India to Web giants: Stop the flaming
Top executives from the Indian offices of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo will be meeting with India's acting telecommunications minister, who wants user comments prescreened.
The Indian government is demanding Web and social media companies, including Google and Facebook, prescreen user content in the country and remove disparaging, inflammatory, or defamatory material before any of it goes online.
Top executives from the Indian offices of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo will be meeting with Kapil Sibal, India's acting telecommunications minister to discuss the issue, according to two of three unnamed representatives from Internet companies, The New York Times reported yesterday. (See also: "ZDNet: Indian govt. piggybacks on religion to censor the Web.")
This would mark the third in a series of meetings which began six weeks ago, when Sibal first gathered lawyers from the tech companies and India's main Internet service providers (ISPs) to his office in New Delhi. There, the minister reportedly showed them a Facebook page containing material that criticized Sonia Gandhi, president of India's Congress Party, and highlighted it as the type of content he wanted removed, the report said.
Read more of "India asks Web firms to pre-screen user content" at ZDNet Asia.