Google and Facebook have told a Delhi court that they have already removed the offensive content from their sites. The court is hearing a civil suit filed by a Delhi resident Vinay Rai against 21 Internet companies including Yahoo and Orkut for allegedly hosting objectionable content. Google and Facebook had earlier told the Delhi High Court that it was impossible for them to monitor content with billions of people accessing the websites.
During the court hearing, Additional Civil Judge Praveen Singh asked the counsel appearing for petitioner Mufti Aijaz Arshad Qasmi whether blog-service providing companies should also be made a party to the case for posting offensive content posted by their users on the blogs. The court also slammed Google Inc. for not submitting a proper response and turned down its argument that it had received the copy of last judgment and other case-related documents as late as last Friday.
The court, meanwhile, has asked the petitioner to provide the copies of all documents to the companies party in the case. The web censorship row came to limelight December last year after the court issued summons to the Internet companies over the “anti-religious” or “anti-social” content. The government previously has made various attempts at removing such content from the Internet. However, Google maintained that it would not remove the content just because it is controversial.
It now looks like Google has softened its stance on the ongoing censorship row in India. It may be recalled that both Twitter and Google recently have come up with country-specific content filtering mechanisms.
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