Supreme Court directs Google, Yahoo, Microsoft to block sex determination ads

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Wednesday asked search engines Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to declare in their terms of service that they do not carry ads promoting prenatal gender selection tests or show any sponsored links promoting the practice, shrugging off objections by these companies that this would prompt the public to draw adverse inferences about them.

A two-judge bench, comprising Justices Dipak Misra and PC Pant, asked the search engines to state clearly that they do not carry any ads or display any sponsored links on prenatal diagnostic tests, which are banned in India to check female feticide, after their counsels insisted that they were not violating any laws of the country. Google was represented in the case by Shyam Divan, Yahoo by Anupam Lal Das and Microsoft by senior advocate KV Vishwanathan.

"We do not carry any ads or sponsored links promoting this," Divan insisted. “However, some material may slip through the technical barriers," he said. These could be removed too if complaints are made to Google and the company was satisfied that the claims were genuine, Divan said.

He, however, stoutly resisted any attempt to get Google to crack down on key words or permutation of words which threw up such test results. "That would amount to precensorship," he said. "It would create more damage than good as it would block out the good with the bad."

The Google counsel also resisted an attempt by the government to shift the onus of taking action against websites which were hosting such content, saying that the government could do so on its own under the Information Technology (IT) Act.

Sanjay Parikh, lawyer for the petitioner Sabu George Mathew, however, contested this argument saying such ads and sponsored links could still be accessed through search engines and urged the court to ask them to shut down those websites which carry such promotional material.