Inter-ministerial group in offing on Internet content

NEW DELHI: With a view to stopping offensive and defamatory content on Internet, the government is likely to form an inter-ministerial group to look into the issue and suggest ways to check uploading of such material.

The move comes within a week of Telecom and IT Minister Kapil Sibal asking leading social networking sites like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to take off such material, a move that raged a controversy. Different and strong views have emerged on the government move to police the Internet.

When contacted senior DoT officials confirmed that there is a discussion going on in this regard but did not confirm whether such a group has been formed.

Maintaining that the government did not want to interfere with the freedom of the press, Sibal had said last week that "if the social networking sites are not willing to cooperate with the government on stopping incendiary material then it is the duty of the government to think of steps that we need".

The minister had said that his request for cooperation from them (social networking and Internet firms) fell on "deaf ears" and the government would not "allow intermediaries to say that throw up our hands and we cannot do anything about it".

Facebook had said it would cooperate in removing any content that violated its terms which are designed to keep materials, which are hateful, threatening, incites violence or contains nudity, off the service.

Google had said it would abide by local laws and take any material off if it violated its policies, but had asserted that it would not remove any content just because it was controversial.