Asia Bizz: A day after the Indian government announced that it will be taking action against all the social networking sites in the country for the objectionable content, Google India had its own opinion. The search engine giant told Delhi High court that blocking their website was not an option as India is a democratic country and that it does not have a ‘totalitarian’ regime like China.
Advocate NK Paul, who appeared for Google India, said that the issue relates to the constitutional issue of freedom of speech and expression and suppressing it wasn’t an option at all as this right separates the country from the totalitarian regime. During the last hearing, Justice Suresh Kait had warned the social networking sites including Google saying that the websites can be blocked like in China if they fail to create a mechanism which will have a check on the objectionable material.
During the initial arguments, Kaul said that internet is a global system which will have billions of users which also includes companies, governments as well as private officials. Kaul provided an instance regarding the issue saying that for an online search for the word ‘virgin’ has 82.30 crore search results within 0.33 and blocking all of them would deprive the users of the required information.
