Back in 2015, costs for internet were not cheap,here in India. There were many who couldn't afford (including me).In those days(2015), I used to be on 2KBps network(You read it right, kilobytes per second). It was Idea Cellular's ₹68 2G plan(USD 0.91) where it provided 1Gigabyte of data for month. 3G plans were costlier. There was no 4G until Nov/Dec of 2015 when Airtel introduced 4G(it was hyped,but it was also costly.) There were no much 4G smartphones. Airtel wifi devices were advertised very much.
In 2016 Nov, Jio did amazing job by giving 4G data free for almost 4 months(10GB per day was limit,i guess. Also, 2G speed afterwards). It then introduced cheapest 4G 1GB/day plan for ₹400/3 months( 5.37 USD for 3 months) .Few other cellular network companies gradually went bankrupt, but others too introduced cheap plans(comparable to jio plan). This way,they revolutionized Indian internet and i am thankful to them for providing Cheap and Good internet.
But,it certainly was a curse for other ISPs(only jio,airtel(which bought few rival companies like tata docomo), and idea/Vodafone(both which got merged), state owned BSNL are remaining.
Pre-Jio in 2015 and before, I could never understand what was going on in the minds of the top management of telecom companies in India. Why couldn't they think from the point of view of a consumer? I used to wonder hadn't they heard of a Win-Win strategy where both consumers as well as business are happy. At Rs. 250 per GB per month (if you recharged only once every month) how was an average Indian consumer to watch video or play games on the internet. 1 GB quota would be used up in only one or two hour of 1080p youtube watching. It was like if someone sold you a television with cable connection and told that you can watch only for two hours a month. How demeaning and idiotic would that be? How come the top telecom players prior to jio never realized the pent-up demand for video consumption on the internet? It is still a wonder to me. It is this behaviour of the incumbents in 2015 and before that prepared the telecom field for true disruption by Reliance Jio.
Jio’s offer is really good on paper, but it’s got to be one of the slowest 4G networks I’ve used when I tried it in February. Anyone know if this is because of a lack of competition (there’s effectively one other serious player left in the Indian telco market right now), or capacity constraints?
I think the speed is highly affected by the population density. I have seen speeds varying from ~40mbps to <1mbps. The less the density the higher the speed.
Cost of provisioning the backhaul network out to the middle of nowhere maybe?.. and paying people to live next to the tower and top up the onsite diesel generator.
I am getting 44 Mbps as i type (checked in fast.com). I am in Bangalore. It not very fast in other places i have been, but better than other networks (varies by location and almost always better than state-owned BSNL). Jio revolutionised the industry and was a boon for traveling as well. I barely ask for hotel wifi as almost always Jio connected fine even if between 4-10Mbps - it was good enough for checking emails, office work and casual surfing the internet.
The lack of competition is not enforced. The advent of 4G and the heavy investment by telcos in earlier generations of telephony has left them unable to compete financially with Jio. The nature of 4G technology means that the other telcos’ business models and borrowing structures are now simply unviable, unserviceable.
Jio 4G quality not being the best in the world is not inconceivable but it’s not part of some crackpot conspiracy involving some Chinese style oligopoly.
For a more competitive telecom market, the GoI has to do large scale debt restructuring and let go of a lot of revenue that they expect from the other competing players.
But this will also not be understood or forgiven by many of the leftists, who are a bunch of malicious hypocrites and keep weaving the story of “evil Reliance”.
> The advent of 4G and the heavy investment by telcos in earlier generations of telephony has left them unable to compete financially with Jio. The nature of 4G technology means that the other telcos’ business models and borrowing structures are now simply unviable, unserviceable.
I'm very curious about why you think this is the case, because in other countries incumbents managed the transition just fine.
Others have accused Jio of predatory pricing -- they managed to accumulate millions of subscribers by offering free services during their test period, a loophole that is now closed by the regulator[1].
Typical Indian cities/towns are not very well planned (Chandigarh being an exception). Narrow alleyways, haphazardly shaped houses/neighbourhoods are generally the norm (especially in smaller towns). Beyond the backbone (which tends to be pretty good in general across ISPs), the main factor of speed of mobile internet, which Indians mostly use for accessing internet, is directly proportional to the reach of the cell tower to the consumer. I have seen excellent speeds in one room of a house and not so great at another room of the same house with Jio and Airtel.
While Jio truly made cellular Internet available to 100's of millions of Indians, most post-paid (the profitable segment) customers are still with Airtel and to a lesser extent Vodafone (this one is a mystery). And Jio is again complaining to regulatory authorities that offering better plans to post-paid customers will harm all other customers (can't make this stuff up!).
https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedstatesofindia/comments/huf1ec...
'The Ken' article, referenced in this Reddit thread, which is unfortunately behind the paywall, is very deep.
Sort of. Airtel is costlier than Jio and BSNL is worse in many areas. BSNL 3G is not only slower but doesn't have half the coverage of BSNL 2G (which is mostly used for calls and SMS not internet).
Jio is slowly increasing prices but is still cheaper than Airtel as far as I know. And the speed, while not true 4G, is better than BSNL 3G IME.
It is possible it was a paid article. Jio's attraction is about its low price point, not quality (speed/latency). Again, that itself is not a problem per se, some people don't need the fastest and the lowest latency as long as they have affordable access.
Is it? A few replies here are mentioning being happy with ~40 Mbps in bigger cities, meanwhile the last time I ran a speedtest in a busy CBD in Australia I got 600Mbps or so on 4G.
I sure hope you're trolling, because as an American running an AT&T 4G phone in the heart of Silicon Valley, 40 Mbps is about what I normally get on a good day.
And I assure you I pay way more than $2/ month. In fact, AT&T's cheapest unlimited plan starts around $65 - and thats the advertised price, which is always before taxes and fees, so its realistically around ~ $80 monthly once all of those ludicrous surcharges are tacked on. Once again, this is for their cheapest plan.
I totally agree with your reasoning. From purely consumers' point of view, Reliance Jio has been godsend for majority of Indians. One can argue that Pre-jio mobile internet in India was neither of high quality, nor as widely available and most importantly it was definitely NOT affordable. I had in my home in my small town in a backward state in 2015 - BSNL broadband which gave 512 Kbps unlimited usage broadband (or 2 Mbps limited broadband) or airtel 3g which had 2-4 mbps at Rs. 250 per GB. Much before Jio's official launch in September of 2016, I got it's 4g connection in May 1st week of that year. At that time, the condition was to buy one of their crappy 4g mobile phones (around Rs. 5500) sold by Reliance Retail to get their sim as part of beta program whose usage was truly free. The first thing after getting Jio sim I did was speedtest by Ookla - 40 Mbps! - I could'nt believe my eyes. Prior to that I was struggling to get even 4 mbps of decent speed. This beta program had no constraints - No daily limit whatsoever @ 40Mbps. During same month I was travelling by road to the state capital. In one of the remote villages, a thought came to do ookla speedtest. 25Mbps! It indeed was a beginning of a digital revolution. Not by disingenous charity (as Facebook tried to do through Free Basics) but purely by superior technology (all IP 4G network) backed by a hell lot of investment (I think 35 billion USD). When September 2016 came, and Jio was launched officially in 18000 towns and cities simulatenously. The demand was so high, that reliance jio's shops in most cities had long lines of potential customers (which previously I had only heard happens in Apple stores during launch of new products). One of the most innovative business tactics/models that Jio introducted was the per day GB plans. So technically you are getting 168 GB (2 gb per day for 84 days at Rs. 599 - today's price) but no one is gonna use uniformly throughout the month. So much of the GB's remain unused so the networks are not that congested if GBs of data usage was offered without any daily limits.
I think the lack of geographical proximity to Jio, didn't give Mr. Ben the complete picture of the forces at play.
The story of Jio (Reliance) cannot be told without the political-corruption-nexus in India, by investing in Jio - Facebook, Google, Qualcomm etc. not only acquire stake in 'The Enterprise' of India but also guaranteed of political favors apart from access to data from millions of Indians through a single unregulated channel.
Let me give you an example of the political reach companies like Adani, Reliance etc. which are in nexus with current ruling party - BJP have in India. I have personally heard from Ex. High Court judges that when they were presiding over cases involving Adani, Reliance they were approached by officials from those companies and were asked "Would you like to be a Governor after your retirement?".
As there is practically no real opposition party left in India, BJP will rule India for for decades to come as it slips into total authoritarianism(like CCP).
So being on good terms with Jio/Reliance aka BJP, guarantee these companies unfettered access to Indians and especially their data. I'm sure BJP already has the necessary infrastructure in place for analyzing data from Jio customers, now with Facebook, WhatsApp, Google you can see where this is going.
As any non-alignment with Jio/Reliance/BJP means 'the end' as we are seeing with even Govt. institutions like BSNL(Telecom), HAL (Aircraft Manufacturer) etc. Any business in India or from abroad now should appease Jio if they have to survive.
It's not like things were too different before. Mukesh Ambani supposedly referred to the INC as Apni Dukaan. Both the Congress and BJP are more than happy to appease Motabhai.
Yes, but the systematic dismantling of the independent agencies did not happen during congress period even though there were always bootlickers around in every govt.
Remember Auditor General of India, CBI(FBI equivalent) discovered and booked Congress-alliance party members for scam while they were ruling? Now, CBI has become a laughing stock is being used as lap dogs for ruling party to get parties into alliance with them.
During congress rule, CBI was referred to as a "caged parrot". The CBI did not act unless forced by the Supreme Court.
The CAG is a very different body - it is much more independent of government, and did raise issues around 2G spectrum allocation and many other areas during Congress time. I mean, the UPA had a minister running an entire TV station out of BSNL lines running to his home, so really it was pretty blatant and hard not to catch.
We should not confuse this type of corruption with doing favors to business which does not show up in government books, and is not easy for CAG to catch.
To be fair I can’t think of a congress party member that was wanted for crimes against humanity on an international scale until he became PM and all was forgiven. [1]
It is indeed extraordinarily sad that we have accustomed to have 'A mass murder accused' as prime minister and it is not even part of discussions against the party which hosts him.
