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.
