-The Hindu   Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, has set off a firestorm of protest by demanding that ‘internet intermediaries' — specifically in this round, four social networking giants, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Microsoft, which enable hundreds of millions of individual users to publish and share on the worldwide web — remove inflammatory content as well as other text and images that might “offend Indian sensibilities.” As in...

-The Economic Times   Information technology minister Kapil Sibal's demand that Facebook and Google screen user-generated content manually before they put it up is impractical and, therefore, unacceptable. But this does not mean that everything he has said should be rejected alongside.  Nor is there any merit in the outcries of outrage over imperilled freedom of expression. Free speech is not unbridled, anywhere. Even the internet companies in question accept this. They say...

In an interview to The Hindu, he says Internet companies left him with no choice Kapil Sibal, the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, has defended his demand that global internet companies block some content from sites they operate, saying he had been left with no choice after the companies refused to delete incendiary hate-speech published on their social-networking websites. In an exclusive interview to The Hindu, Mr. Sibal said Facebook,...

-The Indian Express   Harvard University has decided to remove courses taught by Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy at its annual summer school session, terming his views as "reprehensible" in a controversial piece he wrote on Islamic terrorism in India. At a meeting of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, faculty members voted with an "overwhelming majority" to remove two economics courses – 'Quantitative Methods in Economics and Business' and 'Economic Development in...

India is one of only four countries which, during the first half of 2011, requested Google to remove content on the basis that it was critical of the government. Google refused to comply. The other countries were Thailand and Turkey -- where Google restricted local users from accessing the offending content -- and the United States, where it refused. According to Google's Transparency Report for January to June 2011, the Internet...