No sane person will respect Modi if they knew all the ugly/sub-human things he did to become CM/PM; Hope 22 crores who voted for Modi are regretting now;
Atleast there was no situation where BSNL was not granted 5G rights, while Jio is granted with this. IT feels like Reliance is govt funded while BSNL is private.
I had my rant about BSNL down below. BSNL by a far distance has to be the worst in terms of Customer service , which is sad because i know of brilliant engineers who joined as Junior Engineers in BSNL clearing PSC. Unless there is accountability , there is no chance BSNL will survive.
Note that this is really bad , especially for rural areas where BSNL had the strongest connectivity
I have spoken with several top BSNL authorities. Systematic hurdles are being thrown at them from performing even routine tasks necessary to maintain telecom infrastructure.
e.g. Roads cannot be dug up by BSNL for repairing their telephone lines, where as Reliance can. If they indeed proceed to dig up the road, they are threatened with a police case. In several cities, only Reliance have permission to dig the roads for new telephone/broadband lines.
In HAL, future Aircraft/Helicopter productions were halted after the Rafael deal was signed up with Jr. Ambani's Reliance. But when the whistleblower letter from PMO hit the roof, supreme court was involved, some HAL old projects were given permission to continue to not raise suspicion. But still, many in HAL beleive it's done for and only companies in nexus with BJP with no prior experience will manufacture military Aircraft in the future(This was before the China fiasco).
> In HAL, future Aircraft/Helicopter productions were halted after the Rafael deal was signed up with Jr. Ambani's Reliance. But when the whistleblower letter from PMO hit the roof, supreme court was involved, some HAL old projects were given permission to continue to not raise suspicion. But still, many in HAL beleive it's done for and only companies in nexus with BJP with no prior experience will manufacture military Aircraft in the future(This was before the China fiasco).
The Rafale deal is not even about manufacturing fighter jets. Not sure from where such anecdotes come from.
The articles say that the Ambani family was very close to the Gandhis too. It's very hard to find a complete picture of how Reliance works - I guess they keep a very tight inner circle. Most accusations of impropriety are very vague. I don't think anyone disagrees that Reliance has tremendous political influence, but it's hard to argue that influence is greater than other Indian oligarchs (Mittals, Tatas, Birlas etc.). It's especially hard to curry favor at the expense of the other.
I think the biggest reason for Reliance's relative success in cornering the telecom market is that their oil exports cashflow allows them to borrow money at much lower rates than their competitors, without worrying about hedging costs. The recent spate of investments have almost certainly been accelerated due to the drop in oil prices which has hurt their long-term debt settlement prospects tremendously. The investments gave a much needed sigh of relief for the Reliance group of companies and their bondholders.
>but it's hard to argue that influence is greater than other Indian oligarchs (Mittals, Tatas, Birlas etc.)
That's naive at best.
It's no secret that Billionaires have their way anywhere in the world, especially in India where inequality is enforced, armored with the caste system. So, an Entrepreneur belonging to high caste, heading a company (Infosys, TCS etc.) has far less hurdles than a lower caste individual whose even the right to education via the reservation system would be questioned at every step of their life.
That said, Reliance - BJP nexus is nothing like India has seen before, so the political favors received by the Mittals, Tatas, Birlas pale in comparison. Details in other comment replies.
>The investments gave a much needed sigh of relief for the Reliance group of companies and their bondholders.
It was not like Jio was struggling for survival, which loads of other companies and millions of Indians do at this pandemic. Govt.'s answer to them? Get a loan from the Bank(Which none of the Banks are willing to give, even farmer gold loans have been halted in several states).
Where else have we seen global competitors who are fighting neck and neck in different markets invest in a single company which hasn't proven anything else other than undercutting competitors with inferior technology? Only thing which makes Reliance-Jio different from any other companies in India are its political influence and that is why these global players are rushing to invest. That and the wretched data.
P.S. The house always wins , does not matter who is at the centre. The little one Ambani was super close to the Congress (Ambani - Amar singh - SP - Congress) to be clear. He lost a truck load of money.
I see that claim being thrown around a lot but it does not have much merit IMO.
India is very corrupt but then all companies know that already. There is nothing special that Reliance can offer that Vodafone or Airtel wont. In fact during the Congress government India saw the largest scam ever perpetuated by non-Reliance players.
Reliance is also not a winner always. Reliance industries has burned its hands on retail, 2G services, agriculture, social media and many other business.
People assign too much competence of current BJP government. Had they been half as competent as their opponents claim we would have seen a far different India.
>People assign too much competence of current BJP government.
That is mistaking its competence to get votes, retain power to competence in governance, the latter should have been very clear when it demonetized the currency plunging millions into poverty and economic turmoil from which the India has never recovered from.
We are telling BJP is criminal, racist, and fascist political party(Its parent RSS directly borrowed its ideology from Nazi) which will go to any length to get votes and be in power.
Fanta, Autobahn & Volkswagen are also products of the Nazis.
One of the reasons Modi/BJP's opponents failed is because of the level of ridiculous accusations they level against them.
An one point even staunch communists and Congress supports lost faith in their politics.
I really do not understand how much people can hate the success of others. Contrast Reliance with the likes of Karunanidhi dynasty or the Gandhi dynasty, not only do these dynasts directly loot public money in the billions. They also have them stashed abroad, often in sensitive projects like Hamabanthota run by enemy states like China.
The auction irregularity conducted by the alleged Shell company which was bought by JIO and highlighted by CAG was done in 2010. This was the era of UPA2. Stop bashing BJP with over exaggerations. It is pretty well understood that Ambani is close to all political parties in India.
>The auction irregularity conducted by the alleged Shell company which was bought by JIO and highlighted by CAG was done in 2010
CAG highlighted irregularity with so many other things with the auction and top ruling party-alliance members were booked for scam, why didn't BJP take further action on this report then?
Meanwhile, Airtel/Vodafone (Competitors to Jio) have been asked to pay $ 12.3 Billion AGR dues after supreme court order. This wouldn't have happened if the ruling BJP Govt. had respected the order of TDSAT (Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal) which stayed the payments in 2015 in favor of said telecom companies.
This kind of blatant favoritism for Reliance, Adani etc. leading to total destruct ion of competitive business environment in India did not happen before.
While there is some resemblance of truth in your argument but to compare India's democratically elected government to CCP authoritarianism is totally absurd.
There is always lobbying and influence peddling in any government in any part of the world but to pronounce something diabolical with rather tenuous anecdotal evidence is just political posturing.
For decades? I think that's a gloomy thought. But these companies do have lobbies in all political parties. So whose in power won't make much of a difference.
>So whose in power won't make much of a difference.
It does, depending upon whether a party has a moral ceiling. Whether there's something which they wouldn't do. Unfortunately, there is no such limit for a party which does not believe in democracy.
Why has India dropped in democracy ratings drastically?[0]
What's worrying is, now that BJP has taught other parties how India's democracy can be broken, even if by some miracle some other party comes to power, it will do the same. So, I will agree with you then.
But, that's not going to happen as BJP has ensured that no elections in future would be fair[1].
I mean, out of the two parties who can be in power in the near future, one has been involved in the 2G spectrum scam and the other is, well, bjp. The moral ceiling seems super high for both.
> Let me give you an example of the political reach companies like Adani, Reliance etc. which are in nexus with current ruling party - BJP have in India. I have personally heard from Ex. High Court judges that when they were presiding over cases involving Adani, Reliance they were approached by officials from those companies and were asked "Would you like to be a Governor after your retirement?".
Corruption in judiciary is widely known and it predates Adani, Reliace etc. Nothing much can be done here as the Constitution exempts contempt of court from freedom of speech.
> As there is practically no real opposition party left in India, BJP will rule India for for decades to come as it slips into total authoritarianism(like CCP).
Similar predictions were made for Congress but things turned out differently. BJP has even lost some key states recently. That doesn't look like CCP in anyway.
> by investing in Jio - Facebook, Google, Qualcomm etc. not only acquire stake in 'The Enterprise' of India but also guaranteed of political favors apart from access to data from millions of Indians through a single unregulated channel.
What about the rest of the dozen investor's including private equity and sovereign funds that have invested in Jio. What political favors could they possibly gain? I think these investor's are mostly looking at multiple rates of return when Jio will IPO either in India or overseas (probably US). It is just a super attractive investment opportunity that is similar to any Silicon Valley High Growth startup.
Say you want to acquire property for cheap, like a port or a rezoned development. But laws get in the way. You call in Reliance and demand a favour, then they'll demand a favour from the government. It's happened very often in India to not notice. An affiliate of one of the funds in question actually owns port property in India. Private Equity has a lot to gain from this deal, and not just returns.
Since gas prices are on high side and highly regulated by the government in India, I don't think Reliance ever faced pressures the way other refiners in the world did with low/high oil prices. If anything high pump prices are just another form of subsidy to Reliance as oil prices have stayed low in recent years.
What else can we expect when 50% Ministers in Modi Cabinet are Brahmin and 80% Judges in Courts are Brahmin; And Brahmin are just 3% in India; https://archive.is/ojjbF
Too much overconfidence in Reliance. This is the same firm well known for totally missing the boat on India's IT boom.
It has done a great job deploying the network. Unmatched probably anywhere in the world. But that set of skills has nothing to do with charting out a vision that will work in future.
That set of skills to rollout a network at huge scale quickly, existed in India because of cut throat competition in the Telco space over 15 years.
But the skills to handle the sociological, political and psychological fallout from Scale that Zuckerberg, Dorsey et al have to deal with 24*7 does not exist in India.
They will get the Amazon/payments/delivery/cloud stuff,the easy stuff, right cuz the talent, cash, ambition and drive exists.
But the other stuff, the stuff that actually requires vision, is waiting to blow in India. If you think polarization/inequality/fake news etc etc in US is bad, go and visit India. I was there in Jan and the whole place was burning.
This bet on 4G/cloud/platforms etc is not because of some great vision of the future. It's really about crashing crude prices resulting in a huge pivot from their bread and butter Oil/Refining Business(they own the largest refinery in the world).
