Why India Should Fear USA’s Tech Companies?

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MONOPOLY

In the immediate aftermath of the Trump bans in January, politicians and political operatives from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) issued a slew of commentary critical of the decisions and US tech platforms more broadly.

“This must be [a] wake up call for all who don’t yet understand [the] threat to our democracies by unregulated big tech companies. If they can do this to POTUS, they can do this to anyone.” said BJP parliamentarian Tejasvi Surya

BJP IT Cell chief Amit Malviya similarly criticized the “dangerous precedent” that the decisions would set, branding global internet firms “the new oligarchs.”

India is growing increasingly assertive in its efforts to control online communications, challenging Twitter and Facebook’s practices and threatening to set a precedent that could extend far beyond its borders.
Clearly on their minds at this time was the prospect of US social-media companies banning senior BJP leaders for online speech or offline actions.

The largest US internet firms were also fighting new Intermediary rules issued by Narendra Modi’s government that they say curtail privacy and free speech.
Social-media companies also demonstrated their ability to challenge governments through inaction—specifically, a refusal by Twitter to fully comply (at least at first) with government directives to block accounts tweeting critically about India’s farm laws and allegedly threatening public order and promoting misinformation.
Indian leaders try to validate longstanding ideological concerns not just about US social-media companies, but also about the broader risks posed by US tech firms.
Senior leaders in New Delhi have for years warned of the economic risks of “data imperialism” by large US tech companies and their outsize presence across India’s digital economy.
Controversial content-moderation decisions by many of these same firms strike at the ability to shape and adjudicate the values, speech, and conduct of Indian citizens.

America’s major tech companies are pushing back against India’s proposed data protection laws, with a lobby group led by ex-Cisco CEO John Chambers emerging as the protest organiser.

The report quoted Mozilla global policy adviser Amba Kak as saying the issue is worth national-level negotiation, adding: “Data localisation is not just a business concern, it potentially makes government surveillance easier, which is a worry.”
Data localisation laws aren’t confined to regimes like Russia and China. Australia and Germany have also decided some sensitive citizens’ data should remain onshore (health data and telecommunications metadata, respectively).

But Since competition regulators and anti trust authorities geared towards viewing low prices as a sign of a well functioning market – internet companies have often managed to escape the scrutiny

As America seeks to counter a rising China, no nation is more important than India, with its vast size, abundance of highly skilled technical professionals, and strong political and cultural ties with the United States.
But the parallels between America’s dependency on China for manufacturing and its dependency on India for IT services are striking.
While America and India are both rightly keen to move more manufacturing operations from China to India, significant shifts will take time, as China still has many advantages.
Most large U.S. companies now rely heavily on India-based IT services—with large India-based operations, or their own India-based capability centers.
The United States risks becoming overly reliant on India as an IT services provider though major disagreements emerge over issues such as intellectual property, data governance, tariffs, taxation, local content requirements, or individual privacy.

Leading U.S. tech companies are well positioned in India’s booming Internet and e commerce marketplaces, but strong local competitors are emerging.
India is moving up the value chain into R&D, innovation centers, machine learning, analytics, product design and testing, and other areas, especially in IT and life sciences.
Outside of IT, U.S. companies operating in India typically face stiff competition from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and of course, Indian firms—and doing business in India is still often difficult.

At the time when US tech companies were eying India’s market, Asia’s wealthiest man appeared to position himself as a willing gatekeeper

Most of the tech investment into India in 2020 year — including all of Facebook’s and nearly half of Google’s — was done by Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani.
Has raised more than $20 billion from companies (covid time) through venture capitalists and sovereign wealth funds looking to use it as a quick conduit to India’s massive digital economy.
Jio launched as a mobile network in 2016 and has quickly amassed nearly 400 million subscribers
With recent forays into e-commerce, digital payments, streaming services and even a Zoom-like video conference platform called JioMeet, Ambani appears to be looking to turn the company into an all-encompassing Indian ecosystem.
“US tech hasn’t been able to penetrate the ‘Great Firewall of China’ but it has been easier for it to enter the ‘Great Paywall of India’ created by Jio; all it had to do was pay Reliance the toll fees to enter,” said Ravi Shankar Chaturvedi.

Values/ Curse/ Benefits
Significant technological advances are being made across a range of fields, including information communications technology (ICT); artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in terms of machine learning and robotics; nanotechnology; space technology; biotechnology; and quantum computing to name but a few.
These breakthroughs are expected to be highly disruptive and bring about major transformative shifts in how societies function
These innovations are centered on the gathering, processing, and analyzing of enormous reams of data emerging from the information sciences with implications for countless areas of research and development.

The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) founder, Klaus Schwab, has described technological advances (for better or worse) as a “revolution” due to their “velocity, scope, and systems impact.”
WEF stressed the need to “transform traditional governance structures and policy-making models” and adapt more “agile” methods of governance