The Indian government has requested that social media sites like Facebook and informative search engine sites like Google “remove disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content before it goes online” in their country. So basically before anyone posts anything, sites are to scan and detect “illegitimate” posts before they are published.
Officials from Indian branches of companies like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are said to meet with Kapil Sibal, India’s Minister for Telecommunications and HR sometime today to discuss the censorship procedures and setting up a “proactive screening system.”
The schedules meeting came about after Sibal called legal reps into his office and showed them a Facebook post that “maligned the Congress Party’s president, Sonia Gandi. [Sibal said the post was] ‘unacceptable,’ [...] and he asked them to find a way to monitor what is posted on their sites.”
So while the meeting for Sibal seems hopeful in setting up a system to censor posts like the one about Gandi, the request seems impossible, “given the user-generated content coming from India.”
One executive that is said to attend the meeting noted, “[i]f there’s a law and there’s a court order, we can follow up on it,” but without a court-mandated request the companies really have no say in deciding what is legal or illegal to post.
This is not the first time the Indian government has requested censorship online. Back in April they issued a rule demanding ISPs delete all info posted on sites that appeared “disparaging or harassing.”
Realizing the internet is an open arena for millions to post varying content, the request does seem a little much, but even still, cities like Mumbai have already started issuing monitoring devices for social and sharing sites.
According to Google’s transparency report, India’s latest request can be added to the list of 70 other censorship request made between January and June of this year, though considerably less than the 92 made by the United States and Brazil’s shocking 224.
According to comScore statistics, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing now each have 15% of the search engine market. Considering Bing has been offering its unique search services for under three years, coming this close to overtaking Yahoo is quite an accomplishment – although the fact that Bing powers Yahoo makes the rivalry an interesting one. Of course, neither are anywhere close to search champion Google, who has a 65.4% market share according to the same study.