It can all collapse or go nowhere as that start hitting issues no one has dealt with before.
Plus there is the small issue of huge existing players who are not exactly lining up to bend over to the Ambanis.
To sum up, the Indian Internet or whatever emerges there is in for a unpredictable wild ride over the next few years and the current rose tinted view of Reliance matches what Facebook had in its early year. Expect that to change.
> well known for totally missing the boat on India's IT boom.
There's two different Reliances. When the old Papa died, the two Ambani boys divided his empire into two. The older one kept the oil etc, and the younger one got telecommunications etc. There was some agreement of not competing for X years. The younger brother's telco failed miserably and had to be bailed out by the elder. After that the elder went ahead and start his own telco. That's why he's a little late in the game.
Reliance at heart is basically a reseller. This is where their business acumen matters so much. A good reseller has to be very good at running everyday affairs. Operations, expenses and ensuring profits on unit sold have to be optimized.
Making profits as a reseller demands being good at raising funds, negotiating deals/purchases/contracts, packaging and pricing products correctly, marketing, daily operations etc etc.
So far they took big loans to offer their 4G plans for dirt cheap prices. Now they are selling their company in pieces to pay loans and be free of debt.
How will they price things going forward? Well time will tell. But it's one of those companies and business, where they have to turn in profits. They can't exactly show ads and make money like big web companies do.
> If you think polarization/inequality/fake news etc etc in US is bad, go and visit India. I was there in Jan and the whole place was burning.
This kind of gloom and doom messaging about India has been happening since the 1950s. This is more an emotion than actual facts. The equivalent of this in US is doubting the capabilities of SpaceX because of BLM protests - totally different issues.
Yup. India is growing fast, and as China has shown, people will put up with a lot as long as they see things getting better around them.
That said, India is grappling with some mindbogglingly huge problems ranging from groundwater depletion to what's likely to be the world's worst COVID epidemic, so continuing on an upward path is by no means a foregone conclusion.
The other firms were worse in vision, thus Jio had an edge.
When I was using internet on a J2ME phone and Opera Mini, it cost INR 4 for 20MB airtime (2G!), which lasted 1 day. A GB of data cost somewhere around INR 250, and lasted a month. [1]
After Jio, these days I get around 30GB of 4G data for INR 150. That's the kind of improvement that changed people's lives.
Yeah the fake news is No. 1 issue in India, WhatsApp and Facebook spoiled this country. The elder generation naively believes what they read on whatsapp and that's terrible. The young generation is driven by emotions and identity politics not logic. But I think that's orthogonal to Jio the company.
[1] It is another thing that Opera Mini was freaking fast even on that network and didn't spend even 10MB per day for casual web page browsing. But if you want to get PDF or media content the internet was both slow and expensive.
Yeah I know. I had even detected using about:config to render Kannada text on the phone which didn't support it - it cost more bandwidth but 20MB was too much for a day at that time.
Maybe we are underestimating the power of their relations with the present government, in terms of an ally that can be used to threaten or harm competitors both Indian and foreign.
Just like TikTok can be banned, other services can eventually be banned too, under the garb of nationalism or whatever and India can potentially go the full China way with Reliance as the Indian Baidu or Alibaba, or at least as a major rent seeker in the ecosystem.
With enough protectionism a local company need not try to be a quality alternative to FB or Google.
For example of some Indian Government protectionist whimsy that affected Amazon and Walmart owned Flipkart take a look at [1].
Which 'coincidentally' came the same week that Reliance had announced plans to launch an ecommerce website in India [2].
> Last month, India tightened rules that will disallow foreign-owned online retailers from selling products via companies in which they own equity, and forbid them from pushing merchants to sell exclusively through their platforms
> This is the same firm well known for totally missing the boat on India's IT boom.
Not setting up a body shopping entity is hardly big loss to Reliance.
> that set of skills has nothing to do with charting out a vision that will work in future.
How have IT/Retail/Real Estate/ Banking/ Airlines and so on vision worked in India. I see it again none too well. So what's the big deal if Reliance's vision did not pan out.
> But the other stuff, the stuff that actually requires vision, is waiting to blow in India. ...
Same crap, different pile. Good that you have option to move around though.
> This bet on 4G/cloud/platforms etc is not because of some great vision of the future..
No shit. Neither was IT industry. It was just labor cost arbitrage.
> Plus there is the small issue of huge existing players who are not exactly lining up to bend over to the Ambanis.
Could be that they live in caves in Himalayas or deep under Arabian sea. Never heard of those "huge existing players" in India who are not bending over to Ambani.
Additionally: the problem of nepotism. The most recent shareholder AGM showed up in my YouTube recos. I didn't watch the video, but in the mouse-over preview there were only 3 people: Mukesh, his mother, and his wife.
Well, the entire business started with his father Dhiru bhai ambani. It just happens to operate in a different way compared to the organizations we know in the west.
I watched the whole Jio AGM 2020 presentation. All the board members were present, through video conferencing ofcourse as were the Ambani family members who are the majority shareholders of Reliance Industries and are directors on the various companies' board of the parent group. What nepotism are you talking about? Is RIL a govt entity where it is illegal to appoint one's relative? As majority shareholders they can appoint whomever they want. Two criteria for appointments that come to mind: Trust and Competencies. For the latter they have hired many global as well as Indian executives to run Jio. For eg. Matthew Oomen who is Rel Jio's president was previously Sprint Nextel's CTO.
Wasn't shareholder AGM virtual this time because of the Covid situation? So it makes sense why it would only be family members present physically, if it was streamed from his ridiculous 20 odd floor residence.
- Non-U.S. citizens operate with a high degree of freedom online, although there are minimal restrictions on the collection of the data generated from doing so by private companies or the U.S. government.
- Non-U.S. companies are free to operate in the United States without restriction, and in other countries that follow the U.S.’s approach.
Is really through the roof given how the same site just recently argued how TikTok must either be sold to the US or prohibited in this:
The sad thruth is that the US is ok with a free internet as long as it is completely ruled by American companies and by extension the American surveillance state. If anything challenges that the piper will soon play a different tune.
I don't see hypocrisy. One is a statement on how things are. The other how the author thinks it should be.
The U.S. market is virtually ungated to new entrants, domestic or foreign. The author believes some gates should exist, specifically, with respect to TikTok.
I enjoy Ben's articles, but this one has way too many opinions, and I'm not convinced his stance of Europe is fair.
For the Privacy Shield matter - "The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) basically ruled that US law is too weak to protect EU citizens' data to the extent EU law demands." We know this - Mr. Zuckerberg asked for more regulation if anything.
Regulation from Europe is protection for the consumer. It is not a barrier to "experimentation". We can't release medicine without proper FDA approval. Approval sucks, but your data going forward will become just as important as your health. "Endless dialogs" are the ugly way our service providers choose to overcome these regulations. It just goes to show, that the tech we're building today isn't transparent. That's a failure of private business, not increasing regulations.
As per Jio, India might be headed towards a future similar to China than the USA. Jio is highly state-centric and if anything, it parallels WeChat in a more free economy. It will likely eat SV internet companies, by letting them in, recreating their services, and using state-sponsored leverage to overcome barriers (not to mention talent).
If anything, Europe is creating a more sustainable framework for private companies and government intervention. Cross the moat, and you don't have to worry about castles. Just build a good product. That's what I'm reading.
Meanwhile, there are families in the USA who still don't have access to the internet. And no it's not Google's job to get us there. It's the government's. But our government doesn't intervene enough to support the necessary changes.
BTW a quick search of "Europe Internet Vision" - and I came across:
> Gigabit connectivity for all of the main socio-economic drivers
> uninterrupted 5G coverage for all urban areas and major terrestrial transport paths
> access to connectivity offering at least 100 Mbps for all European households.
> If anything, Europe is creating a more sustainable framework for private companies and government intervention. Cross the moat, and you don't have to worry about castles. Just build a good product. That's what I'm reading.
So it's just a market with restrictions for outside companies? I think the point of the article was the absence vision for Europe to generate its own compelling products and companies that spread throughout itself and the rest of the world.
At the end of the day, Europe is a country, not a company. It isn't about maximizing profits. It's about maximizing the equity among citizens.
I'd argue that the majority of consumers will take anything for free and not think about the consequences. Very much like an innocent child getting free food samples. Private businesses have no incentive to correct themselves.
At the end of the day, if I was Europe, as a government, I care less that my citizens can easily start a businesses of their own. Taxes are great and all, but it matters more to me that whatever option our citizens do go with (even if overseas) is in their best interest.
It's not about becoming a super power and spreading across the world. It's ensuring that your citizens are safe, protected and well-looked after even at the expense of increased starting costs. It's a better long-term win for the consumer.
> It's not about becoming a super power and spreading across the world. It's ensuring that your citizens are safe, protected and well-looked after even at the expense of increased starting costs. It's a better long-term win for the consumer.
So far this is the strategy being played out, and it isn’t doing much for the economy of Europe. Basically everyone sells to Europe, and then money exits. That isn’t a very good long term strategy considering the size of the tech economy; even if you want to protect your citizens then economic well-being needs to be considered as well, in addition to self-reliant autonomy.
The state of ISPs in the US is dire. There is almost no free market.
The EU has a much better market for ISPs. but thats nothing really to do with GDPR, its more to do with competition rules in the late 90s early 2000s. The roll out of 4g is a prime example. In the EU, countries rolled out actual 4g. In the US they were renaming LTE as 4g, instead of rolling out actual 4G.
As for business, yes EU companies appear to need to go to the states to get funding, thats primarily because the bar for funding is much lower in the states than it is in the EU.
Jio was created with the premise that "data is the new oil" (its parent company Reliance Industries is huge on Oil & Gas). This is seen from the time the company was created and named. The way "Jio" is written officially is a mirror image of "Oil", alluding to the fact that the data collected (or usurped) by it is the most valuable thing.
Jio also collects (or said it would collect) information about its users and their habits through traffic analysis and deep packet inspection. This would feed its ambitions in its other ventures in retail, entertainment and other market segments. India does not have a data privacy or data protection law. So this is all fair game for a company that's close to the government and is good at lobbying.
