NEW DELHI: Popular search engine, Google LLC has submitted to Delhi High Court that the new IT rules for digital media in India are not applicable to its search engine, and urged the court to set aside its single judge order which applied on the company while dealing with an issue related to removal of offending content from the internet.

Presenting its point that it was an 'aggregator' and not a 'social media intermediary,' like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, as had been made out by a single judge order of HC where certain directions were issued against Google, ruling that the new rules applied to it. 

The company petitioned the court to quash its April 20 order which applied the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines & Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021 to it, while dealing with an issue related to the removal of offending content from the Internet.

The High Court in its April 20, the order had issued several directions on a petition by a woman who claimed her photographs and images, though not in themselves obscene or offensive, were taken from her Facebook and Instagram accounts without her consent, and uploaded on a pornographic website with derogatory captions added to them.

The order also had directions to Google to remove or disable access to an offending content to be effective even within India, a search engine must block the search results throughout the world since no purpose would be served by issuing such an order if it has no realistic prospect of preventing irreparable harm to a litigant.

It also directed the police to ensure the offending content was removed and directions were also issued to search engines, like Google, Yahoo and Bing, "to globally de-index and de-reference" the offending content from their search results.