Last week, an Indian court threatened to block sites like Google and Facebook if the Internet giants fail to implement strategies to prevent posting of offensive content online.
The Times of India reports justice Suresh Kait said in the Deli High Court: “Like China, we will block all such Web sites.”
Kait reportedly asked Facebook and Google's counsel to develop a real-time mechanism to screen and remove offensive and objectionable material.
This follows the suggestion made by then-acting telecommunications minister Kabil Sibal last year that Web content should be pre-screened.
Sibal met with the lawyers of major technology companies to discuss the issue. Sibal reportedly used a Facebook page with content that was critical of the president of India's Congress Party as an example of what he wanted removed.
According to reports, Sibal also demanded that screening of content should be conducted by people and not by algorithms. At the time, the companies involved rejected Sibal's request on the grounds that it would be impossible to monitor such volumes of user-generated content.
In mid-December, a private citizen, Vinay Rai, then filed the lawsuit in New Delhi after he said he came across offensive content about the Hindu goddess of learning and Prophet Muhammad.
Impossible
A related criminal case also accuses 21 companies in total of violating Indian law and publishing content considered to be “deprave or corrupt”. The court reportedly ordered that summons be served to all the accused companies at their foreign headquarters this week.
An attorney representing Google India during proceedings last week reportedly argued: "No human interference is possible, and moreover, it can't be feasible to check such incidents. Billions of people across the globe, post their articles on the Web site. Yes, they may be defamatory, obscene, but cannot be checked.”
Both Facebook and Google have moved to have Rai's case dismissed. Proceedings are expected to continue today.
In January last year, the Indian government demanded that Research In Motion (RIM) grant it access to user data for BlackBerry Messenger and BlackBerry Internet e-mail. RIM agreed in order to prevent the blocking of its services in India.
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