Yes, here’s one from Reuters from that time. [1] You can also find many other news sites reporting the same if you search for “Jio deep packet inspection data new oil”.
I feel like this article wasted an opportunity to discuss the seemingly larger trend - the splintering of the Internet - and focused too much on the (current) landscape for India (in contrast with US/CN/EU)
I'm not an economist or specialist, but if I were to guess where the tech[1] world is moving towards, I'd look at established and mature industries like automobile manufacturing and trading. Or, to stay in the trade of intangibles (that is, services), Finance. I don't think there will be 3 or 4 internets, I believe that little by little each country will have its own internet and barriers to connection similar to how goods/services flow today: sometimes freely, sometimes not. This brings huge implications to current assumptions of growth for tech companies.
At the same time I believe certain standards will be built, and agreements made, that will allow what we understand as the Internet today to exist between some or many jurisdictions, just like there are places where you can easily import cars or consume international financial services. In other words, I don't see Americans being blocked from reading Euro blogs or something like that.
In the non tech world, roughly speaking, we went from protectionism to (varying degrees of) free trade, while in the tech world we will go from free trade to (varying degrees of) free trade. A leveling of expectations, if you will.
[1] When I say tech I mean mostly sv-like internet-based companies. Hardware always followed the same pattern as everything else, with some changes in the near future due to concerns about backdoors and privacy.
> This has led to a regular number of collisions between foreign tech companies and India regulators, whether it be Facebook’s attempts to introduce Free Basics or WhatsApp payments, increasing restrictions on Amazon and Flipkart’s e-commerce operations, or most recently, the outright banning of TikTok on national security concerns.
It should be cleared that all of these are isolated events and have nothing in common as for the reason.
- Facebook's Free Basics was a direct threat to net neutrality.
- WhatsApp payments are working fine now. There were many issues between their beta launch and the actual launch after almost two years but most of them were related WhatsApp's inability to comply with local data protection and storage law. (UPI related data must be stored in India IIRC).
- Restrictions on Amazon and Flipkart has more to do with their anti competitive practices (promoting the seller in which they are the main stakeholders) and the pressure from retailer unions.
- Banning of TikTok (along with all the other Chinese apps) is largely because of the recent tensions between India and China due to clashes at Ladakh border.
Also this piece talks about privacy when discussing US and Europe model but doesn't mention it for China and India. We all know about data sharing of Chinese apps with CCP. But nobody is talking about the personal data protection when using Jio apps. I did some basic analysis and found the apps built by Jio platforms to have worse privacy policy then their US counter parts (and even their Chinese counter parts in some cases).
This still largely ignores the Data Sovereignty issue for non-US citizens. The US government still maintains control and oversight of US companies that rule the non-China markets. Data flow still runs through US data centres or even through US companies.
This is a huge con for citizens of non-US countries that simply don't want traffic and rules exported by the USG. Since, as non-US citizens, we're not subject to any of the "protections" afforded to a "US Person".
Jio is the only option for a huge number of Indians - I don't how the author got this impression. There are many other players Airtel,idea even bsnl. The offers are more or less similar. Anyone can switch or use both. My main number is on Airtel and i use jio as well.
Airtel used to be the biggest player and in a few short years it has dwindled to 35% customer base of Jio. The rest of them are tiny compared to even Airtel. So sure you have options for now, but its increasingly looking like there won't be in the future.
Also the original statement that Jio is the only option for a majority of Indians is true because a lot of people only joined the mobile revolution because of Jio.
How much of Jio's dominance is just dumping? It seems unfair to cross-subsidize an industry like this. It's good for users in the short term, but if competition dwindles, it'll be bad for Indians long-term.
Jio actually broke the dominance of Airtel in India. Its a perfectly executed strategy IMO and capitalism at work. The company bled money to undercut Airtel and other companies to gain market share and they did it really well. Now they are the market leaders. I wish something like that happened in the US. It often feels like companies collude with pricing here.
Jio made Internet affordable to 100s of millions of Indians. It resulted in huge drop in data price. The results so far have been pretty good to the Indian society in general. Let's see what happens in future. Also Jio only accounts for 50% of Internet users.
> Any of the big tech companies who wish to make a significant presence in India have to go through Jio.
Okay. So? American tech companies have millions of users. It's almost impossible that one day Jio/Indian gov wakes up and decides to ban these websites. The public is not dumb. Banning Chinese Internet is not the same as banning the Internet. Unless the US decides one day to start claiming land in India or ban non US internet companies in USA. The likelihood of that happening is very very low.
> The monies that Facebook and Google spent buying stakes in Jio is to assure them that their operations wont be hurt.
Or they want to invest in a promising tech company and don't want to be left out?
Exactly. Many people I know, myself included see the 'investments' being routed to Jio as buying assurances from the government that regulations like data localization and other pro-privacy, anti-west measures are halted or watered down. A shakedown, in other words.
Any form of monopoly is bad. However, it's important to note that prior to Jio's entry in the market, the data prices were unaffordable for majority of the population. Post Jio's entry, the same incumbent network providers had to slash their prices.
I am pretty sure they are all investing because jio will come up with a one stop digital shop with them controlling it end to end. They will be launching a cloud. All these companies are investing now to get a piece of the big pie. There will be an IPO.
As a plebeian, the only thing I'm worried about is my internet bill. Why should I worry who Ambani has political ties with as long as I'm getting cheap bandwidth?
The usual reasons monopolies are bad. Jio in particular is known for being highhanded in blocking websites. A couple weeks ago duckduckgo was unavailable on their network across India. [0] Last week, the government of India proposed some changes to the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process which would make it easier for corporations to cause ecological damage without repercussions. A couple organizations published articles condemning these changes and explained the procedure to oppose this process, their websites were promptly blocked. [1]
Firstly, DDG was blocked by ALL Indian ISPs during that instance, not just Jio. People using Airtel, Vodafone, etc. were as much complaining in forums as the Jio users. From what I recall, BSNL was the only one who didn't block (due to their inefficiency perhaps!)
Secondly, with the kind of minuscule market share DDG has, they or their users can hardly get impacted by a couple hours' block. If anything, Indian govt. made them a favor by making them more famous! I for one don't recall #DDG ever trend on Twitter in recent history.
> Secondly, with the kind of minuscule market share DDG has, they or their users can hardly get impacted by a couple hours' block
I would like to know the exact market share of DDG in India.
Also people who use DDG use it as their search engine. It would impact that "minuscule" percent of people the same way the majority of people would get impacted if google.com was banned for a couple of hours.
> If anything, Indian govt. made them a favor by making them more famous
Really?
> I for one don't recall #DDG ever trend on Twitter in recent history
> I would like to know the exact market share of DDG in India.
Its very little as I've yet to come across someone who knows it outside techie circles. Even many techies still use google because they seem to think it gives better results.
Really? So it's not that minuscule market share?
Consider the amount of time and energy the PR departments of various companies spend to get themselves trending on twitter each day? Whatever the size of their market share, it certainly increased that day because of the trending. People who've never heard about DDG started asking what it is and thus got to know about it.
Strategy is about simplifying idea in order to let the audience understand easily, and hopefully convince enough of them to act according to the implied direction in the idea.
People who actually write strategy articles, and do not practice them, mimicking that by fabricating a convincing picture, and hopefully entertain their readers.
That's why such strategy articles seldom wroth reading...
Numbers are portable, switching networks is as easy as getting a new Sim in the local market, many phones support two Sims at a time, and much of India is dense enough to support several mobile carriers - these factors keep the mobile market in India highly competitive.
Jio has kind of been like early Google, in that, at the point at which it revolutionized the industry, it was a monopoly that was welcomed by the masses.
The quality of service they offered was just so much better than a lot of places, that it didn't make sense to use anything else. A lot of places in India had BSNL which was nothing short of terrible.
It pushed the other private players to offer competitive services, and it honestly still feels nothing like a monopoly. (Jio has a 30% share)
Not disregarding the rest of the points against it, but adding some context.
While Jio was a revolution in India, this article misses a lot of context.
One of the primary reasons competitors could not respond was a combination of some trumped up scams which had them tied up in legal hassles when it came to allocations or frequencies for years, and because in a moment of some of the greatest idiocy every, the Indian legal system allowed the government to apply new taxation laws retroactively, leading to many competitors owing sums of many that was multiples of any possible revenue they earned and could have expected to earn in decades.
In a further move of genius, the courts declared, in a completely unenforceable ruling, that their parent foreign investors were liable for the taxes breaking limited liability, and trying to apply Indian “laws” (this wasn’t really a law but something the court made up) abroad.
It’s still not enforceable, but it froze any further investment from the majority of Jio’s competitors.
I found the analysis on winners and losers for the Indian model to be lacking in depth. Specifically, if the Jio Platform truly intends to be a platform (as described by the Bill Gates line[1]) then it's a huge win for Indian companies and startup ecosystem.
I wonder if FANGs will dramatically change their Indian operations and make their Indian subsidiaries the primary revenue engines with India first products and services.
On a tangential note, what do these FANG subsidiaries in India primarily focus on? Is it more sales and business operations? Or do they also do "real software engineering" as well? Asking for a friend :)
Amazon has teams with global and local impact, with the work somewhat on par with their US counterparts.
Google generally has a bit of the shittier work in general (the permanent curse of India offices of US companies - local managers/directors having to beg and dig for work/charters). It's changing since Google Pay is run from India and other India specific teams are also coming to India. Google used to have the GSuite team in India that I think was shut down 3 years ago.
Apple I think has a maps and small App Store/itunes team. (They are the exception since they don't seem to be seeking FANG like talent at least in India in terms of pay and candidate backgrounds)
FB and Netflix don't have tech teams in India.
All of FAANG have ops/business/sales team in India.
Ah now it makes sense why there are so many Amazon recruiters pinging and connecting on LinkedIn :-)
Thanks, I am happy to know Google Pay is run from India. Hope things change for the better for Google SWE/SREs in India - I am sure they're at par if not better than their Googleplex counterparts.
