“Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.” So wrote Daniel Lyons some years back, in a classic Forbes cover story titled ‘Attack of the Blogs’. As the Senior Editor of Forbes then, Dan was simply expressing his extreme frustration at the utter nastiness of the Internet community, which seemed to have a super-majority of calumnious commentators, who thrived on the faceless protection that the net provided in order to leave shamefully slanderous and defamatory comments left, right and centre.
Cut to the present, and the situation has sickeningly worsened. Not just globally, but perhaps more so in the Indian perspective. Take a quick ‘surf’ across various pages of the Internet and it would not be hard for one to realise that every fourth or fifth page is filled up with some or the other pejoratively aberrant content against respectable individuals and companies posted by untraceable, incognito and spiteful writers. From four-letter words, to bigoted slanders, to sexist comments, to racist attacks, to clearly inflammatory and libelous material, the Internet is now so completely full of criminally damnable statements that one starts wondering why the authorities haven’t woken up to act on this issue with the greatest speed. In case of profiles of meritorious organisations or individuals, this ratio of deprecating content put up by abusive users often shoots up to almost every second page. Internet hooliganism, as I describe it, is the most contemptible character of the modern technology era, where it doesn’t matter how respectable you are or what your organisation is, or how you sincerely worked throughout the past many decades – irrespective of all that, you will be attacked anonymously with false statements that will make you cringe for a lifetime and with almost no hope for any recourse.
The question is, why is all this not controllable? When a person talks negatively and falsely about you in public, the law provides for such a person to be immediately pulled up by both law enforcement and judicial authorities. Then why cannot the same rules be applied over the Internet, when someone posts flagitious and gutter comments about you or your corporation? Because of three reasons, which go hand in hand.
First, as I mentioned earlier, is the wicked anonymity that the web provides to Internet posters, which gives them protection from being identified and prosecuted. Second is the hand-in-hand conspiratorial connivance of Internet companies like search engines, social networking sites, blog site hosts and even ISPs (intermediaries, in summary) that refuse to delete or block out the execrable comments and links and also refuse to confirm the identities of the anon-posters. Google, Wikipedia, Twitter... all of them fall within the same indecent category of companies. Third has been the unfortunate legal protection given till now to such intermediaries, who apparently could not be held responsible for material that others were posting on their websites (for example, in the US, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has protected intermediaries from liability for defamatory content posted on their sites, even if they allowed the content to remain despite having been notified about the same).
In all this, the search engine giant Google clearly comes off as one of the worst offenders of them all. Being the search engine that a huge majority of net users employ across the world, Google has played its cards on an extremely unethical front and could well now be called the biggest slander supporting media house in the world by its refusal to instantly recognise and remove perfidious and malicious content and to bring the irresponsible posters and commentators to task. It’s no secret now that Google marketing heads vying for advertising budgets of various corporations go to these same corporations calling themselves the “new media”. At the same time, they conveniently forget that ‘media’ ought to be responsible and should not hide behind falsely promoted aspects of freedom of speech. Then too, freedom of speech has never meant freedom to slander others through the public media. But for Google, the charm of attracting more users to its search engine by allowing them limitless access – and thereby to earn more money through advertising from its clients – is clearly more than the morality of going beyond the call of the law and removing objectionable content on their own rather than waiting for court cases to take their course.
That means that whether you find child porn links on Google or you find links that trash products, companies or individuals, Google can still continue to claim to be the high-ground innocent party that, like Alice in Wonderland, has no idea that such stuff is being archived in their search engine links.
A well-known cardiologist of Jaslok Hospital, Mumbai, Dr. Ashwin Mehta, took Google to court, after he discovered that there were over 20 defamatory blogs on its website that accused him of professional misconduct, which greatly damaged his reputation and work. He sought Rs.1 million in damage. When summoned after an investigation by the Cyber Cell of the Mumbai Police, Google India’s lawyers filed an affidavit in the Bombay High Court on June 23, 2009, claiming fantastically that Google India had no connection with Google Inc., USA, and that they worked separately. And because user agreements for the company’s blogging service (Blogger) was signed by Google USA, the Indian arm could not be held responsible for any harm caused to any party through the company’s Blogger service. Also, the company said that a blog-hosting company cannot all the time keep track of all the blogs posted on the site. In other words, it was a case of posting content in the name of freedom of expression, without accountability. Such saneness-testing arguments have not been something new for Google. Even as recently as on August 19, 2008 (the very year when Dr. Mehta had first filed his complaint), the Mumbai High Court had ordered the company to reveal the identity of a blogger who went by the pen-name “Toxic Writer”. The blogger had criticised a Mumbai-based construction company called Gremach Infrastructure Equipments & Projects Ltd., in a blog dated February 26, 2008. The court’s final verdict was that defamation (going by the article posted) was apparent and that Google should reveal the name of the real person within four weeks of the order. Google’s excuse was the same as in the case of Dr. Mehta’s case. It declined to reveal the blogger’s name, though it immediately removed the blog titled ‘Toxic Fumes’. The blogger’s identity remains unknown till date. There are quite a number of other cases related to postings on Google’s sites that have been lodged in courts across India, with plaintiffs ranging from companies to individuals.
