More trouble for Orkut

Parents, schools, and law enforcement in the US certainly aren't the only ones struggling with the user-driven Web. Google's Orkut is the social-networking site that has drawn the most visible fire in other countries. First it heard from Brazilian prosecutors, now from an Indian court. India's Zee News reports that "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'.… 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." Zee News added that the court 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." It appears that courts everywhere are on a steep learning curve about how much local, state, and national governments can control what's posted on social – the hate content could well have come from people of another nationality who somehow think they "own" the space. Humankind in the Internet age seems to be faced with a choice: Either the social Web devolves into just another channel for hate and discrimination or another tool for learning and teaching tolerance. Here's one such tool.