#e4mBreaking: TV Ratings Policy row: Kerala HC reserves verdict on landing page TRP exclusion

AIDCF stated that removing landing page data effectively removes any commercial incentive to advertise on or through landing page, even though the policy permits it to continue as a marketing tool

by Imran Fazal
Published: Jul 21, 2026 4:31 PM | 7 min read

The Kerala High Court is reviewing a challenge to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting's Television Rating Policy, 2026, particularly its exclusion of "landing page" viewership from official ratings, which may conflict with ongoing Supreme Court proceedings regarding the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).
Petitioners, including the All India Digital Cable Federation and DEN Networks, argue that the MIB policy indirectly enforces restrictions that the Supreme Court has previously put on hold, asserting that the landing page is a valuable commercial right that cannot be curtailed without proper regulation.
The Centre's legal representatives contend that the policy does not restrict broadcasters' rights to advertise or place channels on landing pages, arguing that the issue at hand is distinct from the Supreme Court's jurisdictional question regarding TRAI's authority.
Justice Bechu Kurian Thomas is expected to issue orders on the matter by Friday, with the implications of the case being significant for the broadcasting industry, advertisers, and audience measurement practices.

The Kerala High Court on Tuesday heard extensive arguments on whether the MIB's Television Rating Policy, 2026 — specifically the provision excluding "landing page" viewership from official television ratings — amounts to an indirect enforcement of restrictions that the Supreme Court has kept in abeyance in a separate, long-pending dispute involving the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).

Justice Bechu Kurian Thomas, who is hearing the challenge filed by the All India Digital Cable Federation (AIDCF) and DEN Networks against the policy, spent the better part of the day walking through case records from the TRAI–TDSAT–Supreme Court litigation before indicating he would pass orders within the week, with the matter now listed for Friday.

AIDCF: Centre doing indirectly what TRAI was stopped from doing directly

Senior counsel Arun Kathpalia for the petitioners built his case around a single, tightly argued proposition: that the dispute pending before the Supreme Court and the one now before the Kerala High Court are not, as the government and BARC have claimed, unconnected.

Counsel took the bench through the record of TRAI's 2018 direction restraining broadcasters and distributors from placing rated channels on the landing page — the default screen a viewer sees when a set-top box is switched on — and the subsequent judgment of the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT) that struck down that direction.

He argued that TDSAT had not denied TRAI's jurisdiction over the subject matter altogether; rather, the tribunal held that any such curtailment of distributors' rights could only be effected through a properly notified regulation under Section 36 of the TRAI Act — after a full consultative process — and not through an administrative direction under Section 13, which carries no statutory force.

Reading from the tribunal's order, counsel emphasised the finding that a distributor's right to carry a channel or a landing page, by way of content or advertisement, is a valuable commercial right that can only be curtailed "for good reasons through statutory provisions like the regulation," and only after weighing the impact on all stakeholders.

Counsel then took the court through TRAI's own appeal memo before the Supreme Court to show that the regulator has never disputed its jurisdiction over the landing page issue; its grievance is only that TDSAT wrongly confined it to acting by regulation rather than by direction.

He read out extracts framing the core question as whether TRAI's power to regulate channel placement can be exercised only through a Section 36 regulation or also through a Section 13 direction — and pointed to the Supreme Court's interim order, which restrained enforcement of the landing page direction while expressly preserving TRAI's jurisdiction to act in the matter.

Against this backdrop, counsel argued that the 2026 Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) policy, framed without recourse to a TRAI regulation, seeks to achieve the same commercial outcome — stripping the landing page of its value — through the back door of ratings methodology rather than a direct placement restriction. "Can you do indirectly what directly is prohibited?" he asked the court.

Policy chills advertising, violates Article 19: petitioners

Turning to the constitutional challenge, counsel argued that television ratings are described in the policy's own preamble as the "foundational currency" of the broadcasting system, informing programming decisions, advertising investment and content strategy.

