The Government of India appears again to have renewed it's efforts, to rein in the Social Networking sites on the internet. This time however, the method adopted seems to approach the problem, though medium of courts of justice.
A person named as Vinay Rai had made sometime back, a petition with the Delhi Metropolitan Magistrate, that these social networking sites may be prevented from publishing content, which is offensive to national integration and religious harmony. While considering this petition, the Honourable Magistrate had said that such a petition could be considered only if the Government approves this. The Government perhaps was only waiting for this, because within a short period, the department of information technology has submitted it's report on the matter, to the court. This report says that besides above mentioned offensive content, these web sites also publish content which could be said to have committed offenses because of promoting criminal conspiracy, publishing vulgar or pornographic content or and trying to sell pornographic books to children. As a proof, the Government report also has given examples of such contents on the web sites. The court has admitted this report and has asked the Government to file charges against such web sites even located outside India.
Two Indian subsidiaries of International social networking giants, namely Face book India and Google India had filed a petition with Delhi high court to give stay on the decision given by the Metropolitan Magistrate. However this has been rejected by the High court with a ruling, that Responsibility of not allowing such content to get published on their web sites, is entirely of the web site managing company. If these do not effectively prevent publication of such offensive content, these may face a ban just like China.