that fraud and impersonation should be prosecuted under existing criminal law rather than pre-empted by holding a product feature.
It has raised similar objections in the past about the service’s use of traceability rules to shape how messaging apps are built rather than being policed.
The dispute also comes against the backdrop of repeated clashes between Indian regulators and WhatsApp over how much visibility the government should have in choosing the app’s design.
Officials have previously pushed the company to make messages traceable to combat disinformation, proposals WhatsApp has resisted on the grounds that they would undermine the end-to-end encryption of its entire user base, not just suspect accounts.
According to the letter’s disclosure, WhatsApp usernames remain unavailable to Indian users, and the three-day clock the service placed in its notification provides a clear indication of what’s coming next.
