This Article is From Dec 14, 2013

Not possible to police the internet, have to take the bad with the good: Omar Abdullah

New Delhi: Should internet be regulated, and who will regulate it? As an eminent panel at NDTV's Solutions summit today voiced concerns about net policing, Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah said he feared that the Internet "has gone too far now to be regulated." (Watch)

"We have to take the bad with the good," he said during a discussion on Internet and its impact on democracy during NDTV's Solutions summit in Delhi.

Echoing a similar sentiment, HSBC India chief Naina Lal Kidwai  said that we face the danger of "losing what is good" if we over-regulate the content on the Internet. (Do we have to regulate the Internet?)

Political scientist Ashutosh Varshney and journalist Swapan Dasgupta pointed out that the larger issue in fact is to find out who should be assigned to regulate the content on social media and how this should be done. "The moment you give certain discretionary powers to the police or the bureaucrats, there is an evitable tendency to exploit," he added.

Google India chief Rajan Anandan said the biggest problem Internet companies like his face is that because the content is generated by billions across the world, it is interpreted differently by  different people.  

"If the content violates local law, we take it down immediately. Problem is when it does not, who's interpreting it. We rigorously evaluate content if we think it will lead to violence," he said and quipped that the Indian government "would love to see him in jail" for the inflammatory posts on his website.
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