The Union government has requested the Supreme Court to direct the search engines Google and Yahoo and Microsoft, which runs the Bing search platform, to reveal the monetary gains they made from allowing online advertisements of pre-natal sex determination technologies in violation of the Indian law.
The Centre also wants details of the measures adopted by them to block and/or filter keywords and sponsored links that violates the Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act. In an additional affidavit, the Cyber Law Division of the Union Communications and Information Technology Ministry did a U-turn from the position it took in a 2010 affidavit. The search engines came under the definition of “intermediaries” under the IT Act and had “statutory obligations,” it said.
