India Set To Bring Heavy Hand Of Censorship Down On Facebook, Google

According to Indian site NDTV a top Indian court said that Google and Facebook could be entirely blocked in the country unless they come up with a way to selectively censor or remove images and content that India’s government deems offensive. This is pursuant to a recently enacted law aimed at blocking or removing “offensive” or “objectionable” content from the internet in India.

The problem is that the Indian law includes a a long list of concepts and content restrictions that are so broad and vague as to make enforcement a nightmare:

[A]nything that is “harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, blasphemous, defamatory, pornographic, libelous, invasive of another’s privacy, hateful, disparaging, racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable, relating to money laundering or gambling.”

The law would also make websites potentially liable for the acts of individual users and third parties over which they have little or no control. Apparently there is law in India intended to protect websites from liability where they had no hand in producing the offensive or objectionable material. But these two statutes would appear to be in direct conflict.

Further hearings are scheduled and the matter is not fully resolved. So a compromise could still theoretically be reached.

This is yet another example of the “culture of the internet” and free flow of information online colliding with the culture and mores of an individual country. In this context India is much more aligned with China than Western Europe or Canada and the US.

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Greg Sterling

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog, Screenwerk, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on Twitter or find him at Google+.