The Delhi high court dismissed a public interest litigation filed by a group of law students to quash the department of telecommunications’ notifications last month blocking hundreds of webpages, on Wednesday. The Supreme Court had also returned a petition challenging the block on 31 August, asking the petitioner to appear before the Delhi HC.
The bench of chief justice AK Sikri and justice Rajiv Sahai Endlaw in the high court said: "Let the affected party approach the court. We cannot treat this as PIL."
Telecom service providers, internet service providers, search engines, online payment sites and cyber cafes were, according to the petitioners, bearing the brunt of the curb on freedom of speech without being heard. [ET][Outlook India]
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By this logic, the Govt can ask telecom providers to stop providing phone connectivity altogether in any broad geographical area - because it appears to them that there are certain people in that certain broad geography who make/made calls/SMS to other people and commit crimes such as criminal intimidation, kidnapping/ransom demands, sexual abuse, stalking, lottery scams (aka 'Nigerian' scams) and related offences??
Makes ZERO sense.
Of course the websites are affected, true.. but there are hundreds of thousands of downstream users who are as much if not more, adversely affected. Why are they not "affected parties"??!
What is the end-users remedy - sue the relevant website? For what, deficient services?! How will that ever be successful?? The service provider will claim Force Majeure and in all likelihood get away with it (vis-a-vis the client's claims)..
I think the Govt has found a very convenient excuse to gag free exchange of thoughts amongst the thinking/educated populace - the "trouble-makers" insofar as the Govt's perception management efforts with the Western World is concerned.
What is worrying is that this can easily jump out of your or my monitors and hold us by the curlies, the moment we try to express any thoughts - interesting that in the British era, almost 90% of the initial "freedome movement" prosecutions were conducted under sedition and "fomenting unrest" provisions.
So Net-net (pun intended): If I write something "incendiary" (as defined by a minister or a collector or an IPS officer), then Kian you are the one who will be in trouble (a little more than other website owners, perhaps, because you are a Gora).
So they want you (and people in your position) to ensure that you never permit expression of anything even "borderline"?
This matter is being further/properly advertised so that guys like Kian are put under continuous duress and they publish only such stuff that they feel the Govt of the day will like/want to hear...
Weep.
At the demise of democracy.
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