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With a yellow-bird logo and 400-character limit, Indian start-up Koo was never subtle about which US social media company it wanted to emulate. Launched in 2020, Koo got its break at a time of open tension between Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party and Twitter, which defied government takedown requests during large farmer protests in 2021, prompting ministers and supporters to switch to the upstart.
But Koo, which raised money from Tiger Global and became known as India’s “nationalist Twitter” thanks to its BJP-friendly user base, never recreated the network effects of its Big Tech rival and soon lost momentum. A brief surge in popularity in Brazil had less to do with anti-monopolistic sentiment than viral jokes riffing off the name’s similarity to an impolite Portuguese word for backside. Koo finally folded this month after a bailout fell apart.
Koo’s demise underscores the failure of efforts to replace US social media companies in India. But Modi’s government now has a far more effective strategy: Control. Rule changes since 2021 are forcing foreign tech groups to fall in line. And following his re-election to a third term last month, Modi is planning much more.
Around the time of the conflict with Twitter over the farmers’ protests, India toughened its rules to include criminal liability for social media executives. This worked. Even self-styled free speech champion Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, has publicly acknowledged he has little choice but to comply with Indian takedown requests.
Modi has made stopping tech monopolies a policy platform, telling the G7 summit of global leaders last month they must “make technology creative, not destructive”. His government is preparing a handful of new laws, including the Digital India Act, designed to overhaul the country’s existing information technology laws, and a digital antitrust bill.
India’s move to rein in foreign tech mirrors global trends in many ways. Like Europe’s Digital Markets Act, India’s digital competition bill would allow authorities to pre-emptively crack down on companies before they form monopolies — rather than punishing or breaking them up after the fact.
But at its heart, India’s approach stands out for what Udbhav Tiwari, director of global product policy at Mozilla, calls an attempt to create a “fourth path” for regulating the internet. It seeks to be lighter touch than Europe and take consumer protection more seriously than the US. But it also creates broad powers for the state to police online speech in ways critics say resembles neighbouring China more than fellow democracies.
A data privacy act passed last year, for example, introduced some strong consumer protection norms for companies even as it enshrined exemptions for authorities on broad grounds including “maintenance of public order” and “friendly relations with foreign states”.
The ambiguity in these sorts of provisions means “executive discretion takes over”, says Prateek Waghre of the Internet Freedom Foundation, which sees an erosion of checks and balances that creates ample scope for abuse. About a third Modi term, Waghre says “the signals that have been going out have been more aggressive”.
Foreign tech companies have made limited attempts to push back, with a US lobby group in May reportedly asking authorities to reconsider the competition law. But they have reasoned that missing out on India’s fast-growing market is not an option, particularly after being shut out of China. Facebook and YouTube have more users in India than anywhere else — more than 375mn and 475mn respectively. An entrepreneur such as Musk, who wants to set up a Tesla plant in India, may decide it’s not worth annoying the Modi government over how he handles posts on X.
AI will be the next big test for Indian tech policy. Though it is mostly US companies like Meta and OpenAI that currently lead cutting-edge research and large-language model development, a vast amount of additional work is needed to train AI for Indian languages and package it into products for Indian consumers and companies. This is an opportunity for India to create its own AI tools, Tiwari argues, rather than simply import American tech. Given India’s high ambitions, can it now innovate rather than seeking to copy or control?
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