The
Supreme Court Wednesday directed search engines Google, Microsoft and
Yahoo not to advertise, or sponsor any advertisement, on India-centric
sex determination tests that are in breach of statutory provisions.
“As
an interim measure, it is directed, the respondents, namely, Google,
Yahoo and Microsoft shall not advertise or sponsor any advertisement
which would violate section 22 of the PCPNDT Act, 1994,” the bench of
Justice Dipak Misra and Justice Prafulla C. Pant said in their order.
The court also directed the three companies to withdraw forthwith if they were carrying any such advertisements.
“If
any advertisement is there on any search engine, the same shall be
withdrawn forthwith by the respondent,” said Justice Dipak Misra.
Section
22 of the Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques
(Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, 1994, prohibits advertisements
related to pre-natal determination of sex and provides for punishment
for contravention.
Directing
the listing of the matter for further hearing February 4, the court
directed Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to carry out its order on their
respective policy pages and terms of service.
The
interim order came during the hearing of a petition by Sabu Mathew
George that sought direction for prohibiting sex determination test
advertisements on the Internet.
The
court order came after the central government said the three search
engines have “relevant technology and deep-domain knowledge and
expertise to block/filter the words/phrases/expressions and sponsored
links”.
“India
is suffering so much because of the skewed sex ratio, still there is
state of antipathy. You must provide information to government of
India,” Justice Misra said.
Appearing
for Google, counsel Shyam Divan told the court that the Internet was an
uncensored medium and “ordering the blocking of the information is very
dangerous as it amounts to pre-censorship”.
Saying
that censorship and legal provisions were two different things, the
court said “anything can take the colour and flavour of advertisement.
Human mind is ingenious and there is a scope for mischief”.
Solicitor
General Ranjit Kumar told the court it could block or filter the
information promoting sex selection and eventual abortion only if the
Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and IP (Internet Protocol) address is
known.
He said the exact URLs could be provided by the three search engines to block them at the Internet gateway for India.
Explaining
the difficulties in blocking or filtering the information based on “key
word search result”, the central government urged the court to ask the
three search engines to “provide details of measure adopted by them, so
far, to block/filter keywords and sponsored links violative of PC-PNDT
Act and amendments thereof”.
Divan
told the court that Google has already clamped down on such
advertisements promoting sex determination techniques. He said if some
of them slip in, then they would be removed on specific information.
Counsel
Sanjay Parikh, who appeared for petitioner Mathew George, told the
court that throughout the world, the search engines have been directed
to block certain services or information which were not permissible to
be shown in that country despite the issues of jurisdiction and
technical problems being raised.
Parikh told the court that he would file a convenience volume of such judgments before February 4, the next date of hearing.
Posted by : Gizmeon
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