Supreme Court: Passing an Interim Order, the division bench of Dipak Misra and P.C. Pant, JJ., prohibited popular search engines namely Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to advertise or sponsor any content related to pre-natal sex determination in violation of Section 22 of the PCPNDT Act, 1994.
Arguing on behalf of the Union of India, Solicitor General of India, Ranjit Kumar put forth before the Court that the State can control any kind of advertisements related to pre- natal sex determination and eventual abortion if the respondents provide for the ‘URLs’ and IP Addresses along with certain specified key words. He further stated that filtering or blocking of keywords advertisements can be effectively done by the respondents if they so desire because they have the access to the mathematical algorithms and other technical know- how or the Union of India on provision of the required details can do the blocking. The petitioner counsel Sanjay Parikh stated that despite the issues of technical problems and jurisdiction the search engines have been directed to block contents that are not permissible. However, he assured that the Interim Order of this Court shall be displayed on the policy page and ‘terms and conditions’ page of the respondents.
The Court shall further discuss the issue on its future hearing on 11.02.2015. Sabu Mathew George v.
