It’s front page news in today’s paper. The Government of India, apparently wants the court to prosecute Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and other companies that run social networks because they display objectionable content thereby “promoting enmity between groups” and “deliberate malicious acts intended to outrage.” – on their websites.
Basically, people it looks like can’t post their opinion on social networks concerning religion, politics or other people, but it they do, and some take offence, it’s the social networks who are taken to court for that! This is not just the government harassing new media companies but also democracy and free-speech.
To make things sound scarier, a High Court judge threatened:
Like China, we can block all such websites.
Wow!
Things like this have happened in the past, and I would think that India is a new democracy, only 60 or so years old, and eventually it will mature to become more like the US and other older democracies in the west, but with SOPA and the protect IP act created to bring censorship to the Internet in America looking more and more possible each day, I wonder if the idea of free speech and democracy exists within the very borders of the world’s ‘democracies’ any-more.
Full story on the India situation at Reuters