Sex choice adverts banned from search engines in India

Davey Winder
Sunday, 17 August 2008 06:48

Your IT - Home IT

Dr. Sabu Mathew George filed the complaint against the search engines in an attempt to prevent them from making money by breaking Indian law.

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...