Online uproar as govt seeks checks on Facebook,Google

Sibal denied he was promoting censorship and said some of the images and statements on social media sites risked fanning tensions in India.

A New York Times reported Monday that Sibal called executives about six weeks ago,showed them a Facebook page that maligned ruling Congress Party chief Sonia Gandhi and told them it was unacceptable.

The government is sensitive to criticism of the Gandhi family. Last year there were moves to block the English translation of a Spanish novel about Sonia Gandhi’s life.

“We have to take care of the sensibilities of our people,we have to protect their sensibilities. Our cultural ethos is very important to us,” Sibal told reporters on Tuesday.

Sibal said his ministry was working on guidelines for action against companies who did not respond to the government’s requests,but did not specify what action could be taken.

“We’ll certainly evolve guidelines to ensure that such blasphemous material is not part of content on any platform,” Sibal said.

India’s largely unrestricted Internet access stands in contrast to tight controls in fellow Asian economic powerhouse China. But in line with many other government’s around the world,India has become increasingly edgy about the power of social media.

India’s bloggers and Twitter users scorned the minister’s proposals,saying a prefiltering system would limit free expression and was impossible to implement.

“The idea of prescreening is impossible. How will they do it?…There is no technology currently that determines whether content is ‘defamatory’ or ‘offensive’,” India-based cyber security expert Vijay Mukhi told Reuters.

The New York Times report,which Sibal did not confirm or deny,was the focus of much of the online anger directed at the minister on Tuesday.

The government was taken aback in the summer by an anti-corruption campaign that multiplied on Facebook and Twitter,drawing tens of thousands of people to street protests and forcing the government to agree to new anti-graft laws.

Last year,as part of a broader electronic security crackdown,Indian security agencies demanded access to communications sent through highly secure BlackBerry devices of Canadian smartphone maker Research In Motion.

RIM gave India access to its consumer services,including its Messenger services,but said it could not allow monitoring of its enterprise email.

Facebook said it recognised the government’s wish to minimise the amount of offensive content on the web. The California-based company said it removes content that violates company rules on nudity and inciting violence and hatred.

“(We) will continue to engage the Indian authorities as they debate this important issue,” Facebook said in a statement.

Yahoo India declined to comment and Google said it would comment later in the day.

India now has 100 million Internet users,less than a tenth of the country’s population of 1.2 billion. It is the third-largest user base behind China and the United States. It is seen swelling to 300 million users in the next three years.

During last year’s clampdown,officials also said Google and Skype would be sent notices to set up local servers to allow full monitoring of email and messenger communications.

Britain also faced criticism last month for considering curbs on social media after recent riots even as Foreign Secretary William Hague castigated countries that block the Internet to stifle protests.