The Aurangabad bench of Bombay High Court has directed the Maharashtra government to issue notice to Google for the alleged spread of hatred about India by its social network service Orkut.

The order was issued by Justice A P Deshpande and Justice R M Borde Monday in response to a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by local Advocate Yugant R Marlapalle.

A picture of burning the national tricolour, bearing anti-India message, has been put on www.orkut.com and a community “We Hate India” has been created on the site, the petition said.

The petition has also appealed to the government to appoint a ‘controller’ under the Information Technology Act-2000 to regulate all such communities being in operation on the internet.

Now what do they expect Google/Orkut to do? Moderate every single community? Maybe moderate every single post and scrap as well…
Or better still maybe a “controller” to control every single line of text or image on the net. wow!!!

Did the litigant and the court seriously think that people are complete idiots and will believe whatever they see, and so need to be protected from such content… Why can’t you trust people to make their choices without any interference from the government and judiciary?

Seriously makes me wonder when will we have courts and governments that do not try to censor information or curtail expression of opinion?

So what’s up with PayPerPost blog advertising that seems to be generating so much controversy?

I believe that it all boils down to how people think this will affect blogs and blogging. Blogs have always been about personal and frank opinion. The problem is that if you are paid by PayPerPost for a posting a review and the advertiser has mandated a positive review, then your review might not be very frank and you may be tempted to be positive about the product.

Sure enough, this is not the best thing to happen to the blogsphere, but is PayPerPost the evil responsible? I don’t think so. At the end of the day, the author of the post is squarely responsible for the contents of the post, how can PayPerPost be held responsible if the author has decided to sell his soul for about $5 (that seems to be the average earning per post).

While an advertiser can specify that he wants a positive review, the blogger is under no compulsion to take up that opportunity unless he feels that its a product or service that deserves a positive review. And anyway, it looks like there are lots of opportunities that do no require a positive review. I leave you to figure out who is responsible for taking up an opportunity that is mandated as positive review, and then providing a post that is a lie.

But could PayPerPost have done something that would have made it better? Yes, mandating every post be marked as an advertisement would have been a worthwhile option. But even if its not mandated by PayPerPost, bloggers should ideally disclose the same in the interest of transparency.

Disclaimer: This post relates to a PayPerPost Opportunity.