CHENNAI, India – A local court in India has ordered government officials and Google’s subsidiary in the country to “prevent the display of porn site suggestions” in its search engine.
The Madras High Court issued the notice as part of a public interest litigation, Daily Thanthi reported.
The censure petition was filed by Chennai-based lawyer S. Gnaneswaran and heard by Chief Justice D. Krishnakumar and Justice PB Balaji.
Gnaneswaran claimed that when “a genuine internet user types something into the Google search engine, it suggests certain sites related to pornography or other obscene content,” which may lead to someone accidentally “opening the illegal sites without knowing the content, and faces embarrassment.”
Gnaneswaran’s censorship petition also claimed that minors “could end up accessing these sites out of curiosity, leading to a worst-case scenario for society.”
The local lawyer asked the court “to direct the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to respond to its representation to prevent suggestions of such porn sites in the Google search engine.”
The judges issued notices to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and Google’s local subsidiary, giving them two weeks to file a response.
As XBIZ reported, India’s Hindu nationalist government led by Narendra Modhi is waging a war on porn along the same lines as religious conservatives in the US.
Indian law provides no legal protection for adult content and Modhi ministers have repeatedly geoblocked platforms and sites in the country, claiming they “promoted obscenity and vulgarity under the guise of ‘creative expression’.”
The Modi government also enforces laws against the crime of “depicting nudity and sexual acts.”
Although many of India’s diverse cultures, including Hinduism, have openly depicted nudity and sexual acts for thousands of years, today’s conservative ideologues support the country’s extreme censorship laws against sexual expression. This attitude emerged in the 19th century with imported Victorian views under the British Empire, which shamed Indians for their openness about sex.
Recent government and media reports in India have lumped both explicit and simulated sex together under the crime of ‘obscenity’.
Main image: Madras Chief Justice D. Krishnakumar