Prime Minister "gifted away" India's digital markets to Google, Facebook, Microsoft just for few hours of "glory"
A senior science activist has alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during his meetings with the top brass of Facebook, Google and Microsoft, gifted away digital oceans for "a few hours of glory". Associated with the Delhi Science Forum, Prabir Purkayastha has said, Modi will be providing "last mile connectivity" to these giants, and the “bulk of expenditure in providing Internet backbone will be done by the government”.
An engineer and an expert in power, telecom and software sectors, Purkayastha says, all three giants will be allowed a “free ride on India’s Internet infrastructure”. Wanting it to be Internet to be a public utility, the Modi government, he adds, has decided for spend Rs 70,000 crore on National Optical Fibre network “for developing an internet backbone for the country on top of the existing infrastructure that BSNL and others."
“Google will use RailTel – a fibre optic network that Indian Railways has built -- for its wifi installations in the railway stations, giving it access to this very large, existing fibre optic infrastructure, for its own use as well”, Purkayastha says.
Insisting that this is what India would have to pay, Purkayastha says, “It was a huge ‘success’ for PM Modi”, but “what was missed is that Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are all interested in grabbing India's digital market.”
Purkayastha insists, it is time one knew what Edward Snowden, former CIA employee has revealed – “that Facebook, Google, Microsoft have been fully a part of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Five-Eyes (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) global spying network.”
“All these companies, along with telecom MNCs such as AT&T and Verizon, act as agents of the US intelligence agencies”, says Purkayastha, adding, “ They provide access to all their data, to be searched, sorted, and stored in data banks for the next 50 years, by the NSA of the US, the shadowy agency that Snowden outed.”
“So giving the US MNC's our data, is not only giving them a very important economic resource, it is also helping the US to monitor intimately all the current and future decision makers in the country”, the senior expert contends
Contrasting this with China, Purkayastha says, the Chinese “have kept Google, Facebook and others out of their market”, and the only three companies among the top 10 global IT companies that it has hired are are not from the US.”
He says, “China has done this by protecting their huge internal digital market, creating internet and mobile based businesses that rival, if not are more advanced, than their US counterparts. They are now expanding globally, particularly in those markets that are much more based on mobile based access to the internet.”
Commenting to Modi's visits Facebook headquarters, Purkayastha says, “By doing so, he also implicitly gave his seal of approval to Facebook, which reciprocated by allowing people to endorse Digital India on Facebook and change the colour of their Facebook page.”
Calling internet.org Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's “truncated Internet supervised by Facebook”, Purkayastha wonders, if Modi, by such high profile visit, was not vitiating the regulatory process, when “Facebook's internet.org is being examined by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the Department of Telecom and the Competition Commission of India for possibly violating India's telecom rules.”
Says Purkayastha, “Zuckerberg claims that he wants to connect the poor to the internet to lift them out of poverty. What Facebook's internet.org is proposing is that out of the nearly 1 billion websites in the world, the poor need to see only a few; and Facebook will decide what the poor should see.”
Comments