Sex choice adverts banned from search engines in India

By Davey Winder
Sunday, 17 August 2008 06:48

Home IT

Internet censorship has many and varied faces. The latest revealed itself in India as the Supreme Court  ordered Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to stop serving up adverts for sites that promote sex selection services.

It might not be thought of as the most heinous of Internet crimes in the Western World, but in India things are different. Very different indeed.

For a start it is actually illegal to advertise services or products which profess to help determine the gender of an unborn child. The Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostics Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act covers that.

And while it is easy to scoff at the laws of others, in India it is estimated that fast approaching 900,000 unborn female babies are lost as a result of feticide. To save you looking it up, that is "an act that causes the death of a fetus" and most commonly applied when the death is deliberate.

However, it was only in 2003 that the 1994 PC-PNDT Act was amended in a specific attempt to stamp out female feticide.

It was another Indian law, though, which was brought to bear against the big search engine three: namely the Information Technology Act 2000. An Act which Google has had cause to complain about in the past, as both Orkut and YouTube have been sued for copyright violations and objectionable content under it.

In India, there is no escape clause for Internet Service Providers, Search Engines, Social Networks or Web Hosts under the law when it comes to responsibility for published content.

Amendments to Section 79 of the Act are quite clear about that, the only exception being if it can be proven there was no knowledge of the offensive content or it had been published despite every effort being made to stop it.

So who filed the complaint, and what does Google have to say about it all? Find out on page 2...

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