Google and Facebook Comply with Indian Court Orders

By: Qichen Zhang on 6 February 2012
Posted in India, Asia

Google and Facebook have taken down some content from sites with Indian domains. In compliance with Delhi High Court demands that they begin censoring should they continue operations in India, the two companies seem to have bowed to the court's ruling. One Google spokeswoman said, "(Our) review team has looked at the content and disabled this content from the local domains of (Google) search, Youtube and Blogger." Although the courts have given the 21 companies charged in this petition two weeks to present strategies for censoring content, Google and Facebook have already complied, reports ZDNet.

It remains unclear whether the court ruling applies to all content. The ambiguous responsibility regarding user-created content on blogs arose during the court hearing. Additional Civil Judge Praveen Singh asked the counsel acting on behalf of petitioner Mufti Aijaz Arshad Qasmi whether blog-service providing companies should also be held accountable for offensive content posted by their users on blogs. The hearings will continue at least for another month—the High Court has asked representatives from the companies to appear again on March 13 to face charges of conspiracy, among other charges.