Really? I was under the impression that the Hyderabad/Banglore office is old enough that they must’ve figured out their hiring process by now. You would expect at least great Infra/SRE support teams for Google Pay - as it’s an India centric product.
As for Amazon - yeah, read those stories here on HN but not sure what to make of it. They must be having huge churn in that case.
Can someone who is a domain expert comment on this statement I see being repeated often about Jio's ability to have a significantly lower cost structure by offering only 4G service with 'commodity hardware' versus the legacy players who are operating 2G/3G networks in conjunction with 4G? Is there a lot of truth to this or is this just something that the analysts have heard someplace and are now repeating it faithfully?
It is true. The ex-CTO of Jio, Tareq Amin, who pioneered this IP only network in Jio now works for Rakuten in Japan and he repeated the same feat here in even lesser time. You can lookup terms like NFV and Open-RAN to dig deeper. If you're familiar with web-infra it's similar to replacing expensive hardware routers from Cisco with a simple dumb server + FRR
I feel like every Stratechery piece on Europe is just plain bashing because Ben Thompson is allergic to regulation. Somehow extrapolating from one Indian company, Jio, to some sort of global vision of an internet while completely disregarding the European continent (which in pure market value obviously still is large) just seems like bad faith.
Every time I read one of these pieces about growth, growth and growth I'm reminded of Russ Ackoff.
"“Science, technology, and economics focus on efficiency, but not effectiveness. The difference between efficiency and effectiveness is important to an understanding of transformational leadership. Efficiency is a measure of how well resources are used to achieve ends; it is value-free. Effectiveness is efficiency weighted by the values of the ends achieved; it is value-full[...]
Put another way: efficiency is a matter of doing things right; effectiveness is a matter of doing the right things. For example, the more efficient our automobiles have become, the more of them are on city streets. The more of them on city streets, the more congestion there is. The efficiency of an act can be determined without reference to those affected by it. Not so for effectiveness. It is necessarily personal. The value of an act may be, and usually is, quite different for different individuals. The difference between efficiency and effectiveness is also reflected in the difference between growth and development, and development is of greater concern to a transformational leader than growth.”
We don't need more internet companies for the sake of more internet companies, and more growth for the sake of growth. We need an internet that works for its citizens and members, and on that front I have still more trust in the old continent than I have even if China and the US keep producing a million more companies. If human rights and privacy isn't a vision I don't know what is.
> I feel like every Stratechery piece on Europe is just plain bashing because Ben Thompson is allergic to regulation. Somehow extrapolating from one Indian company, Jio, to some sort of global vision of an internet while completely disregarding the European continent (which in pure market value obviously still is large) just seems like bad faith.
But he actually makes a very specific point:
> This Internet, though, feels like the worst of all possible outcomes. On one hand, large U.S. tech companies are winners, at least relative to everyone else: yes, all of the regulatory red tape increases costs (and, for targeted advertising, may reduce revenue), but the impact is far greater on would-be competitors. To put it in allegorical terms, the E.U. is restricting the size of the castle even as it dramatically increases the moat.
He's saying that under Europe's model, giant US tech companies are going to be even more locked in to dominance. The market will be less competitive, and have less room for European-grown companies to rise up. It's pretty hard to see how any regulations Europe might impose are going to substantially ameliorate the harmful economic effects of US companies dominating tech, and Europe's economy being relegated to the 20th century.
And why is that bad? I don't care if the software I'm using is coming from the US and if there are going to be globally dominant European internet companies. The only thing that counts to me is getting a good product, which privacy regulations are critical for, and getting taxes, which also requires more regulation not less.
Of course you don't. But European citizens care about economic growth, because it provides work and creates wealth and tax revenue for European citizens.
Europe's ability to compete in the Technology sector is just dandy. It's the EU's ability to compete in the "tech" sector that might fall behind, and maybe that's a good thing.
I think European regulations like GDPR or cookie laws have made the Internet worse, not better. They're not effective and make things more complicated for everyone.
I think that people in government should design rules to provide equal opportunities to everyone. I think that will benefit you even if you see yourself only as a consumer. I agree with what the article says, the European regulations only benefit the bigger companies, which have the resources to handle the red tape.
Don't forget articles 15 and 17 (former 11 and 13 I think) of the copyright directive. Link taxes and content filters which only benefit the big tech corps.
I disagree on the GDPR one. It's the only piece of legislation that protects my data online.
Prior to GDPR any data that you create wasn't yours and was freely sold, traded and aggregated. Even if you asked Google, Facebook or whoever for YOUR data to be sent back to you; they wouldn't be obligated to.
Nicely put. I think the idea of disruptive innovation by technology is very much influenced by the industrial revolution in the west. And only now is that we've started to discuss in public domain the consequences of it on nature and our species. Sadly, most of the Indian entrepreneurs today are still influenced by the Western model of technical innovation and disruption having blind spots about how to use technology to solve the local issues.
I grew up in a modest town in India and have been working in the tech domain. But it deeply upsets me that technology is not effectively used in here to solve the most fundamental issue that is of access to education, healthcare and electricity. Most of the population in India doesn't even have the proper education to understand the implications of technology.
A lot of Indian entrepreneurs who have grown in cities do not even understand the problems of the real India and blindly copy western solutions in many cases. Dining at an upscale restaurant or shopping at a fancy retailer in a swanky neighborhood you can see how weird some of the solutions are.
Is someone else supposed to work on solving the local issues while you personally reap the rewards of working in the tech domain? Is your work pushing against the status quo of any of these fundamentals you talk about?
I asked straightforward questions. I wasn't aggressive in what I said. I did call him out on his self-professed disappointment with the state of affairs which seems to be blaming the tech talent out of India for not working on solving fundamental issues. This sort of punting of responsibility for building India is common among Indian youth. The thought being - someone else is supposed to sacrifice their career and life to create a better India to solve my disappointment.
And no my work doesn't, but I'm not the one professing disappointment with Indian entrepreneurs.
I appreciate your inputs. But allow me clarify on a few points.
First, I'm not blaming the tech talent here. There is a difference between expressing disappointment and outright blaming. I understand that we're still in early stages of tech innovation. And there are entrepreneurs out there who are trying hard to solve fundamental issues.What I was suggesting that we can do much more if we given our talent pool. Read about the founder of ZOHO and how he has moved back in his village and trying to create job opportunities there in the tech sector. That's one way of thinking about it.
Second, I believe in the idea of building India with the power of technology not with any nationalist agenda. And being in the tech sector for a handful of years, I've plans of doing something in the mentioned areas in coming years.
Third, it's not about sacrificing one's career or life for the betterment of the country. If someone is working, paying taxes and contributing in the economy, that itself is enough. And entrepreneurship is about solving problems be it a problem in the urban economy or the rural economy. But entrepreneurship aligned more with large scale issues create large scale impact. We don't have to go back much in history to see that. :)
I will make the point if all you are doing is paying taxes you are supporting the system you dislike. Without you (and others like you) the system would fail. If you demanded change those that represent taxpayers will do your bidding.
Parent has a point if everyone is saying I'm too small to make a difference someone else richer or larger will than you become part of the problem.
> But it deeply upsets me that technology is not effectively used in here to solve the most fundamental issue that is of access to education, healthcare and electricity
Just as Zuckerberg couldn't conquer India, city kids will not be able to solve problems in rural India.
Why exactly are you expecting city kids to be able to solve a problem that they are fundamentally unaware of?
Why aren't you seizing this opportunity? Find a small problem, figure out a fix for it. Start a company or empower locals to start their own company that earns revenue.
And completely ignores the fact that internet penetration is mediocre at best, speed:price is horrendous compared to the nordic countries, and it's because of LACK of regulation. Had the US government enforced a 1-wire policy from the get-go (municipalities run single-mode fiber for the last mile and let ISPs compete at an aggregation point) we'd be world leaders instead of sad also-rans.
All of that is ignoring the caps that are starting to show up that will absolutely stifle innovation for the public internet. Or ISPs intercepting DNS traffic. Or insert any number of privacy violations. Claiming companies like Facebook and Google dominate because of the "open internet" of the US is laughably ridiculous. They exist because of our universities and GDP (which is more a result of WWII than any government deregulation). And given the current administrations insistence on locking down borders, I'd be more surprised if the US held its lead than Europe coming up with sufficient replacements.
OVH and Hetzner might not be AWS and Azure but they absolutely have the building blocks to compete if the market wants more players.
> it's because of LACK of regulation. Had the US government enforced a 1-wire policy from the get-go (municipalities run single-mode fiber for the last mile and let ISPs compete at an aggregation point)
The fact that this did not happen was not because of lack of regulation; it was because of too much regulation and regulatory capture by large ISPs. Plenty of municipalities wanted to do exactly what you describe, since the benefits to their residents are obvious. What stopped them was regulators, plus lawsuits by large ISPs on the grounds (though they didn't put it this way) that any such action by municipalities would violate the sweetheart monopoly deals they had with the Federal and state governments.
>Plenty of municipalities wanted to do exactly what you describe, since the benefits to their residents are obvious.
No, municipalities were building out their own ISP because of a lack of the federal government drumroll... mandating a 1-wire rule. They were left to try to come up with their own solution and their own funding. I've yet to hear of a single municipality building out last-mile fiber and leasing it back to private ISPs. I'm sure one exists somewhere, but that's not what has been happening.
The ISPs even being allowed to sue municipalities was because of drumroll... the federal government not having regulations requiring a 1-wire policy for last mile, which would've pre-empted any attempted by an ISP to sue to stop it.
You could have literally no law in place around burying fiber in the ground and an ISP like Comcast would sue a city for the simple sake of slowing down build-out and draining municipal funds. Regulation is 100% not the reason we have the mess we do in the US.
Municipalities were trying to build out their own last mile infrastructure. Some of them wanted to add ISP functionality on to that, but not all. In other words, they were already trying to do exactly what a "1 wire rule" would have mandated.
> They were left to try to come up with their own solution
In other words, municipalities were trying to do what was best for them. They did not need the Federal government to tell them that 1-wire last mile was a good idea. They already knew it.
> and their own funding.
