The Government wants social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter and Google, to have servers in India so as to keep tabs on objectionable content, reports India Today. It said that all such websites host content that is uploaded abroad, which creates a jurisdictional issue, hence the move. The issue will be taken up by the newly established Cyber Regulatory Advisory Committee in an upcoming meeting, according to the report. The court was hearing a PIL which argued that the Centre should take steps to block over two crore porn sites as its “among the biggest reasons for the increase in crime against women and children.” The court decided that easily accessible porn sites were indeed “polluting young minds” and since it would be impractical to block two crore website as they “pop up in foreign countries and are hydra-headed”, servers based in India are the only option. A dangerous game It is unclear yet how the government plans to implement this move. Will it mandate that all “Indian” content accessible in India should be hosted locally, or mirrored locally? How will this impact Indian businesses that host internationally? How will this impact privacy and anonymity? What happens to nudity that is art? As we had mentioned earlier, while it is one thing to argue that pornography should be banned, the collateral damage of that is much greater. Note that the national co-convenor of BJP’s IT cell Vinit Goenka believes that online companies need to store data of Indians in servers within the country for…
