The thee major search engines have all been served court papers for supposedly promoting methods and products designed to help parents choose the sex of their unborn child. The case is being petitioned by Sabu Mathew George who says Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! show ads alongside search results deliberately targeted at Indian users.

The three companies are being sued for apparently violating The Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act, which came into operation in 1996, in order to check female feticide. George spoke to the New York Times in a phone interview this week and said that 900,000 unborn baby girls are aborted each year because of the preference for male babies in India. The act also prohibits any advertisements relating to pre-natal determination of sex.

Current Indian law holds Internet intermediaries (ISPs, search engines, social networks, etc.) responsible for objectionable user content unless the company can prove it had no idea it was there or that it had made every effort to ensure the content in question was legal. While Google told the New York Times that the company took local laws very seriously and would be reviewing the petition carefully once it arrived, however in the past Google has protested the fact that intermediaries may be held responsible for content they didn’t create. In October, policies analyst Rishi Jaitly explained the concept of intermediary liability, expanding on a separate blog he had written about India’s Information Technology Act.

“We don’t hold the telephone company liable when two callers use the phone lines to plan a crime. For the same reasons, it’s a fundamental principle of the Internet that you don’t blame the neutral intermediaries for the actions of their customers.”

George told the New York Times that India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and Ministry of Communications and IT were also being named as respondents in the case because they didn’t take action against Google, Microsoft or Yahoo when the issue was brought to their attention.

Read the full story on the New York Times

Related Links

New York Times: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo Sued for Sex Selection Ads in India Google Blog: Celebrating India and the Internet Google Blog: Intermediary liability and the future of the Internet in India