I've been speaking with several other publications, helping them understand the context of the proposed Internet censorship in India, but my views haven't been comprehensively represented anywhere. So, here goes, without fear or favor, and always open to criticism: If there is something which is defamatory in nature, deal with it. There are mechanisms in place, wherein content can be removed when if is flagged, and if it violates the terms and conditions of sites. The key problem here is - who plays judge? Is Kapil Sibal the right person to play judge? No. Is Facebook? No. Is Twitter or Google? No. Who plays judge? If you also take a look at the IT Rules finalized in April, the Indian government transferred the onus of making a judgement to the social networking sites or to ISPs, who are in no position to make a judgement, thereby forcing them to comply with written requests for removal. The way they will look at it is - "I need to save my skin, so I will block." If the social networking site doesn't block it, then the government can go to the ISP and get them to block access to the social networking site, because of the way 'intermediaries' are defined in the rules. We've seen this happen earlier this year, and before that in 2006, when for the want of blocking a few blogs, all blog hosts were blocked by ISPs. So who should play judge? It should be the judge. If…
