Major Tech Titans Caught In Indian Gender Dispute...

Google India, Yahoo India, and Microsoft Corporation were issued notices by India’s Supreme Court, to respond to a complaint filed by Dr. Sabu Mathew George, whose petition claims that the said organizations were illegally promoting techniques and products for the selection of an unborn child’s sex through advertising and links on their search engines, and have failed to follow India’s Preconception and Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques Act (1994), the activist and a lawyer said Wednesday.

There is a premeditated attempt by these companies to aim at Indian users with advertisements that claim to help in the selection of a child’s sex, said George, the petitioner in the case, in a telephone interview on Thursday.

Indian law prohibits tests that allow people to know the gender of an unborn child -- a law designed to tackle widespread abortion of female fetuses.

“These companies are making a lot of money by doing highly targeted and selective advertising of these products,” said George, an activist leading the campaign.

“Our petition seeks to block these advertisements.”

The Act intends to forbid “the misuse of [pre-natal diagnostic] techniques for the purpose of pre-natal sex determination leading to female feticide.” In India, as in other countries, female children are often valued less than male children, a tradition that prompts some parents to terminate pregnancies that would result in the birth of a female infant.

According to a 2006 report in British medical journal Lancet, 10 million female fetuses have been aborted in the past two decades in India. The Guardian in the U.K. reports that Indian parents abort half a million female fetuses a year. The site Maps of India shows the sex ratios in different regions of India as of 2001, based on census data.

Most Indians prefer sons because they can earn more money in the workplace, while girls are seen as a financial burden because of the matrimonial dowry demanded by a groom’s family.

“The court has issued a notice to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo asking them to reply to our petition,” Sanjay Parikh, a lawyer who lodged the complaint, said in a statement.

Google said various elements go into managing ad program policy, including local legal requirements and user experience. “We review our policies regularly and make changes to keep them current and effective. We have not yet received the petition from the Supreme Court, but we take local laws extremely seriously and will review the petition carefully.”

A search for “sex selection” on Google India returns no text ads, in contrast to 63 sponsored links for the same keywords at Google.com. Yahoo India likewise returns no sponsored results for those keywords. A Microsoft Live Search conducted through MSN India returned two search ads offering information about gender selection.

Yahoo and Microsoft were unavailable for comment.

As social reformers were effectively able to stop sex selection advertising in the print medium, Indian and foreign advertisers have moved to the Internet, George said. Unlike the print medium, Internet search engines allow for highly targeted advertising, he added.

“These companies are making money by breaking Indian laws,” George said.

The country’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and Ministry of Communications and IT have also been made respondents in this case, as they did not take any action against the three companies, although the offenses were brought to their notice, George said.

In India, search engines, video sharing sites and social networking sites, including Google’s Orkut and YouTube have been sued for objectionable content or copyright violations.

“We do not hold the telephone company liable when two callers use the phone lines to plan a crime,” Rishi Jaitly, a policy analyst at Google India said in a Google blog post in October.

“For the same reasons, it is a fundamental principle of the Internet that you do not blame the neutral intermediaries for the actions of their customers,” Jaitly added.

Parikh said the petition had been submitted along with letters from the government in which it agrees that the Internet advertisements are illegal.

The Internet companies did not immediately respond to media queries about the case.