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A comment on India, Jio, and the Four Internets. Parent comment

Re:India, Jio, and the Four Internets by flak48 on Tuesday July 21, 2020 @03:57PM (#23910332)
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].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/27/amazon-walmart-india-e-com...

[2] https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/asia-s-richest-man-o...

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Re:India, Jio, and the Four Internets by wobbly_bush on Tuesday July 21, 2020 @06:21PM (#23911612)
From your [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

Amazon and other companies are running into this problem even in the US - https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/23/wsj-amazon-uses-data-from-th.... So the speculation that action of Indian government is just that - speculation.

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Re:India, Jio, and the Four Internets by op03 on Tuesday July 21, 2020 @06:05PM (#23911482)
Yup thats a good point. Govt is a factor. Will be interesting to see what happens when interests don't align between the two.
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