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Following In Bing's Footsteps, Yahoo! and Flickr Censor Porn In India
bhagwad writes "Following recent news on how Bing decided sex was too sensitive for India, Yahoo! and its associated site Flickr have decided to do the same. While it's true that this is because of India passing laws that prohibit the publication of porn, no complaint was ever launched (and never will be), and glorious Google still continues to return accurate and unbiased results. So why is Yahoo! doing this? Is it because of its tie-up with Bing? I assume this is the case. Indian ISPs have already told the government and the courts that it's not their job to restrict porn and it's technologically infeasible too. In the absence of a complaint, I can only assume that Yahoo! has decided to do this of their own volition. Given that the 'sex' search term is searched more in India than in any other country, isn't it the duty of Yahoo! to provide accurate results to its customers? It can always plausibly deny control of its results and claim that filtering porn is infeasible. Since Yahoo! already has a low search market share in India, this will drive it even lower."
Remember when the Internet was all porn (1994)? Yeah, it's really gone downhill since then...
Shh.
The whole subcontinent is littered with statues of stylized large-breasted women and phallic lingam. It seems a little odd to ban online porn, when sexuality lies at the heart of Hinduism (as it does for all the Indo-European religions).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Didn't the Kama Sutra come out of India?
Heh. I doubt it's entirely true that Indians search for sex more than everybody else, just that others are just more specific.
:)
Hypothetical example: for every Indian who looks up "sex", there are four Americans who each look up "fisting", "creampies", "MILFs", and "jailbait"
Clearly, if you have to google "sex", you already know what it is.
"Sex" you say? Let's just give that a try.....open Google and.....OH MY GOD WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT TO ANOTHER PERSON???
You're implying that they somehow block every single search term related to porn. Guess what? Not only are there tons of slang terms for various things they haven't heard of, but even whole genres of porn that they can't block because they've never heard of. Sure, they can block most mainstream porn, but a lot of genre-specific porn would also apply to mainstream.
2 snakes 1 charmer?
Not nearly as paranoid as it could be. Tighten your tinfoil hats and consider the following insane hypothesis:
Microsoft, in their limitless greed and avarice, has an insatiable desire for cheap H1B and outsourced programming labour. India is a major source of this labour; but has rising incomes and standards of living, which threaten to make that labour more expensive. Pornography reduces birth rates by providing the sexually frustrated an alternative to procreation. If Microsoft(and its subservient minion Yahoo) can cut off India's porn supply, they can insure a bumper crop of future programmers. Supply and demand being what they are, the more programmers born, the less Microsoft has to pay, per programmer!
See? It's all very simple when you recognize the sinister conspiracy at work...
There shouldn't be any bashing at all in this article.
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India is a democratic country -- their laws are by definition reflective of their social values. If they want porn cencored, they are within their rights to want it. I don't agree with it -- but it's their call. If at some point in the future there is a change in social attitudes towards porn in India, they can vote for a government that will change their laws accordingly.
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If you want to bash anyone, bash Google for not respecting local laws -- but even that would be stretching it a bit.
This is a case where your social values are at odds with personal liberties and just because such regulations would be arrived at through a democratic process doesn't mean that it's okay to take these liberties away.
The thing here is, you are making a value judgement. You're also making a value judgement when you say that racial segregation is bad. I happen to agree with that judgement, but it is still a judgement. Who is there to say that your values are correct and some other person's values are incorrect? Unless we have absolute truth, we cannot know these things.
You are confused about the point of democracy: it doesn't exist to protect what you consider to be liberties, it actually exists to avoid some of the problems we have with kings (violent regime changes), and to have government that roughly represents the will of the majority. It is hard living in a single place with a bunch of people: if you think about it, even living in a family is hard, and how many more people are there in a country? Democracy solves the problem better than anything else so far, but still if the majority decides to take away your personal liberties, they can because there are more of them than you. You may think it is 'wrong,' but once again that is a value judgement.
Qxe4