Dear MEL Topic Readers,
India is trying to build its own internet
When India banned TikTok and other Chinese apps last year because of a border conflict, Chingari, India’s equivalent app, recorded 15 million downloads just in two days. The move was meant to keep Indian user data within the country and avoid security risk but was never had been the business plan for the Indian app. Also, the Indian government has been posing pressure on US tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for not doing enough to block malicious accounts. India has the second-largest internet population with over 750 million users and hundreds of millions more yet to come online. And there are numbers of ambitious tech talents, startups and entrepreneurs, and abundant funding to support not only to grow the industry but also to fill sudden vacancies of foreign apps.
Or will we be witnessing the decline of the global internet concept as the gap widens between the East and West, democracy and autocracy, religions and traditions? Though users’ data may be preferred to be stored within their respective countries, that could make it less effective and efficient to train recommendation algorithms because of the limited and fragmented data source. Then, will such internet nationalism be justified in today’s globalized world?
When internet nationalism becomes reality, none of the apps seems indispensable.
Enjoy reading the article and think about what the future of the Internet is going to be like.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/08/tech/india-internet-homegrown-apps/index.html
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