That is personal anual income and not family income I suppose. Remember that India has around 30% of people far too young to use cellphones. A family might have one phone and will happily spend $28 per year for the $30GB data per quarter. Also it is mostly prepaid with hundreds of plans to chose from so people chose based on their needs.
Smartphones are extremely important part of India's way of life as almost everything else is regulated to death. It is a ray of light for most poor people and you will find people who might not have a toilet but will own an android smartphone.
This is the system we have in the UK. The crucial differences between having it as an extra tier of income tax of 9% above £21k (going to £25k soon) are
1) Those that don't directly benefit from university (say you become an electrician) don't have to pay
2) Those that earn millions don't pay it - they pay their £50k loan off (40% of that is living costs), but then those people tend to avoid income tax anyway
3) Those that emmigrate still pay it
All in all it seems fine, but it's used as a political football by those that want to tax builders to pay for the education of stockbrokers (Labour)
There are a large number of people who will pay back multiples of their original loan amount (pay back ~£90k over 30 years on a £40k loan) if they earn moderately high salaries to start with and progress to high salaries within the last 15 years or so of their 30 year loan lifetime.
The extortionate interest keeps a middle tier of professionals paying well after they've cleared their original loan amount.
Not to mention - I have no doubt 30 years will be changed to 35, and then 40, when the day to write off the debt actually comes.
To pay back £90k would involve paying back £3k a year, or earning an average £33k over the threshold - currently that's £54k well into the top 10% of earners.
Currently income tax between £50k and £60k is 60% due to the wothdrqwal of child benefit, student loan increase this to 69%.
Personally I think we tax income - especially earned income, far too high. We have millionaire pensioners paying hardly any tax at all, yet people paying 70% who are unable to buy a house. Sickening, but it's not tuition fees to blame.
> For one, taking credit for something they have not delivered.
Google has provided free wi-fi across various Indian railway stations which I am told carries more traffic than entire cellular 3G-4G traffic. India has 13000 trains running at any given time and carries over 8B passengers every year (legally).
Google has put a lot of efforts in providing Google services in over 10 different Indian languages. That is why my driver is able to use Google maps. He does not understand English. Google like many other tech giants has surely played an important role in making Indians use internet more and more.
I recently met Chinese Commissioner at a party and he told me that the political class thinks of censorship as a weakness in their society and is fully aware that it is going to hit them badly.
He was like the censorship is more driven by vested and corrupt interests more than competence of the communist party.
It could, but in a way it's currently acting like import tariffs but for the Internet. It's making it easier to create and run a local clone of an international company than to import the international company's services to use locally.
So if or when censorship goes down, it will be Chinese companies that will be more powerful on the Internet, not western ones.
BS. China ends up paying huge cost for this censorship which the government too acknowledges. Youtube sensations are softpowers. A kid can learn million skills by visiting youtube. If you don't have that you have a backward society. China is wasting useful capital on reinventing the wheel that could have gone into building something even greater.
(Do we really save $10 by cutting our own hair at home?)
Yes you could argue that China is paying a higher cost now, but their goal is to protect and nurture their own industries so that those industries can dominate the world later on.
It's like South Korea in the 1960's and later from what I've read. The government invested and subsidised (i.e. protected) their young growing industries so that they could grow to be competitive on the global market.
The USA did likewise when it was young, with tariffs on imported goods, blatant copying of intellectual property, etc.
I think it depends on the type of censorship and what the purpose is. Just look at the colonial mentality of neighboring countries, where simply being from "the West" gives you huge perks.
We do not know about their other investments that tanked. This is how investment world generally works. You lose most your bets but the one bet that gives result pays for it and more.
May be France's shitty tax regime is more to blame here. French government should work with Apple to come up with a simplified tax code or show some balls and expel Apple from the country.
Well, may be people were shitting on SF streets well before Twitter and Facebook but the stink affects the current people and they might want to do something about it today.
