Despite of amid pressure from Indian Government, search engine giant Google has announced that it cannot censor the web content in India. As the number of internet users in India is around 121 million, it’s difficult to mentor each and every user across the website. Google is among the 21 companies which are facing controversy in India for hosting obscene and offensive contents.
However, executives of these 21 companies have been convened to materialize in a lower court in Delhi on March 13 for purportedly hosting obscene and obnoxious content on their websites as well as services.
Few weeks back Delhi court Justice has also said that if these companies will not censor the objectionable and obnoxious content than they can face ban forever as China did in past.
Interestingly, the companies have challenged the summons in the High Court and the next hearing date is scheduled on 2nd February 2012.
The rivalry between companies and Indian Government started just after the executives of Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and Microsoft had met with IT minister Kapil Sibal in which they were asked to censor the offensive contents related to the individual personalities. However, companies denied the request by saying that checking contents of billion users is not possible in real-time.
Surprisingly, after such ‘turned-down’ request of Indian Government, Google got the notice from Income tax department of India for non-payment of legitimate tax for the year 2008-09.
“You are asking not just censor the Web in India; you are asking to censor the entire world-wide web. The Web has no border “.”I think the idea of censoring everything and pre-clearing everything is going to fundamentally, sort of, taint the growth of the Indian economy in India and vis-a-vis the world,” said by Nikesh Arora, Chief Business Officer, Google.
I feel censoring contents from 121 million internet users from India is not an easy task. Infact with the improvement of infrastructure and network facility, the number of users will only go up in coming days. So, it’s impossible for any of the site to take the view of individual users’ activities on regular basis in real time.
Last but not the least, taking stiff action against companies on this matter will only damage the reputation of the Indian Government as well as Indian law on global platform. So, its important for both the sides to work out the best possible solution of the scenario ‘out-of-court’ in a healthy business environment.
(Source: Times Of India)