Excluding landing page viewership from that currency, he submitted, effectively removes any commercial incentive to advertise on or through the landing page, even though the policy nominally permits it to continue as a "marketing tool."

He relied heavily on the Supreme Court's judgments in Tata Press v. MTNL and Sakal Papers, both of which hold that commercial speech and advertising revenue are integral to the freedom of speech and expression under Article 19(1)(a), and that curtailing advertising space has a direct — not remote — impact on circulation and, by extension, on protected speech.

He also cited Bennett Coleman v. Union of India to argue that restrictions with a demonstrable effect on Article 19(1)(a) rights cannot be justified by re-characterising their purpose as something else — what he called an impermissible use of the "pith and substance" doctrine outside its proper constitutional context.

On the government's preliminary objection that the petition was not maintainable because it challenges a policy rather than a statute, counsel argued that policy decisions are very much open to judicial review where they are shown to be arbitrary, contrary to statute, or violative of fundamental rights — citing a line of Supreme Court authority including Bajaj Hindustan, DDA v. Joint Action Committee and Brij Mohan Lal v. Union of India, while noting that the stricter "hands-off" standard applied to fiscal policy does not apply here.

He also rejected the government's reliance on Article 19 being unavailable to corporate petitioners, again invoking Bennett Coleman for the proposition that relief can still be granted to protect the underlying rights of shareholders and stakeholders even where corporate entities are formally before the court.

Centre: two different regulatory questions, no restriction on landing pages

Appearing for the Union, the Additional Solicitor General pushed back on both the maintainability and the merits. He argued that the policy is an executive guideline issued under Section 25 of the TRAI Act framework and MIB's general policy-making authority, and that the only proviso under challenge is a narrow one — not the entire policy — undercutting the claim that a full regulation was required.

He maintained that neither broadcasters' right to advertise, nor their right to place channels on the landing page, is in any way restricted by the policy; the only consequence is that landing-page-generated viewership will not be counted toward official TRP ratings.

On the question of overlap with the Supreme Court proceedings, the ASG pointed to the synopsis in TRAI's own civil appeal, which frames the dispute as confined to the question of jurisdiction — whether TRAI can act by direction or only by regulation — arguing that this is distinct from the ratings-methodology question now before the Kerala High Court.

He submitted that since TRAI has, in any event, not issued either a regulation or a fresh direction on the subject, the jurisdictional question is no longer a live issue in this case.

Backdrop: BARC's affidavit and the interim stay

Tuesday's hearing followed the Centre's affidavit — filed after the court's May 22 interim order kept Clause 5.4.1 of the Television Rating Policy, 2026 in abeyance — seeking vacation of that stay.

The Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC), impleaded as the technical body that would operationalise the methodology, has separately filed a counter-affidavit backing the Centre, arguing that landing page exposure amounts to "forced viewing" rather than genuine viewer choice, that its own Data Validation Quality Initiative and Landing Page Algorithm (introduced in 2020) had already found landing pages to inflate ratings artificially, and that the categorical exclusion under the new policy simply codifies a principle it says is internationally accepted.

BARC has also argued that the Supreme Court's TRAI case deals only with placement jurisdiction, not measurement methodology, and that no fundamental right exists to have "platform-generated, non-genuine exposure" counted as viewership.

The petitioners, for their part, have argued that BARC's existing algorithmic safeguards already address any distortion, and that the Centre has produced no material showing those safeguards are inadequate — a gap they say renders the blanket exclusion arbitrary.

What's next

After hearing both sides at length, Justice Bechu Kurian Thomas indicated that he would examine the submissions and pass orders on Friday. The petitioners also sought a short date for a final hearing on merits, citing the constitutional, statutory and regulatory questions involved and the commercial urgency for the cable distribution industry.

The outcome — on both the interim relief and, eventually, the underlying writ petition — is being closely watched by broadcasters, cable and DTH distribution platforms, advertisers and BARC itself, given its bearing on how television audience measurement, and the commercial value of landing page placements, will be governed going forward.