India’s Supreme Court sought information from the three big search advertising players for failing to block advertising for gender selection products and advice.

Frustration over people seeking ways to maximize their chances of having a male baby led to India’s judiciary to take Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft to task.  A 1994 law called the Preconception and Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques Act forbids such services and the advertising of them to potential customers.

Indiatimes said the three search engines carried such ads, a violation of the law. The Supreme Court wants to know why:

The petition said that any person can find links to such ads on search engines. The court’s attention was drawn towards the official correspondence between the home ministry, health and family welfare ministry and cabinet secretariat regarding the sponsored links promoting sex selection available on the search engines like Google.

Other stories out of India ran along a similar vein, but no one’s mentioning any penalties beyond blocking those terms from view when people try to search for them. The social question of sex selection runs much deeper than what search engines return for a query, and seems to be a better place to focus high-level consideration than contextual advertising.

Posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 12:34 pm. Permalink