Google is pretty upset regarding the new amendment in the Internet regulations of the India, which were revised very recently. These new rules put in effect just last month, ask all the websites providing services in India to be sure of removing any objectionable material which their website may contain. The memo elaborated that the objectionable material includes anything which could be referred as "grossly harmful, harassing, blasphemous," "ethnically objectionable," "disparaging" and the list went on listing any material impersonating someone else. In order to ensure the implementation of its new rules, it gave the responsibility and instructed to all the Internet Service Providers and social networks to restrict any content, which falls under the categories mentioned above, within their terms of service contracts with all their existing and new users. Additionally it gave all the websites the time limit of 36 hours, for removing any such material they have on their websites which can be identified as objectionable.
Image via CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBaseThis memo was penned actually in February, and was apparently only reviewed by the WSJ on Wednesday, which did not actually publish this memo. The review of Wall Street Journal mention that the tone used in the memo was "too prescriptive" and could be used as an excuse to restrict any material, as they would consider it illegal in India, even when it is not.
Google has highly criticized this new memo, and strongly proposed that the memo shall not be so vague, it suggested that the wording of these rules shall be changed to ban content that "violates any law for the time being in force." Secondly Google also gave a bitter reaction to another term of the memo, which stated that any online company "shall not itself host or publish or edit or store" banned material, as it can easily make Google seem liable for a content which it did not even posted, and was actually published by third parties. Google serves almost 56.3 million visitors in India, last calculated in March by the research firm ViziSense, which makes it the country's most popular website as stated by WSJ.
Even though the memo apparently seems to affect all companies at large, these new policies could particularly do immense damage to Google's business. The memo reads that large internet companies "play a crucial role in determining how free a medium of communication the Internet will be for the world's peoples, especially the millions of Indians who are increasingly making use of it in their everyday lives.”
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