NEW DELHI: We decided to take up this battle for freedom of speech online, when the Big Guys of internet did not, said Faisal Farooqui , founder of consumer review portal MouthShut .com, which fought alongside law student Shreya Singhal in the Supreme Court to strike off Indian laws that criminalized ‘grossly offensive’ content online.On Tuesday, the Supreme Court scrapped section 66A of Indian IT Act which gave the government rights to arrest and penalise web-users for posting ‘objectionable’ content online. The apex court also said the right to issue orders to take content off the web, commonly called takedown orders, will largely remain with the courts.Farooqui said his firm has braved hundreds of takedown orders from cyber-media cells, many defamation suits and few court orders, some of them fake, before taking a plunge in this case.MouthShut has received over 800 takedown orders from cyber-media authorities located across the country in last six years seeking removal of objectionable content from its website, Farooqui said.His team would also be flooded with notices seeking IP address and other details of people who had posted these comments. “Mostly Article 66 A was used as a threat to arrest people who posted such content and refused to take it off the web. There would be no more of such threats after this Supreme Court order” said Farooqui.MouthShut also received few takedown orders from the courts, some of which turned out to be fake, fraudulently issued in the name of the Supreme Court and High Court of Bombay. “We furnished these fake orders during the case, one of which was fraudulently signed off in the name of the very judge who was hearing the main case.” said Farooqui.“I was initially reluctant to file the case, mainly because it affected my business directly, and unlike Shreya, I had no legal background. Also when these laws were enacted between 2008 and 2011, I was expecting the Big guys of internet—Google, Facebook, Yahoo to challenge them” said Farooqui.After gathering informally from the legal circles, that the big tech firms may take a position that the Indian laws would not be applicable for US headquartered companies, Farooqui decided to file the case in 2012. “While we were still preparing, Shreya filed the case in November 2012”, he said. MouthShut approached the court in April 2013, and its case got clubbed with Shreya Singhal’s case.“We also argued that it was a disadvange to be an Indian firm in our own country, if the same laws didn’t apply to big internet firms headquartered elsewhere. Imagine if the US had such laws, a Facebook could never have been built,” he said.