The rules of political speech on the Internet are usually pretty simple. In America, almost anything goes. In places like China, the censors call the shots. But in India — a boisterous democracy that’s riven by religious and ethnic tension — the game is far trickier, as Google is discovering.
In September, lawyers at Google Inc.’s New Delhi office got a tip from an Internet user about alarming content on the company’s social networking site, Orkut. People had posted offensive comments about the chief minister of India’s southern state of Andhra Pradesh, who had died just a few days earlier in a helicopter crash.
Google’s response: It removed not just the material but also the entire user group that contained it, a person familiar with the matter says. The Internet giant feared the comments could heighten tensions at a time when thousands of mourners of the popular politician were emptying into the street.
The incident shows the treacherous terrain Google must navigate as it expands in India, the world’s most-populous nation after China and a major growth market for Web searches, online advertising and mobile phone software. As Google broadens its reach, it must increasingly tweak the way it operates to suit new cultures. While authoritarian countries pose well-known challenges, Google is learning that even democracies such as India can be fraught with legal and cultural complications. Its experience here could serve as a precedent for other Web companies.
The nation of 1.2 billion is the world’s largest democracy and in principle affords free speech to its citizens. But the country has a volatile mix of religious, ethnic and caste politics and a history of mob violence. So, the government has the authority to curtail speech rights in certain cases. India’s Constitution encapsulates that gray zone: Free speech is subject to “reasonable restrictions” for such purposes as maintaining “public order, decency or morality.”
Authorities say Internet companies in India, including Yahoo Inc., Facebook Inc. and Twitter, are expected to help government enforce those standards online by removing objectionable material and, occasionally, helping to track down users. Under a law that took effect in October, corporate officials from any Web site that fails to comply with requests to take down material or block sites can face a fine and a jail sentence of up to seven years.
India is a secular state, but its people are predominantly Hindu, with a large Muslim minority and significant populations of other religions. Religious and caste tensions have periodically erupted in bloodletting in the 62 years since independence from Britain. In 1992, Hindu activists destroyed a mosque that they believed to be the birthplace of the Hindu deity Rama, setting off riots that killed more than 1,000. The memory remains raw in India.
Iqbal Chagla, a leading Indian attorney on civil liberties and public interest litigation, says fears of public rioting sparked by Web content — or incendiary content in any medium — are overstated. “Communal tensions become largely an excuse for denial of civil liberties and denial of freedom of speech,” Mr. Chagla said. “It’s a very thin line that’s being tread.”
Google’s policy, Ms. Wong says, is to review material flagged by Indian users of Orkut and other Web services it owns, such as YouTube. Google checks whether the content violates its global rules for users, which ban materials like child pornography and hate speech. The company pledges to abide by the laws of the countries it operates in. In India, that means making some content inaccessible from the local versions of its sites, such as orkut.co.in.—the default page users see when accessing Orkut from India. Google says it only blocks content brought to its attention by users or law enforcement authorities and only when it considers the request valid. The company cannot control what content is posted on third-party Web sites but controls what can be found through its search engine.
Google began ramping up in India in 2007 to capitalize on burgeoning Internet use. The country has about 52 million Web users, according to the International Telecommunication Union, making it one of the largest markets in the world. There is room for growth, since only about 5% of India’s population is yet online. Google declined to comment about the finances of its India operation.
Orkut, with 17.6 million users in India in October, is the country’s third-most visited Web site, according to comScore Inc. Google acknolweges that it was taken aback early on at how the site gave rise to explosive debates on topics like religion and politics. In mid-2007, the company began fielding complaints from police and users about profile pages with derogatory comments about figures living and dead. These have included B.R. Ambedkar, an architect of India’s Constitution who was an activist for lower-caste Indians, and Ms. Gandhi of the Congress Party.
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