In its affidavit of compliance, Facebook told the court that it does not control or operate the servers that host the website available at www.facebook.com , which are located in the US, while Google India, in its compliance report, said it has removed certain webpages from the Internet.

The court, under Senior Civil Judge Praveen Kumar, had on December 24 last year issued summons to 22 social networking websites asking them to remove “anti-religious” or “anti-social” content in the form of photographs, videos or text which might hurt religious sentiments. The court was acting on a private complaint filed by Mufti Aijaz Arshad Qasmi.

Yahoo and Microsoft filed applications for deletion of their names from the civil complaint stating that there was no allegation against them of webcasting any objectionable contents.

The court directed all 22 sites to “file written statements within 15 days from today. Replies to applications filed by defendants be also filed by the plaintiff.”

The matter will now come up on March 1.

Many of the companies claimed that they had not received copies of the documents submitted by the petitioners or received their copies late. Asking the petitioner to supply copies of all documents, the judge, however, pulled up several companies, including Google, for not filing a proper reply.