By now it looks as if the spat between the Government of India and US-based social media companies is going to develop into one of our great media spectacles, big enough to push the "2G scam", the "Bellary mining scandal" and other staples of Indian cultural life to the inside pages of our newspapers and off our TV talk shows.The government representatives say they are acting in the interest of National Security, and the US-based social media companies say they are fighting for Freedom of Expression.
The US Embassy in Delhi has pitched in as well, sending out a "media advisory" drawing attention to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's speech last week at The Hague.
Without mentioning the ongoing spat in India, she declared that "when ideas are blocked, information deleted, conversations stifled, and people constrained in their choices, the Internet is diminished for all of us".
The last time tempers flared like this was in December 2004 when the CEO of an Internet auction site was arrested for allowing a user to sell a 2:37-minute video clip of a Delhi schoolgirl performing oral sex on her classmate.
It was pointed out that India's Information Technology Act, originally conceived in the context of our rising IT outsourcing industry, was perhaps inadequate for the e-commerce era.
The government appointed a committee to update the IT Act (disclosure: I was named a member), and (second disclosure) I was the person responsible for inserting the section about "intermediaries" into the new IT Act.
This did not require a flash of genius because, by then, American and European e-commerce laws, sympathetic to the plight of the poor Web shopkeeper, had already protected him by naming him an "intermediary", a mere conduit through which buyers and sellers discovered and transacted with each other.
He need take no responsibility for what was being sold in his shop. His responsibility only lay in removing items from his shop if anyone objected.
Unfortunately, it is not just e-commerce and online media entrepreneurs who have benefited from the wonders of the Internet.
Terrorists, purveyors of hate, child pornographers, sellers of snake-oil charms and others have also discovered that anything they did in the brick-and-mortar world could now be done on the Internet at a fraction of the effort and many times the effectiveness.
In addition, the anonymity and cross-border reach of the Internet could do further wonders to
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