
India is the next internet frontier (2018) - sujdes
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2018/11/business/internet-usage-india-future/
======
karambir
A positive thing for International companies is that India has a very large
section of English speakers and that is only growing. So they did enter and
expanded in the market easily.

But in the last few years due to Jio revolution, people from tier 3 cities and
villages and getting connected to the internet for the first time. So
companies wanting to capture these markets have to put extra effort into their
products. Aside from language preferences, this section sees products in a
different manner. Like Tiktok and Youtube have very different "popular" videos
here.

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iamgopal
There is a revolution boiling. Jio not just made internet accessible, it
became catalyst in braking the barrier of classes and location and thinking,
and education. The whole importance of it will be felt in coming decades if
not years. It's crazy out here.

~~~
cvrjk
I am all for cheaper and accessible internet, but I have a few concerns.

On pricing, the incumbents really needed a jolt with their terrible pricing.
But I think Jio went a little too far. It achieved all that it has by
excessive and extended predatory pricing, primarily because it had access to
unprecedented amounts of cash (from Ambani/Reliance) that the other providers
do not. Vodafone-Idea and Airtel (the other major providers) have both
suffered massive losses, the former has defaulted on their loans, and the
stock has fallen to all time lows, and the firm itself is looking to exit the
market - which is even worse as this could lead to a duopoly.

As for the access, I am not sure if India is ready to deal with unchecked free
flow of information, considering how much of our population is prey to false
propaganda and fake news. Whatsapp has already causes enough harm with the
mindless sharing of unchecked/unverified news. With recent reports [1] of the
ruling political party (BJP) resorting to distribution of deep fakes using
dedicated IT cells to push a false narrative, the situation doesn't look
comforting.

[1] - [https://www.technologyreview.com/f/615247/an-indian-
politici...](https://www.technologyreview.com/f/615247/an-indian-politician-
is-using-deepfakes-to-try-and-win-voters/)

~~~
terminaljunkid
> I am not sure if India is ready to deal with unchecked free flow of
> information

Fellow Indian, 100% agreed. Most of people who told me Wikipedia was
unreliable now trust random WhatsApp forward messages.

~~~
hutzlibu
But this is just stupidity. Does exist also a lot in the western world, but I
don't see, how that can improved with restricting information flow?

~~~
enitihas
Yup, there is no magic potion for imparting critical thinking. If anybody
thinks Indians are the only ones affected by misinformation, please go to the
Twitter feed of the current president of the United states, and read the
replies.

~~~
mardifoufs
I totally agree that misinformation is everywhere but I still think there's a
huge difference in just how impactful/dangerous misinformation can be in
countries like india vs the US.

I'm not indian, but a very similar pattern of a sudden explosion in internet
access happened in Morocco, where I'm from. Morocco has a relatively large
population of uneducated or barely educated young people that are super active
on the internet and to be honest, the results are just horrible. Especially
since majority of them are unemployed (which isn't their fault, the job market
there is just horrible) and have nothing else to do anyways. And what happened
to the two danish girls murdered there imo is directly related to that mix of
totally ignorant people with total access to information they can barely
process that end up radicalized

~~~
enitihas
Misinformation has a huge impact everywhere, and I don't see how other
companies are more immune to it. With the president of the US claiming climate
change is a hoax, invented by the Chinese, and Boris Johnson, the current PM
of England, saying NHS will get so much money back on leaving the EU, these
countries sure don't look immune. Mind you, these are not trivial lies, these
are lies believed by a huge number of their followers. And both of the above
people ended up winning elections.

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walrus01
I don't doubt that for _most_ of India, _most_ of the time, vast numbers of
people now have new LTE services on their phone that were previously
unavailable to them.

Meanwhile, the Indian government thinks it can order ISPs to shut down
Internet services in wide geographic regions for long periods of time:

[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-
india-50819905](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-50819905)

[https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/internet/how-
the...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/internet/how-the-worlds-
largest-democracy-shuts-down-the-internet)

Government attempts at censorship are constant and ongoing:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India)

Doesn't exactly seem like a bastion of Internet freedom to me.

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rektide
India is the next Internet frontier, in that the state has awful laws with no
respect for the privacy of their users.

I hope there are other frontiers than states & governments infringing &
clawing nastily at the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, but it sure
seems like that's going to be one of the biggest anti-developments splashes
for quite a while.

And India seems absolutely to be a vanguard force in fighting heavily against
freedom & user rights.

------
puranjay
This might very well be a false dawn. Internet speeds are downright awful
after the Jio-led boom, prices might go substantially up if we are reduced to
a duopoly, and the startups that raised billions on the promise of 600M
internet users are now finding out that just because people have internet
doesn't mean that they are a valuable audience for businesses.

------
prtsh
factual error - "almost a third of the unconnected are in India". It should be
"almost a quarter of the unconnected are in india.". 0.9B of 3.5B.

There are ~550M internet users in India (2019), that leaves out ~750 million
unconnected users. 150M less than 0.9B.

There are other factual errors as well. Real sloppy journalism.

~~~
kumarm
The article is from 2018 as mentioned in title.

~~~
prtsh
2018? then it is "even more" incorrect.

What's up with the downvotes? The journalist hasn't done the math and has
blown up the numbers to increase the significance of the article. This is a
real pervasive problem.

