By Raja Murthy
MUMBAI – The world’s largest search engine is caught up in another Indian legal battle, one of many ongoing around the globe. A leading cardiologist from Mumbai is complaining to the city’s High Court over 20 Google blogs he says defame him.
The cardiologist’s case is timely, raising important questions about freedom of expression in the Internet age, and Google’s huge global presence. It has equally important implications for the curious phenomena of individual publishing on the Internet, such as blogs.
The legal conflict revolves around freedom of expression becoming entangled with abuses of personal freedoms. In effect, it gives a 21st-century, online dimension to A G Gardiner’s classic essay On the Rule of the Road, which spoke of the need for traffic lights, traffic policemen and speed limits.
In the pre-World War II essay, a stout old Russian lady strides down the middle of a road in Petrograd. When told it would be safer to walk on the footpath, she retorts, “I’m going to walk where I like. We’ve got liberty now.” It does not occur to the old lady, wrote Gardiner, that if her liberty entitled her to walk in the middle of the road, it also entitled the cab driver to drive on the footpath.
In other words, the end result of too much individual freedom can be anarchy.
Similar charges of anarchy can be applied to the content produced by the world’s estimated 1.3 billion Internet users. Google leads the content flood, declaring itself to be “the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of information online – with more than 3 billion web pages, images and newsgroup messages”.
Asia Times for more