Yes, and funding was never an issue. Many municipalities were trying to build, or had already started building, last-mile 1-wire infrastructure with their own funding that would have required ISPs to compete for access at aggregation points, exactly as you describe. What stopped them, as I said, was regulations and lawsuits.
> The ISPs even being allowed to sue municipalities was because of
Regulatory capture and a broken US legal system that allows large corporations with deep pockets to make frivolous lawsuits against municipalities that they know can't afford to defend themselves. If we forced plaintiffs to pay all legal costs for the defendants if they lose their lawsuit, those frivolous lawsuits would go away.
> You could have literally no law in place around burying fiber in the ground and an ISP like Comcast would sue a city for the simple sake of slowing down build-out and draining municipal funds.
Yes, indeed; see above. But why should we allow them to get away with frivolous lawsuits? Why not do the obvious thing to fix that particular problem, as described above?
> Regulation is 100% not the reason we have the mess we do in the US.
Stupid regulation that benefits large corporations and their political cronies instead of the people is 100% the reason we have the mess we do in the US.
Smart regulation that was targeted at obvious abuses, like the lawsuits mentioned above, would greatly improve the situation, without having to have the government try to impose one-size-fits-all policies on everyone.
>Municipalities were trying to build out their own last mile infrastructure. Some of them wanted to add ISP functionality on to that, but not all. In other words, they were already trying to do exactly what a "1 wire rule" would have mandated.
Building out last-mile != becoming an ISP. The city builds roads that lead to my house, they don't sell me the car I drive down the road or the gas I fill it with.
>Yes, and funding was never an issue. Many municipalities were trying to build, or had already started building, last-mile 1-wire infrastructure with their own funding that would have required ISPs to compete for access at aggregation points, exactly as you describe. What stopped them, as I said, was regulations and lawsuits.
You're completely out of touch if you think funding isn't an issue. There's a reason the federal government has handed out hundreds of BILLIONS to expand internet coverage in the US.
>Regulatory capture and a broken US legal system that allows large corporations with deep pockets to make frivolous lawsuits against municipalities that they know can't afford to defend themselves. If we forced plaintiffs to pay all legal costs for the defendants if they lose their lawsuit, those frivolous lawsuits would go away.
Are you serious? Comcast makes billions of dollars a year, they can sue and lose repeatedly and it isn't a blip on their radar. A city with a budget measured in the hundreds of thousands per year would immediately cease and desist if they were faced with a multi-million dollar settlement should they lose the case. It would literally have the exact opposite effect of what you're claiming it would do. The city can provide a city lawyer to defend itself, but having to pay for Comcasts lawyers who will no doubt inflate their hours and wages a hundred fold? Good luck.
>Yes, indeed; see above. But why should we allow them to get away with frivolous lawsuits? Why not do the obvious thing to fix that particular problem, as described above?
Your "solution" fixes absolutely nothing. Comcast will still sue, only the city will immediately stop buildout - and small cities won't even bother trying to start if they know there's a possibility they'll be sued. Comcast won't even have to go to court, they just have to write a nastygram!
>Smart regulation that was targeted at obvious abuses, like the lawsuits mentioned above, would greatly improve the situation, without having to have the government try to impose one-size-fits-all policies on everyone
I love this saying as if it's a bad thing. I was just telling my neighbors the other day that 1-size-fits-all regulations like clean water and fiber internet are horrible and really need to be specialized. Some of us want arsenic and lead in our water and dial-up internet in 2020, the government overreach is unbearable!
Regulation has never been the issue in the US. EVERY SINGLE TIME regulation gets rolled back, the exact issue it was intended to fix comes right back. See the mortgage crisis for the latest example.
> There's a reason the federal government has handed out hundreds of BILLIONS to expand internet coverage in the US.
Yes, it's called regulatory capture and corporate lobbying.
> Are you serious?
Yes.
> A city with a budget measured in the hundreds of thousands per year would immediately cease and desist if they were faced with a multi-million dollar settlement should they lose the case.
If the lawsuit is obviously frivolous, they won't lose. Their lawyers will be able to advise them of that before they decide how to respond. In a sane legal environment, the municipality's lawyers would know that a judge was going to see the suit as frivolous and throw it out, with the plaintiff ordered to pay the defense's costs. Of course, we don't currently have a sane legal environment.
> Regulation has never been the issue in the US.
Evidently we don't live in the same reality. So I don't see that further discussion is going to have any point.
> I've yet to hear of a single municipality building out last-mile fiber and leasing it back to private ISPs.
Of course you haven't. The ones that tried it were forced to stop by regulations and lawsuits. And then ISPs have the gall to claim that it's not feasible because nobody is doing it.
What exactly gives you more faith in the old continent? The thousands of unicorns Europe has? No, there are hardly any.
The UX nightmares cookie laws create? No.
Lower bandwidth fees than in the US? That is actually because of regulatory capture in the US, plus the sheer size of the continent, nothing to do with free markets.
So how exactly is Europe so great? The most unicorns came out of the UK who have just decided they’ve had enough of all the regulations.
UX nightmares are not the fault of cookie laws, they're the fault of companies that don't want to respect users. If the companies behaved more ethically, there'd have been little impetus to even create such laws.
It's easy to see that websites want people to accept all unnecessary cookies, but are mandated to ask for it. So they'll give one big "Accept everything" button and bury the rest under as many clicks as possible. This is not an issue with the law, nor is it an issue with the users; you know how to make a better UX ? Remove all tracking content. You know how to make it as good as the way the websites owner want ? Make the "Reject all" button front and center.
The UX being bad is a _conscious decision_ by the website owners
The system isn't perfect. But it's better than pure anarchy.
Probably no (human-designed) system will be perfect. In the case of obnoxious GDPR consent popups, though, the main problem is companies (under the direction of humans, obviously) that are doing their utmost to subvert the clear and reasonable intent of the law, because they simply don't want to respect it (or their users). They're a cancer on the internet. I hope to see the day when enforcement is taken more seriously.
Who said unicorns are good?
Money =\= value.
It's just a proxy, which doesn't always work.
You know how you can prevent regulation? Don't be excessive and greedy.
But where are the examples of the valued products in large use? Let's see.. Spotify ok, Mojang hmmmhmmm.... Rovio? Outside of Spotify, what do I use on a daily basis as an American that's a valued EU-based company?
Not going to take sides but Europe does have innovation. It’s just not necessarily commercial or they have been bought out. JetBrains, Minecraft, Python, Linux, HTTP/HTML, ARM, DeepMind.
Linux isn't a good example. Torvalds abandoned Europe a mere five years into Linux, and has lived in the US ever since. For 80% of the development of Linux, he has been in the US, almost a quarter of a century. His home is in the US, he's an American citizen. He has lived in the US as long as he lived in Europe at this point (except he chose to live in the US, he was born in the Europe and left by choice).
Wouldn't really count the UK as part of continental Europe, i see them more as a part of the anglo sphere(US,UK,AUS and NZ).
But wouldn't also say programming language can be claimed by a continent because most are global effort or contributions.
The scenario in my head is what if the US decides to put the same kind of sanction/embargos they have put on Russia,
Iran and China how well will the EU handle such a economic/technological warfare, can we in the EU continue to function by flipping a switch and have cyber sovereignty.
Because as far as i can see the EU tech sector got colonized by US companies, and i wouldn't be surprised if the same happen with India in 10~20 years.
The US won't probably go as far as to enact sanctions against the EU but rather pressure its leaders to support US against Russia and China, like banning Huawei spyware or commonly applying sanctions. Which we should probably do anyway because its in our common interest.
> Outside of Spotify, what do I use on a daily basis as an American that's a valued EU-based company?
ARM Holdings (to be fair they did spend 99% of their life up to this point in the EU) and SAP are two reasonable examples derived from the EU that have products that are used by Americans regularly. ARM was co-founded by two American companies and is now owned by a Japanese company, so that's not exactly a shining independent example for the EU (past or present).
It's not an 'internet' based company, which this article is specifically talking about. German cars are heavily used by Americans, and I have many German appliances, but again that's not what the subject matter is.
ARM and SAP are both Internet companies without question.
ARM wouldn't be relevant at all without the Internet. In practical terms its product is entirely linked to the Internet, specifically the mobile Internet.
ARM is not a website, sure, nor an app. It's as much an Internet company as AWS is. One could pretend AWS could exist in some formulation without the Internet, but that would be silly. The same is true with ARM as it exists today, the Internet made them what they are. If you remove the Internet, which neuters smartphones, ARM all but vanishes; thus, they're plainly an Internet company. You don't have to be strictly software to be an Internet company.
You could then call Nokia and Ericsson Internet companies, but they also existed for purely voice-based services. ARM chips go into all kinds of things like hard drives and microcontrollers that are not Internet based. Yes it's true that ARM has exploded due to cell phones, which in turn heavily rely on Internet-connectivity for their value proposition, but the Apple Newton used an ARM-chip well before 3G.
This article is talking about 'internet-vision'... I don't see how ARM fits into that vision, especially since it effectively predates it. Plus it's now been sold to Softbank at any rate.
>ARM was co-founded by two American companies and is now owned by a Japanese company, so that's not exactly a shining independent example for the EU (past or present).
ARM was founded by two American companies and a British company, Acorn Computers.[0]
The article is specifically talking about internet-based companies, aka "tech". It seems to me you're confirming an absence of them, which to me invalidates your comment of 'who said unicorns are good?', because the absence suggests that the current model isn't working.
It's true the world isn't the US -- can you point to successful internet-based EU companies that are big in both EU and some other part of the world? If so, it would seem a shame that they're not able to compete well in the US given the size of the market and the compatibility in culture/law/trade.
He asked for valued products. Not valued tech products. With the hidden assumption, which I called out, that only products created by tech unicorns are products.
Skype, OVH, Zalando. There are surely others, but, yes, most internet companies are in the US. The question is why?
I can think of two reasons: the US is more uniform (one language to start with), so once the business starts to go well it explodes quickly, whereas in Europe it may go well in one country, but expanding to other countries is harder. The other is because it's where the big investments are, so people, also from Europe, go there to get funded, which attracts more investments. It's a positive feedback loop and it's hard to stop it.
