Don’t let Big Tech take it away

Context: Recently Department of Justice of the United States (US) filed an anti-trust law-suit against Google. This has led to various other countries taking regulatory steps to curb the influence of Big Technology companies.

Issues with Big Technology Companies:

• Stifling Competition: US Congress panel recently held Amazon and other big players have unfair market dominance and recommended prohibiting further mergers and acquisitions and price regulation.
• Adverse Social Impact: Big techs align their business model and practice in order to gain dominance and minimizing tax liability while leveraging jurisdiction.
• Calibration of engagement with various stakeholders 
• Big techs have calibrated their engagement with government through policies of reconciliation, investment and job creation, and leveraging political fault lines.

• Collusion of Big Techs with News companies to curb damaging news and publish paid news. – for e.g.
• Facebook invested in Augmented Reality Labs of New York Times.
• Apple hired journalists for Apple news and Google paying publishers for news.

Way forward:

• Robust regulation to ensure employment: As per the World Economic Forum, even though 85 million global jobs will be lost because of automation by 2025, 97 million new digital jobs will be created.

• There should be Indian-registered entities of Big Techs accountable to Indian laws.
• Proper implementation of National Digital Health Mission and other such steps are required.

• Boosting Local Ecosystem: Insights from data of Indian citizens should lead to local intellectual property (IP) creation and multiplied economic benefits.

• Implementation of new policies and laws: Recent policies and laws such as data privacy, E-commerce policy and other intermediary regulations should be brought in to force.

Conclusion: Regulating Big Technology Companies is key to India’s economic and social destiny. It requires a holistic and long-range view keeping national interests in mind.