Is Google fuelling anti-government fury?

NEW DELHI, INDIA: The search giant Google is not new to controversies. From fuelling public anger worldwide, the Silicon Valley major is accused of sparking off mob frenzies across geographies. 

Google advocates free speech and offers a bouquet of products that include video and image sharing, instant messaging, discussion groups and blogs. But plethora of uncensored content over the Web has been a subject of debate for quite sometime.  

Google's Transparency Report, early this year acknowledged to have received requests for removal of more than 300 items from India page, while country’s law enforcement agency asked it to block 236 items from Orkut alone.

Needless to say that anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare and team leveraged the Internet extensively for their anti-corruption crusade. But on the flip side, the discussion forums were flooded with mockery, derogatory comments and anti-government content.

When telecom minister Kapil Sibal sought to censor content on Facebook and Google, the zealot bloggers called it government's move to control social media.

Making a mockery of the food bill, a post on Google’s Blogspot says: home minister Pranab Mukherjee’s fast once a day helped India reduce food inflation.

A morphed picture of Sibal and Congress leader Digvijay Singh has been posted to suggest that 90 per cent of Indian mothers want their kids to be a mix of both. 

A blogger even alleged that UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi is a Russian, and her father served the army of Adolf Hitler. “Rajiv Gandhi was a son of a Muslim; hence the Gandhis are not Hindus. He and his family owned 2 billion USD in Swiss Bank as of November, 1991,” the page says.

These are just a few instances. The offensive and objectionable content galore  the cyberspace with alleged facilitation from Google’s Blogspot, albeit it is said that the search major has started removal of derogatory statements in the backdrop of a recent Delhi court order.

Ironically, like Google many other online platforms advocated free speech. Such incidents, however not only left government red-faced, but compelled it to think of Web regulation. 

New York Times recently quoted Indian minister of state for communications and IT Sachin Pilot as saying, “these companies which operate in India have to abide like any other company within the rules of the sovereign state.”

Pilot said that the debate over Cyberspace regulation is going on all over the world, and India has only shut down few Websites in over a decade. 

Speaking to CIOL, eminent Supreme Court lawyer and Chairman of the Cyberlaw Committee of ASSOCHAM Pavan Duggal said that it’s however not correct to say that Google is inciting public anger against the government as there is no scientific evidence.

“Google does not censor the content which might not match the government’s mindset, but however growth and progress of India has taken a hit,” Duggal said. Without naming any country, Duggal said that the competitors of India want to derail the economy through negative publicity.

Google India however didn’t respond to CIOL’s query but sent its ‘on-record’ statement that says, “Services like YouTube and Google+ help users to express themselves and share different points of view. Where content is illegal or breaks our terms of service we will continue to remove it.”

Google’s Eric Schmidt in a recent Dublin summit acknowledged the growing problems with Internet censorship in the authoritarian countries.

“There are countries where it is illegal to do things that Google encourages,” he said.