Another problem created in Europe by iverregulation is MOSS. EU is a "single market" but with thousands of rules when it comes to taxation. It is very hard for B2C digital services startups to sell on the European market, because you have to charge taxes according to the rules of any of the 27 countries. Of course, this is an easy problem to solve for the behemoths.
It seems a little unfair to single out Europe or the EU for this. If the EU didn't exist, then the situation wouldn't be any better (of course, you can hope that the EU would make the situation better than it is, but that requires greater harmonisation which is non-trivial and some may find unpalatable). And it's not just countries in Europe that require businesses to charge taxes according to the rules of the various countries -- many countries around the world do exactly the same. And as I understand it, differing sales tax across states in the USA can also create headaches. So it doesn't seem to me that this issue is specific to either Europe or the EU.
As for the behemoths being able to solve the problem, there are options for smaller players as well, like using a specialist who handles all the tax issues for you worldwide -- for example Paddle (I'm unaffiliated and have never used them; I'm just aware of their existence).
> That is actually because of regulatory capture in the US [...] nothing to do with free markets.
Regulatory capture has everything to do with free markets and American capitalism. I don't even understand how Americans can use the internet without an overseas VPN.
Yes, the elephant in the room is that the laissez-faire internet of the US is doing irreparable harm to the US and much of the world. (Just one example would be the US's response to covid-19 because people can't distinguish fact from fiction)
I think one of the most important roles of a government is to say "no" to some parts of its society to try and make it function better. The EU is taking its first tentative steps towards fixing the internets problems. The US hasn't even acknowledged there is a problem yet.
India recently blocked an environmental protection website called http://letindiabreathe.in without any reasoning or notice. The founders haven't got any reply from nixi India, now they are seeking an RTI to find out the reason for the blockade. I dont think India can be a good example of the global vision for the Internet.
Where is the Europe's alternate to US's or Chinese companies? Please give examples to support your cases vs. just calling out your biases. It is so unfortunate that Europe has just allowed itself to be so dominated by US' and Chinese (in the case of Huawei) companies.
Wow - such great companies. I am flattered. Please be real. US has FB, Google, MSFT, Apple. China has Tencent, Alibaba, Bytedance. And look at the list you have come up for Europe.
I hope you realize that in your definition of "us" it is just you and a small grp of your European friends. Rest of Europe are busy searching on Google and sharing photos on Instagram.
> We need an internet that works for its citizens and members, and on that front I have still more trust in the old continent
I broadly agree with the spirit of this line. But I fail to see how Europe is achieving that. Can you share a few specific (and meaningful) examples of how European approach has created an outcome which works better for its citizens and members?
So far from what I have seen, European companies (eg. Spotify) seem to have a similar modus operandi as their US counterparts. Many European countries are still in NATO and hence would collaborate with the US government for security purposes when push comes to shove. And the key regulatory initiatives either haven't proven effective in curbing US giants' powers (eg. GDPR) or have pretty strong counter-arguments rooted in principles (eg. Right to be forgotten vs freedom of speech).
* Websites are required to clearly present what information they store and track. They are also required to provide an option of functionality without ad tracking technology. The UX problems have been discussed ad nauseam, but from a pure requirement, this is a net win for citizen's data privacy and data tracking transparency.
* Internet companies are required to report and delete all citizen's data on request. This is a huge win for citizen's control over their own data. While companies like Google had already started to become more transparent on the data they collect from their users even before GDPR, this specific law spurred a huge increase in functionality in order to meet the full requirements.
* The fact that it has forced major international companies to provide these data transparency and deletion features to all users is a net win for all, including non-European citizens.
* Companies (and government institutions) are required to publicly notify any breach of data within 72 hours.
Broadband and mobile prices are far more reasonable in Europe than in the US. Unlimited data+calls for <20EUR has been a thing for several years now in Europe, and broadband for <30EUR as well.
Also the EU banned roaming fees and GDPR prevents the data reselling and privacy violations that carriers and ISP in other countries could introduce at some point.
On the other hand the US is unable to keep broadband companies from arbitrary price increases or per-building monopoly. Health care prices are also out-of-hand, it seems the US is happy to let their citizens getting ripped off as long as someone is making a big profit.
"the key regulatory initiatives either haven't proven effective in curbing US giants' powers (eg. GDPR)"
Would you mind expanding on that? Perhaps you have information that I do not, but from what I understand, large US tech companies with a presence in Europe do abide by the GDPR, which includes data privacy audits and large fines for non-compliance.
Even though they abide by GDPR, neither their market share nor their business model has changed. Neither do we see any new companies (or new business models) gaining market share from the US based ones. In that sense, GDPR has not curbed US giants' power. So what did GDPR achieve in practice? (Or maybe, you and I just had different expectations from GDPR to begin with).
"In that sense, GDPR has not curbed US giants' power. So what did GDPR achieve in practice?"
I don't think GDPR was ever about about curbing tech giants' power nor changing their business model. It was always only about protecting the personal data of EU residents.
Assuming the tech giants' business models do rely on indiscriminate use of user data, and that the GDPR does interfere with that, it applies only to EU residents, which I assume comprises a relatively small market-share. For a fundamental shift in business model, the US would have to adopt similar measures for its own residents, but the political climate would not allow for that, I don't think.
Is he wrong, though? The US, Chinese and Indian models have a fairly strong vision for their internet ecosystems. What's Europe's, and who benefits?
From the outside, the EU's big swings (GDPR, Cookie Law, Article 13, etc) look like reactionary messes, and it doesn't seem like their current behavior is doing much to help their companies, governments, or citizens.
European (generalizing) models seem to have the problem that they generalize restrictions while specifying permissions.
E.g. 'Thou shalt not store & use personal data'
Overridden by 'Thou may store and use personal data, in a banking context, with clear user permission presented in an interactive graphical format, for user requests pertaining to tax information'
DENY ALL + PERMIT {SITUATION} is not a recipe for innovation.
Versus I'd say the US model is PERMIT ALL + DENY {SITUATION}.
And India's model appears to be PERMIT ALL (in theory) + ARBITRARY BUREAUCRATIC DENY (in practice).
Whereas Thompson's point seems to be that national champions effectively simplify this into the US model, albeit with a chokepoint / revenue siphon. Perhaps South Korea as a similar example?
For years people's data was used as currency without their knowledge. How is that capitalism? Markets without transparency are not free. Europe is trying to maintain a fair market. While big tech (well, big everything) is trying constantly to subvert the market while pretending to make the world a better place.
Europe couldn't even manage to implement Linux in Berlin! The capitalist pressure is what really works there in the farce of socialism. Even with GDPR, those who got penalized where small websites, IT Shops, bloggers, etc. for not knowing their intricate rules while the big fish went unscathed.
Is it in the geopolitical interest of the West and India to use the same Internet platforms? Take a look at what reddit and YouTube users have to say about India. That kind of uncensored hatred and racism will push India right into the arms of Russia and China.
It would be better for US-India relations if Indian Internet users also have local alternatives to choose from. Local alternatives where they don't have to hear what Cletus from Texas has to say about their country and religion.
Geopolitics isn't determined by comments on Internet forums. It's determined by mutual interest between governments and how their administrative officials think. YouTube and Reddit comments don't mean anything given that a vast majority don't understand nuances of geopolitics.
>Geopolitics isn't determined by comments on Internet forums
Politics is increasingly being influenced by Internet movements and culture. Millions of Indians being repeatedly exposed to what reddit and YouTube has to say about them will change their opinion about the West for the worse. The Indians who browse reddit and YouTube are more likely to be young and politically savvy.
I'm not calling for censorship. One possible solution is that American Internet platforms create India-focused silos of their platforms. Indian Internet users (who wish to do so) should still be able to go out of their way to find out what Cletus from Texas has to say.
> Politics is increasingly being influenced by Internet movements and culture.
They are not. Internet users affect public opinion, but only to an extent that it may influence domestic policy. International affairs are run levels above and they rarely take cues from the Internet because, as I said before, the general public lack the nuance in discussing geopolitics. Case in point, America's relationship with the Saudis. People in the US have been complaining "Saudi Arabia bad" for a long time, yet the alliance is as strong as ever because public opinion simply does not matter in geopolitics.
Platforms need better ways to filter out "unwanted" voices. The amount of Hindi videos on youtube with English titles is pretty infuriating. As well as increasing Indian/China/Pakistan drama on relevant topics. "Unwanted" not specific to these groups, just general need for personalized content control as the internet is only getting more and more dramatic with new geopolitical tensions.
For reddit, I recommend "Reddit Pro Tools", it's a customization mass tagger. Setup a few filters for new accounts, users who posts in kid subreddits (likely kids), politics, and you have a good sense of who you're dealing with at any time. Internet needs more first impressions. I'm not interested in the opinion of a user who posts in r/teenager or r/XYZnationalistsubreddit etc.
Yep if anything I hope the Ambani family's escapades with Jio doesn't whitewash their deserved reputation as perhaps the most corrupt company in India.
For those not aware, Jio itself came into being via a scam. (That the comment I replied to is alluding to). The TL;DR is Reliance acquired a company that had only managed to win an Internet Service Provider license auction (that too in a dubious manner [1], [2])
Then Reliance 'convinced' the government to let them convert the license [3] to allow them to provide voice services as well, for a paltry fee (the amount they paid was set in 2001 and did not account for inflation over 12 years - which is pretty significant in India). Thus Jio was able to become a full blown 4G cellular provider at a fraction of the cost of competitors like Vodafone, Airtel etc.
Reliance isn't an innovator. It's more like a contractor with deep pockets and political contacts. Gets laws and permits easily and deploys bought technology.
This is very similar to what BSNL (the state telco) unions argue. The argument has been they got only 3G licenses when others got 4G , while there are some merits to it , let me tell you some examples on a common ground Broadband services.
