Regulating Internet Addiction Crime under Cyber Law: A Critical Study

Abstract

Think about how dramatically the Internet has changed our lives — the way we talk, learn, shop, play, and socialize. But every gift has a shadow. Alongside all this convenience, something troubling has crept in: excessive, uncontrolled Internet use. When someone can't stop scrolling, gaming, gambling, streaming, or shopping online — when it starts damaging their studies, work, relationships, or finances — we have a genuine social, psychological, and now legal problem on our hands.
And the legal problem gets even more tangled when this addictive behavior overlaps with actual cybercrime — financial fraud, online exploitation, privacy violations, obscene content, identity theft, harassment, and illegal gaming. So regulating Internet addiction can't simply be treated as an ordinary criminal-law question.
Here's a key fact students should note: India has no offence called "Internet addiction" under the Information Technology Act, 2000. Instead, we have a patchwork of laws — the IT Act itself, the IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, data-protection legislation, and the newly enacted Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 — each targeting a particular digital risk. The gaming law deserves special attention because it openly acknowledges the psychological, social, economic, and privacy harms of online money games and builds a specialized regulatory and enforcement machinery.
This article walks through the relationship between Internet addiction and Indian cyber law, and makes a central argument: criminalizing addiction itself makes no sense, because addiction is better understood as a health or behavioral condition, not criminal conduct. What we need instead is a preventive, rights-based, harm-oriented framework that combines criminal law, intermediary regulation, consumer protection, data protection, platform accountability, age safeguards, financial controls, digital literacy, and treatment. The article closes by proposing a balanced model that protects vulnerable users without crushing legitimate Internet use or fundamental freedoms.