What to do about internet content?

Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, has set off a firestorm of protest by demanding that ‘internet intermediaries' — specifically in this round, four social networking giants, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Microsoft, which enable hundreds of millions of individual users to publish and share on the worldwide web — remove inflammatory content as well as other text and images that might “offend Indian sensibilities.” As in other battles over free speech, both sides are claiming the moral high ground: Mr. Sibal's supporters, including the Bharatiya Janata Party, don the mantle of defenders of order, decency, and ‘Indian values'; his opponents, led by the bloggers, wear the halo that comes with wanting to protect and expand modern democratic rights. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the claim of Mr. Sibal's detractors that the government acted not so much out of concern over inflammatory content, which has been around on the worldwide web for quite a while, as on account of blogged graphic content that targeted Congress president Sonia Gandhi is correct. In an interview published in The Hindu, Mr. Sibal made the argument that the nature of the medium, the worldwide web, has blunted the instruments in the law's arsenal: for example, a blogger posting inflammatory communal polemic might be doing so using servers located in a country where it is not a crime. In fact, the report published in The Hindu on December 8, “India wanted 358 items removed,” reveals that 255 of these requests made to Google fell in the “government criticism category,” with the biggest chunk accounted for by a single request from “a local law enforcement agency to remove 236 communities and profiles” from the Google-owned social networking site, Orkut, which were “critical of” an unnamed “local politician.” This strengthens widespread suspicion that the inflammatory content argument is really a cover for censoring political attacks and uninhibited criticism circulating in the social media.