Cut to the present, and the situation has sickeningly worsened. Not just globally, but perhaps more so in the Indian perspective. Take a quick ‘surf’ across various pages of the Internet and it would not be hard for one to realise that every fourth or fifth page is filled up with some or the other pejoratively aberrant content against respectable individuals and companies posted by untraceable, incognito and spiteful writers. From four-letter words, to bigoted slanders, to sexist comments, to racist attacks, to clearly inflammatory and libelous material, the Internet is now so completely full of criminally damnable statements that one starts wondering why the authorities haven’t woken up to act on this issue with the greatest speed. In case of profiles of meritorious organisations or individuals, this ratio of deprecating content put up by abusive users often shoots up to almost every second page. Internet hooliganism, as I describe it, is the most contemptible character of the modern technology era, where it doesn’t matter how respectable you are or what your organisation is, or how you sincerely worked throughout the past many decades – irrespective of all that, you will be attacked anonymously with false statements that will make you cringe for a lifetime and with almost no hope for any recourse.
The question is, why is all this not controllable? When a person talks negatively and falsely about you in public, the law provides for such a person to be immediately pulled up by both law enforcement and judicial authorities. Then why cannot the same rules be applied over the Internet, when someone posts flagitious and gutter comments about you or your corporation? Because of three reasons, which go hand in hand.
First, as I mentioned earlier, is the wicked anonymity that the web provides to Internet posters, which gives them protection from being identified and prosecuted. Second is the hand-in-hand conspiratorial connivance of Internet companies like search engines, social networking sites, blog site hosts and even ISPs (intermediaries, in summary) that refuse to delete or block out the execrable comments and links and also refuse to confirm the identities of the anon-posters. Google, Wikipedia, Twitter... all of them fall within the same indecent category of companies. Third has been the unfortunate legal protection given till now to such intermediaries, who apparently could not be held responsible for material that others were posting on their websites (for example, in the US, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has protected intermediaries from liability for defamatory content posted on their sites, even if they allowed the content to remain despite having been notified about the same).
In all this, the search engine giant Google clearly comes off as one of the worst offenders of them all. Being the search engine that a huge majority of net users employ across the world, Google has played its cards on an extremely unethical front and could well now be called the biggest slander supporting media house in the world by its refusal to instantly recognise and remove perfidious and malicious content and to bring the irresponsible posters and commentators to task. It’s no secret now that Google marketing heads vying for advertising budgets of various corporations go to these same corporations calling themselves the “new media”. At the same time, they conveniently forget that ‘media’ ought to be responsible and should not hide behind falsely promoted aspects of freedom of speech. Then too, freedom of speech has never meant freedom to slander others through the public media. But for Google, the charm of attracting more users to its search engine by allowing them limitless access – and thereby to earn more money through advertising from its clients – is clearly more than the morality of going beyond the call of the law and removing objectionable content on their own rather than waiting for court cases to take their course.
That means that whether you find child porn links on Google or you find links that trash products, companies or individuals, Google can still continue to claim to be the high-ground innocent party that, like Alice in Wonderland, has no idea that such stuff is being archived in their search engine links.
A well-known cardiologist of Jaslok Hospital, Mumbai, Dr. Ashwin Mehta, took Google to court, after he discovered that there were over 20 defamatory blogs on its website that accused him of professional misconduct, which greatly damaged his reputation and work. He sought Rs.1 million in damage. When summoned after an investigation by the Cyber Cell of the Mumbai Police, Google India’s lawyers filed an affidavit in the Bombay High Court on June 23, 2009, claiming fantastically that Google India had no connection with Google Inc., USA, and that they worked separately. And because user agreements for the company’s blogging service (Blogger) was signed by Google USA, the Indian arm could not be held responsible for any harm caused to any party through the company’s Blogger service. Also, the company said that a blog-hosting company cannot all the time keep track of all the blogs posted on the site. In other words, it was a case of posting content in the name of freedom of expression, without accountability. Such saneness-testing arguments have not been something new for Google. Even as recently as on August 19, 2008 (the very year when Dr. Mehta had first filed his complaint), the Mumbai High Court had ordered the company to reveal the identity of a blogger who went by the pen-name “Toxic Writer”. The blogger had criticised a Mumbai-based construction company called Gremach Infrastructure Equipments & Projects Ltd., in a blog dated February 26, 2008. The court’s final verdict was that defamation (going by the article posted) was apparent and that Google should reveal the name of the real person within four weeks of the order. Google’s excuse was the same as in the case of Dr. Mehta’s case. It declined to reveal the blogger’s name, though it immediately removed the blog titled ‘Toxic Fumes’. The blogger’s identity remains unknown till date. There are quite a number of other cases related to postings on Google’s sites that have been lodged in courts across India, with plaintiffs ranging from companies to individuals.
Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).
For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
IIPM Best B School India
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age WomanIIPM's Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
IIPM Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri on Internet Hooliganism
Arindam Chaudhuri: We need Hazare's leadership
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri - A Man For The Society....
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).
For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
IIPM Best B School India
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age WomanIIPM's Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
IIPM Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri on Internet Hooliganism
Arindam Chaudhuri: We need Hazare's leadership
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri - A Man For The Society....
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management
