Technological beasts like Facebook, Orkut, YouTube & Google impossible to control - The Economic Times

They were places that let you be: to chat with buddies, exchange photos and plan parties. The rules of engagement were loose, voyeurism passed off as curiosity, vanity as sharing and gibes as friendly banter.

Becoming the voice of a generation was never the agenda. Neither was toppling governments or inciting riots. But technological beasts are impossible to tame. And social networking sites (SNWs), made up of millions of lives, have morphed into the most unpredictable monster yet.

What started as online hangouts, have become a melting pot of opinions and ideas. Facebook, Orkut, YouTube and Google+, enjoy power of the collective, bolstered by technology that allows real-time interaction and blurs physical distances. The effect has shaken up the world: Wall Street to West Asia.

Little wonder parts of the Indian establishment also seem worried. They don't know what to make of a few thousand people who publicly "hate" a political leader, trash a public policy in tweets or support the conventionally profane.

But the government ought to have been smarter than to call the biggest social media intermediaries, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, into a closed door meeting and force stricter rules. The news leaked, and the beast became angry. Social network users have gone into a frenzy to protect their rights.

Kapil Sibal, communications minister, held a press conference to highlight the kind of user-content that the government opposes. He clarified the government wants pre-screening not censoring. But SNW followers have paid no heed. For any external control taints the idea of an online hangout.

But one can't wish away perverseness. And Sibal is not completely wrong, there is plenty of it on SNWs. The question is, who should take it down? Users, hosts or the government?

Extra Rules Not Required

The country has not been running without cyber laws. So why invent new ones for the social media? "Rules are already in place, the Information Technology Act, 2000 and Information Technology Rules, 2011, which allow anyone, including the government, to take a legal recourse," says Pawan Duggal, advocate in the Supreme Court of India and a cyber law expert.

Section 2(1) of IT Act defines an "intermediary" as any person who on behalf of another person receives, stores or transmits a message or provides any service with respect to that message. By this definition, an intermediary is just a messenger. SNWs, internet service providers and web hosts fall in this category.