The Union Government
on Friday informed the Supreme Court through an affidavit that search engines like
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were capable of blocking all contents infringing
Indian laws, including those relating to pre-natal sex determination
technologies.
The affidavit has
been filed in response to a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) by Sabu Mathew
George, who said the search engines violated Indian laws by displaying
pre-natal sex determination ads.
In its affidavit,
the Ministry of Communications and Technology has stated that the “search engines have the relevant technology
and deep-domain knowledge and expertise to block/filter the
words/phrases/expressions and sponsored links, which are violative of the
Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex
Selection) Act.” The Act prohibits determination of the sex of a foetus.
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The Ministry
contended that the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were
intermediaries, as defined under the Information Technology Act, and hence they
had statutory obligations to perform due diligence and block all contents that
breached Indian laws.
It pointed out that
the search engines used an algorithm to rank search results on web pages and
that it was used as a marketing technique for the entities to gain higher page
ranking against a key word search.
Since there was a
limited technical know-how in the country to decode such algorithm and disable
search of contentious key words, the Department of Electronics and Information
Technology found it difficult to block the information based on the key word
search results, which could include unlawful information.
“Such
blocking/filtering on keywords or advertisements can be effectively and
regularly done only by the search engines as they have access to their
respective mathematical algorithms all the time,”
claimed the ministry. The Ministry has further contended in its affidavit that Google,
Yahoo and Microsoft should be asked by the court to provide details of measures
adopted by them to block keywords and sponsored links violative of the PC-PNDT
Act.
The PIL is likely to
come up for hearing before the Apex Court shortly.