I wanted a broadband at home (2011) and i preferred BSNL as i could use the monthly bills as address proof. The nearest office was just 2 KM away (First problem , you have to go there and submit an application). I did that , and it took 10 days and follow up to see if Broadband connection can be"given"
It was decided to be "given" after diligence. They gave me a connection , but i had to buy a router and take it to the office for PPPCoE and other configs (Second problem). After a year i moved houses , I was asked to go to an office that was 12 KM away to submit an application for cancellation (Problem 3)
I asked for a move of the connection itself , the answer was that the new home is in a new "jurisdiction" and this office was not authorized (Problem-4)
Well , i had enough and i got a new broadband (Jio did not exist then) . Called a number that was stuck on the wall of the Apartment , i got a connection activated the same day with a good router.
If you think i am ranting , don't get me started on what happens if it rains and the connection goes or a thunder fried my router once (Problems 6,7,8...)
How does it matter if there was no innovation or if the provider has deep pockets or political contacts ? What i think is it is not sufficient we have posters printed of this : https://stupidgyan.com/a-customer-is-the-most-important-visi... , what matters is living them
I wonder what will be the impact for blockchain- crypto-tevh adoption as these "splinternets" (regionets?) become reality.
I'm not saying it will be reality, but as Ben states I also sense forces that are adversarial to this "wild west" Internet.
I'm sure there's millions of blockchain transactions broadcasted or mined in China (inside GFW) but, could further tightening of control become an important obstacle to new decentralized networks?
> On the other hand, locking in a monopolistic player, particularly in the context of a government that has shown a desire for more control over the flow of information is a real downside.
This may warrant more than a single sentence. The government has in the past gone as far as turning the internet off in areas it doesn't want in the public eye. Censorship and banning of outlets is fairly common, and rarely as high profile as the recent tiktok ban.
I'd be interested to hear peoples' experiences with complying with GPDR & expense. Ben is kind of a libertarian, and he takes it as an article of the libertarian faith that regulation simply entrenches incumbents/big companies by making it too expensive for new or smaller companies to break into a market. (He has made this point many, many times on Stratechery). Already in the private Stratechery forums, there's one person who said that he lead GPDR compliance for a startup and it wasn't expensive at all. What are other peoples' experiences with GPDR & cost?
I did GDPR/CCPA consulting for a few retailers. If you have a good handle on the data you're storing (good data governance), compliance tends to be pretty easy. Even if you're being fast&loose with some of your customer data, the fix is usually to quit storing that data. We saw very few customers asking for their data to be deleted (they WANT to be your customer) so delete requests were a very part-time endeavor.
If you don't have a good idea of the data you're storing (sadly, very common), or if you're abusing your customers, then it can take years of consultant-hours to unwind the idiocy. But that's not really the GDPR's fault. You would have needed to do this anyway.
You'd be amazed at the kind of sensitive cruft that can pile up in SAP if you're not paying attention. It's good to give your systems a good scrubbing once in a while.
Net neutrality was an idea, when networks consisted of universities, big corporations and government institutions.
Today the capex is entirely borne by ISP, Telcos, companies like Reliance. Free basics if it came into fruition would not have violated net neutrality, between the user and FB servers there would have been only one ISP in all probability.
The Indian narrative on HN is dominated by 1%'ers who hardly represent or know the ground reality for the 1.3 billion people.
For people so concerned about democracy, free press, evil INCs, free speech, duties on electronics..... it doesn't take a lot of effort to do some cursory research
Free press - checkout Indian news channels on Youtube, the fact that they can get away with this nonsense, yet claim the press doesn't have freedom. In Europe the govt holds the purse strings via the compulsory radio, TV & media license.
Duty on electronics - India is way cheaper than Europe for Laptops and Mobiles
I think the dismissal of EU does not sound properly justified - and the author writes off home grown innovation too easily in EU markets just because they are not “capable of chasing scale”. The bias is pretty clear for monopoly establishing practices one way or another. Interesting article otherwise.
I'm surprised Ben didn't emphasize aggregation theory here - it might be the biggest example yet!
The American internet is a disintermediated morass or tech product/service providers each building on each other to make the internet work. But each foundational industry that makes it up - chips, infrastructure, consumer products, applications - has relatively few players. By selling bits and pieces of itself, Jio is not only getting people to invest in it's vision, but getting a share of the oligoplies at each layer. Google's staying power can become Jio's, and by extension, the government's.
India's telecom market is crazy competitive, and another ISP will quickly develop if the government lets it. The support of American tech companies will be Jio's real moat in the future.
What's more interesting than the topic discussed is the fact that Jio has been generating a large volume of chatter among prominent netizens, particularly in the tech space. I can point out to a slew of talks by Lew Later [1] in the past 15-20 days. Engadget [2]. Now Ben/Stratechery.
It's nice to see India's part in the space that business ∩ tech ∩ people, apart from always being the focus of H1B related news.
People who want privacy won't use Jio. At the moment Ambani's own the government this was pretty much clear when this article came "Reliance’s Jio Institute gets government’s Institution of Eminence status but it’s yet to be set up".
Theres nothing much need to be said about this.
What's interesting about current Indian market, everybody want to settle up their debt or planning on delisting. Jio is just a way of Ambani settling up his debt nothing else new in it. JioMart is just another super Market like DMart(walmart clone). There is nothing new or benefit to end customer. Just another app.
> At the moment Ambani's own the government this was pretty much clear when this article came "Reliance’s Jio Institute gets government’s Institution of Eminence status but it’s yet to be set up".
The govt. clarified that Jio institute was selected under Greenfield Category from among 11 institutes that applied based on 4 parameters and was conditionally given letter of intent for Institute of Eminence tag subject to certain milestones to complete within 3 years.
> JioMart is just another super Market like DMart(walmart clone). There is nothing new or benefit to end customer. Just another app.
Is JioMart really another super Market like DMart or walmart? From what I understand it is going to connect already existing millions of local mom and pop stores to consumers through whatsapp platform/web for hyper-local delivery in hundreds if not thousands of cities.
This is Definitely a new concept for India and will definitely benefit consumers as they will now have greater choice for online ordering of grocery, fmcg and other products at the press of a button.
Customer service matters , quality of service matters. Jio & other players are pretty good at this. I had an earlier comment on my harrowing experience with BSNL Broadband!. Just crying foul on regulations (fair to a certain point) , does not take the argument anywhere atleast for BSNL or MTNL. Reliance may be no saint when it comes to lobbying , but hey the most popular number that did a previous regime was lobbying and the popular "2G scam" when Jio did not exist
As it's discussing future developments, another way of looking at the trajectory of a European model is to have folded it in to the Chinese model or mentioned as an adjunct to it; there's clearly admiration for the GFC within EU policy circles.
Language barrier, cultural differences, time difference, payments, compliances, government regulations, initial userbase, network effects, hiring etc. It's so much easier for a startup to deal with these issues in home country than dealing with them in a different country.
Also why will the investors give you money for starting in some other country than investing in someone who is already in that country.
Ofcourse there are exceptions and you can start a lot of companies without dealing with these issues as well.
> China is the only country to rival the U.S. for the sheer size and breadth of its Internet companies, thanks to the combination of a massive market and the lack of competition
Author assumes that Amazon, eBay, Newegg and Paypal was banned or blocked in China. It's not. Alibaba & jd.com won the market by competition.
The author is based in Taiwan. I believe he would have good insight into developments and trends in Asian regions generally.
That's a very interesting list of absent economies that you posted though. We don't hear much from the telecom/internet backbone from those areas... perhaps they don't have as much local development and rely more on US/China based developments and infrastructure.
"The U.S. Internet model is a laissez-faire one, and it is hard to argue against its effectiveness."
That's pretty much all it was needed to know about the article: one-sided, unbalanced opinion aka 'ours is good the rest is shit'.
Having read some of the comments here, I want to point out to a few things.
Number of Unicorns in the US vs Europe. There are a few reasons for this and not because US don't have GDPR. The US is massive market. 300M people speaking one language, having similar culture and etc. Europe is not one market. It's a mix of mainly small/medium size countries,where all speak different languages,have different cultures and etc. I'm Lithuanian.My country has fewer people than a few block in NY. So what do I do if I start some SaaS company? I start international business from day 1. So while my American competitor from the bay area is happily on the phone with the guys in NY closing deals,I'm still figuring out what my liability will be if I sel to someone in Boston. I can't get sales people working for me because nobody wants to work at night so they could do some call calling to the software companies in California. Finally,once I get some traction,I meet the local VCs. They give me 200-500K tops. My American counterpart gets 20M for the same stuff. Ok,so by now I've got money and I go to other western markets. Guten Morgen...You said what?? Wass?? Hi,I've got a great Saas offering! Wass??? So now I need to hire German,French, and Spanish speaking salesmen to sell into their markets. Ok,maybe it's easier just to open an office in France and get some local guys.Right,who knows French employment laws.. Shit..The American guy already closed B series by then and his company worth $5B.
So:
1) US market is huge. That's why China is having so many Unicorns recently. China is maaasive.
2) VC industry in Europe is where the US industry was 20-30 years ago.You started earlier,got more experienced and are less conservative.
3) It's not the entire US producing tech unicorns. Majority are located only in a few clusters that happen to be very good at it. World is full of such examples: Italian optical glass makers, French high fashion clusters, Danish design agencies and etc. It's not that Kentucky and Alabama are producing the Facebooks of this world.
4) Internet needs to work for all stakeholders, not just giant US tech monopolists or average Joe in Europe. Right now it has a lot to be desired,while still providing tons of value.
5) The size of the company doesn't always make it better. Sometimes it's better to have a few smaller ones than one large( Oracle, SAP) that tend to stifle competition, push price up and not care about anything else( any fans of the US telcos here?)
In 2016 Nov, Jio did amazing job by giving 4G data free for almost 4 months(10GB per day was limit,i guess. Also, 2G speed afterwards). It then introduced cheapest 4G 1GB/day plan for ₹400/3 months( 5.37 USD for 3 months) .Few other cellular network companies gradually went bankrupt, but others too introduced cheap plans(comparable to jio plan). This way,they revolutionized Indian internet and i am thankful to them for providing Cheap and Good internet.
But,it certainly was a curse for other ISPs(only jio,airtel(which bought few rival companies like tata docomo), and idea/Vodafone(both which got merged), state owned BSNL are remaining.