They Are Coming For Our Search Engines

In the US, opponents of ex-President Donald Trump’s ascendancy and possible reelection are citing Project 2025 and the usual conservative’s conservative view on pornography as ‘restrictive,’ as warning signs. By all accounts, when it comes to naughty content viewing or creating in America, the fight is at a fever’s edge more than ever before.

But there are other places on the planet where pornography is also taking a beating.

In India

Just this week, the Madras High Court in India ordered officials, and the country’s Google subsidiary to “prevent the appearance of porn site suggestions in its search engine.”

Attorney S. Gnaneswaran made his intentions plain that the worry from his point of view is that minors can all too easily trip across sites harmful to them since Google search engines “suggest” sites related to pornography or other obscene content in everyday searches. Gnaneswaran’s suggestion to Chief Justice D. Krishnakumar and Justice P. B. Balaji was for the government to prevent this eventuality, and the judges indeed issued a notice to India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, as well as to the local Google subsidiary that they have two weeks to reply to these concerns.

India’s Hindu nationalist government is presently led by Narendra Modhi, and Modhi and his lawmakers have been waging war against content that they claim depicts nudity and sexual acts for some time now. But enforcing this edict is no simple task to be sure in a country that enjoys a diverse and large cultural population.

As Americans have seen with the deeply engrained Puritanism built into American history, a good amount of India’s conservative views can be traced to British Empire Victorian mores, when India was under British rule.

Where the above order will take India, is yet to be seen.

In Indonesia

As of last Friday, the government in Indonesia blocked DuckDuckGo.  The claim here is that the popular search engine can be used to access pornography for a more anonymous searching.

Part of an ongoing attempt to ban gambling in the country, the Indonesian government led by Metallica fan President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, has now grown to encompass an attempted takedown of content the Muslim-majority country considers obscene and illegal.

Widodo and his clan have already banned Reddit and Vimeo, as well as have blocked Steam and PayPal.

What seems to have brought the heat on Pennsylvania-based DuckDuckGo is where it differs from other websites. The company advertises on its website that it offers services and products “that help people protect their online privacy."

This includes their search engine.

Widodo’s second and final five-year term ends in October. Will his bans be lifted then?  Or will someone come into power even more conservative than him?

It seems more than ever before, across the globe even the slightest salacious content, or the means to get it, can fall under scrutiny or complete banning in the face of ambiguous laws, wavering definitions, and what is and what is not allowed in the shifting sands of the sandbox of whoever gets into power in any one election cycle.