Relevance: GS-2: India and its neighbourhood relations

Relevance: GS-3: Awareness in the fields of IT, Space, Computers

Key Phrases: Banned 54 Chinese Apps, Cyberspace, Great Internet Wall of China, American Big Tech, Copycat, India stack

Why in News?

• Recently, the Indian government again banned 54 Chinese apps on the grounds of national security .
• Government believes that user data was being sent via the apps to servers in China, such collection would allow the data to be mined, collated, analysed and profiled, potentially by "elements hostile to the sovereignty and integrity of India and for activities detrimental to national security.

Key Points:

• Border standoff to Cyberspace warfare:
  1. The current India-China border standoff has made Indians very watchful in their cyberspace but the Chinese strong shields on their own Internet territory, what is called by experts as the 'Great Internet Wall of China' , made India vulnerable to misuse of Indian Data by Chinese apps.
  2. Earlier, Google announced in response to a hacking attack from within China on it and dozens of other U.S. companies, it would pull out of the country completely. Due to strong Chinese government influences on the IT sector.
• The Chinese Internet market today, and has grown to over 900 million users, most of them on mobile (paradoxically via Google’s Android) from just over 300 million in early 2010. This highlights the strong potential of Chinese cyberspace.

What are the inherent loopholes in China's cyberspace which are a blessing in disguise for India?

• Decentralization and Innovation missing:
  1. The Great Internet Wall insulated Chinese entrepreneurs from Big Tech in Silicon Valley.
  2. The Chinese web market was left with lack of innovation and competitive spirit in Internet-based social, commerce, and lifestyle products which cannot be fulfilled by only Big Tech such as WeChat and Alibaba.The need is a decentralised local enterprise market.
• Reverse engineering of silicon valley's models:
  • Chinese companies simply are doing faithful reproductions of Silicon Valley ideas into distinctly Chinese applications for their home market.
    1. Baidu has replaced Google in China.
    2. Youku Tudou is YouTube, and Xiaohongshu is a version of Instagram.
    3. WeChat began as a simple messaging app, but is now many things for the Chinese (social media, news, messaging, payments, and digital commerce).
• As far back as 2016, U.S. President Barack Obama released a strategic report, the most striking part of this report is that it appeared the Chinese had learnt their lesson from failing to make themselves an IT outsourcing services superpower like India had.
• Blessing in disguise for India:
  1. With the rise of Jio, and the response from its competitors, the widening reach of Internet connection across the country provided hundreds of millions of non-urban Indians with fluid access to the Internet.
  2. India now has the lowest Internet data costs in the world.
  3. In its attempt to dominate the rest of the world, the Chinese Internet industry desperately needs India’s freshly minted 500-plus million netizens to continue to act as a training ground for the AI algorithms they put together.
  4. China’s Internet ecosystem is entirely self-created, self-run, and self-serviced, so it exports apps such as Tik Tok and PUBG worldwide — adding to the user base of 900-plus million Chinese netizens, whose data they can analyse and keep improving further.

What are new changes coming from China?

• According to the 2016 White House report, the Chinese have leapfrogged even the U.S. in AI research, especially in the components of “neural networks” and “deep learning”.
• In this case, the intellectual property being produced actually belongs to China and is not a faithful duplicate of someone else’s product or technology. This has far-reaching implications.
• Thus, banning Chinese websites and applications to the Indian public effectively allows our home-grown IT talent to focus on the newly arrived Internet user. Develop their own competence in AI, Robotics, IoT.

What will be the impact of the Chinese apps ban?

• Geostrategic move with wider implications:
  1. The decision to ban Chinese apps in India is not only a geopolitical move but also a strategic trade manoeuvre that can have significant economic impact.
  2. This effectively allows our home-grown IT talent to focus on the newly arrived Internet user.
• Exporting without catering domestic market:
  • India’s focus on exporting IT services while paying little attention to servicing our own nation’s tech market.
    1. The issue is that while we have spent the last two decades exporting the bulk of our technology services to developed countries in the West, the vacuum created as the Indian Internet grew has been filled by American Big Tech and by the Chinese.
    2. After the removal of more than 118 Chinese apps, Indian techies have started trying to fill the holes with copycat replacement websites and applications. But faithful copies are not enough for us to make full use of China’s exit. This is not enough.
    3. The primary Indian IT objective must shift from servicing others to providing for ourselves. In the absence of Chinese tech, Indian entrepreneurs should not simply look to replace what the exiting firms have so far been providing.
    4. They should focus instead on providing services and products of high quality that will be used by everyday Indians across the country.
• Harness domestic market potential:
  1. Now the aim should be to provide netizens with the same services across diverse domestic markets — regional barriers created by language exist within our own nation.
  2. These provide an accretion of excellent smaller markets, with opportunities for specialised Internet services created for a local community, by the community itself.

What is the way ahead for Indian IT sector?

• Focus on diverse-regional necessities:
  • The fundamental focus of the new digital products that plan to emerge in the growing market should be to provide for diverse -regional necessities and preferences. For example, apps and services that provide specific market prices, local train and bus routes, allow for non-traditional banking and lending, education, health, online sales, classified advertising,and so on.
• Hyper-local, hyper-regional Accessibility is crucial:
  1. With the rise in migrant work and labour all over the country, a news or banking app with, say, an Odiya interface should work everywhere that Odiya-speaking people migrate to.
  2. If we create hyper-local and hyper-regional services of high quality and great accessibility that are also portable across our linguistic diversity, we are far more likely to succeed in creating one of the strongest Internet markets in the world, rather than creating copycat apps or apps that only cater to English speakers.
• Explore the unexplored:
  • IT companies all over the world have focused their efforts on the 15% of the world’s population with deep pockets while largely ignoring the other six billion denizens of the world’s population.

Conclusion:

• If the Indian IT sector goes forward with the aim of servicing our own, India’s experiences as a modernising power are of great use to the bulk of the world’s population, which lives in penury when compared to its western counterparts.
• India can export our “India stack” to other countries in the “south”, such as those in Africa and Latin America. We have successfully done this before with our outstanding railway technology. There is no reason India cannot pull off the same achievement with our home-grown Internet power.

Source: The Hindu

Mains Question:

Q. The ban of the Chinese apps by itself can do little in achieving its objectives unless the entire Data protection ecosystem is reformed. Do you agree? Give reasons to support your answer.( 15 marks).