India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has ordered WhatsApp not to launch its planned usernames feature in the country until further consultations are complete, according to a letter seen by Reuters.
The ministry, known as MeitY, has given Meta three days to explain why regulatory action should not follow the feature’s announcement.
WhatsApp said on 29 June that users would soon be able to reserve a unique username, letting people start conversations without sharing a phone number. Within 48 hours, MeitY had sent a formal notice telling the company to pause the rollout “until the consultation on this point is achieved to the satisfaction of the Government.”
The ministry’s stated worry is fraud. Its notice warns that usernames “may facilitate impersonation and identity spoofing, including impersonation of individuals, public authorities, financial institutions, and government agencies,” by letting people adopt handles that closely resemble those of real institutions.
That concern sits inside a wider run of digital arrest scams and phishing schemes that Indian regulators have spent much of the past two years trying to contain.
A Meta spokesperson said the feature is not yet live in India and that the company has already reserved usernames resembling those of public figures, government entities and verified Meta accounts specifically to head off impersonation.
Whether that safeguard will satisfy MeitY’s objections remains unclear, and the ministry’s letter gives no indication that a reserved-name list alone would be enough to lift the hold. This is not India’s first fight over anonymity features baked into a messaging app.
Telegram challenged a temporary, nationwide block in the Delhi High Court earlier in June, after the government said channels on the app had been used to sell leaked papers for the NEET medical entrance exam, and lost.
During that case, officials specifically flagged how username-based contact and concealed phone numbers made it harder for law enforcement to trace who was actually behind an account.
That argument maps closely onto the objections now raised against WhatsApp. WhatsApp, though, occupies a different place in India’s digital economy than Telegram ever did.
It is one of Meta’s most important markets globally, and the company has spent years trying to turn the app into a commerce platform rather than just a messaging tool, most recently by taking a stake in the fintech firm Cred and installing its founder as WhatsApp’s new head. A prolonged regulatory standoff over usernames would land at an inconvenient moment for that broader ambition.
Not everyone accepts that MeitY has the legal footing to issue this kind of order in the first place. The Internet Freedom Foundation has argued that the ministry is leaning on Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, a safe harbour provision that governs platform liability, to do something closer to product-design oversight, which the group says no statute actually grants it.
The foundation’s position is that fraud and impersonation should be prosecuted under existing criminal law rather than pre-empted by holding back a product feature.
It has raised similar objections before about the ministry’s use of traceability rules to shape how messaging apps are built rather than how they are policed.
The dispute also lands against a backdrop of repeated friction between Indian regulators and WhatsApp over how much visibility the government should have into the app’s design choices.
Officials have previously pushed the company toward making messages traceable to combat misinformation, proposals WhatsApp has resisted on the grounds that they would undermine end-to-end encryption for its entire user base, not just the accounts under suspicion.
As of the letter’s disclosure, WhatsApp’s usernames remain unavailable to users in India, and the three-day clock the ministry set on its notice gives the clearest near-term marker for what happens next.
