Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The New York Times quotes
a Google spokesperson as stating that "We take local laws extremely
seriously and will review the petition carefully."
However, Google India is known to take a dim view of intermediary
liability as was made plain towards the end of last year in an official
Google Public Policy Blog
posting.
Rishi Jaitly, Policy Analyst for Google India, stated at the time "We
don't hold the telephone company liable when two callers use the phone
lines to plan a crime. For the same reasons, it's a fundamental
principle of the Internet that you don't blame the neutral
intermediaries for the actions of their customers... For intermediary
websites to be held liable for the "reckless activities" of others is
fundamentally unjust, ignores the origin of the content, misunderstands
the size and scale of the Internet, and fails to appreciate the great
benefits yielded to the vast majority of Indian users by these
information platforms."
Yet the fact remains, for many in India it is culturally acceptable to
abort an unborn child if sex selection techniques suggest it will not
be male. For technologies which use the IP address to determine the
geographic location of the user viewing an advert or link, it is simple
enough to ensure that advertising for gender determination services are
not served.
All in all it does not seem that big a deal. Certainly it does not seem
to suggest that the Internet will fail in India if the adverts are not
allowed, and arguing otherwise on the basis of qualified safe harbor
principles could be a case of the wrong time to take a principled
stand.
While it is easy to cry foul on censorship grounds, a global Internet cannot always escape from local laws no matter how hard it may try...
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.