Only a few hours after RIM managed to avoid the Indian ban hammer, it now looks like Google and Skype could be the next target. India’s Home Ministry, the country’s interior ministry (think police force and other domestic policy matters), has told the BBC that “any company with a telecoms network should be accessible” to the country’s security services. India says it needs to be able to be able to tap into such communications in order to thwart potential terrorism threats.
Since Google’s Gmail uses encryption, and Skype is a proprietary protocol, the Indian government would have no way to tap into them should the need arise.
It’s the exact same situation that RIM had been facing, so we could be looking at a case where India is merely “working its way down the to-do list.”