The balance of power between users, platforms and the government needs a reset

A perfect storm is brewing in the world of Internet platforms: in the last 10 days, Pavel Durov, the founder of messaging app Telegram has been arrested in France; in Brazil, a Judge has threatened to block X (formerly Twitter) after it refused to comply with orders, and in the middle of a hotly contested election in the US, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has disclosed government pressure during the Biden-Harris administration to censor content.

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A response to Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal’s comments on Ecommerce as a problem in India

I remember clearly the day I told Amitabh Kant about my preference for bright coloured socks: It was late in the evening at Udyog Bhawan on May 15, 2014, a day before Narendra Modi’s BJP came to power. As the then Secretary of the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP), Kant was presiding over a stakeholder discussion on whether multi-brand retail should be allowed in India. 

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Reasoned: A series about choices and decisions in tech

Trying something new: Reasoned is a new video series that goes beyond the news and examines the strategic and tactical decisions behind actions that technology companies take in a hyper-competitive and ever-evolving global and local marketplace.

People today are flooded with news, but behind every news are decisions that someone in a leadership position has taken, which often doesn’t come through in the fast paced news reporting that follows.

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Statement on the withdrawal of the draft Broadcast Bill in India

The withdrawal of this secretive draft of India’s Broadcast Bill is welcome, but it shouldn’t have existed anyway. We need more transparency and accountability from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which has held private closed door meetings with the industry over the last few months, and excluded online content creators, digital rights groups, and digital news publishers from these discussions.

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Outdated mindset driving India’s Broadcast Bill needs an update

26 year old Jimmy Donaldson, aka Mr. Beast, runs the world’s most subscribed YouTube channel with 307 million subscribers.  Known for generosity and stunts, he has spent 24 hours in an ice house, given away 26 Teslas on his 26th birthday, and gave $5 million to help 2,000 amputees walk last year.

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On Koo, failures and successes in India’s startup ecosystem

The shuttering of Koo, a microblogging website similar to Twitter (now X), has rekindled discussions about why India doesn’t have its own Google, Facebook, or WhatsApp, and whether a protectionist approach is necessary to build such services. But what would Indian versions of these platforms offer?

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Expect Imperfection

Yesterday, I built a custom AI chatbot to help me pack for travel, starting with making plans for an upcoming long trip to South America.

I’ve typically used spreadsheets for this, with variations based on type of travel (work, holiday), number of formal occasions, type of location (beach, mountains) among other parameters. The output is imperfect, and it does make mistakes with simple calculations, but then my spreadsheets are imperfect too: they’re all something to use as a starting point.

This is true of all AI chatbots: if you expect perfection, you will be disappointed. But if you expect a base to build on, you’ll save a lot of time.

Basic rule with AI and automation: build for small repeatable use cases and expect imperfection.

Research Paper: On Tiktok and India’s Tech Emancipation from China

I wrote this paper for the Friedrich Naumann Foundation on the steps that India has taken for its technology decoupling from China, covering changes in the regulation of investments, telecommunications, ecommerce, handsets, as well as the ban on apps including TikTok. This includes recommendations related to what countries can do to reduce their dependence on China. Executive Summary:

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On Perplexity and the challenge it poses for Digital Media

Perplexity is a fascinating AI application that I sometimes use to read the news, but it has me worried for a while now.

It takes a Wikipedia-like approach to compilation of news and information: it takes verified news sources and compiles the information in a format that is simple and easy to understand, with all the key facts. It also allows you to ask questions, answers to which it creates on the fly, based once again, on sources. 

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Deepfakes and elections

Two things stood out for me from our discussion on deep fakes and democracy on Wednesday:

Firstly, Gautham Koorma pointed out that detection of deep fakes becomes much difficult when they’re published on social media, because platforms transcode the content. With minor modifications, comparing hashes can become fruitless exercise. This means that on the whole, detecting deep fakes on social media is not possible with 100% accuracy, even if the deep fake is being compared with an existing dataset. Holding safe harbor to ransom is thus not the right approach.

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On OpenAI and the use of AI in warfare

OpenAI has quietly changed its terms to allow it to work with Military and for Warfare. This is a worrying development, especially since OpenAI has scraped a large amount of publicly available data from across the world. While it says that its tech should not be used for harm, that doesn’t mean they can’t be used for purposes that aid military and warfare.

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On streaming and censorship

In terms of Netflix removing Annapoornani, why are we even surprised? This is the rule of the mob, and we’ve seen this before when theaters used to be attacked in India, for films that, at times, people hadn’t even watched, but came along because everyone loves a riot. As someone who had once participated in our discussion on content regulation once told me, beheti ganga mein haath dho liye.

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Two ideas for social media platforms to protect users who are receiving targeted abuse.

A journalist for another publication just rang me up asking about what can be done in India for addressing online abuse against the LGBTQI community. I really don’t have community specific solutions, but I do feel that there are two product changes that social media platforms can make in order to provide users with agency to protect themselves against targeted abuse online:

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The real problem with AI fakery

As we hurtle towards India’s Deep Fakes Elections, I write in today’s Time of India about the risk of 2024 being India’s Deep Fake Elections. A few points:

1. The rise of deep fakes presents both exciting and concerning implications for entertainment and societal discourse. From resurrecting iconic stars in movies, and having your favorite singers sing songs they never did, to enabling multi-language political campaigns, the technology’s potential is profound.

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Surveillance Reform and India’s new Telecom Act

The recent Telecom Act in India has sparked concerns over potential surveillance implications, especially for their lack of surveillance reform. I was on CNBC-TV18 with Ashmit Kumar towards the end of the year, discussing the act (link in the comments). I’ve had some time to think about this more, so a few points: :

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The story behind the design

When we organised our first conference #NAMA — and that was the only one we did — it was almost in defiance. For a tiny little team like ours (4 or 5 people then), the idea of running editorial and then organising a large conference, was scary. We knew all potential speakers and all potential speakers knew us. We had never figured out costs for a large conference, never negotiated with a hotel. We had done small events where we had left it to the sponsors to pay the venue directly, and we took a management fee. So it was all new. It was all scary.

How we made that happen is a story for another day, and I’ll tell it sometime, but in my mind it wouldn’t have happened if Vijay Shekhar Sharma hadn’t gone out of his way to come and see me in CP, and help me clear my head and literally made a plan and an agenda on the fly. Vijay is a yaaro ka yaar, as they say, and he came through for me that day.

In the middle of all of this chaos, I wanted to define an identity for MediaNama’s conference: for it to be an annual conference on the lines of the D Conference (which, for me, was a benchmark), and for it to be something that people remembered us for. The name that I had been thinking about for years was “Converge”. It represented the fact that we wanted to be a conference were people come together, and convergence is a telecom+internet phrase. I had an intern design a futuristic logo as well, in 2009. But somehow, it didn’t quite fit for me. There were several conferences globally called converge or convergence, and then there is an Indian conference called “Convergence India”. Finally we zoomed in on NAMA. People referred to MediaNama has Nama in conversations, and the first person I remember calling it Nama in a conversation with me was Sameer Pitalwalla, another old friend in the space. But what made this different. I also thought that we needed a visual symbol, and looked to incorporate the hashtag. At that time, MediaNama’s primary focus was tech, and not tech policy, so we thought we could extend the brand. So the conference was called #NAMA, and if we ever did something on the video industry, that would be VIDEO#NAMA, or on music, would be MUSIC#NAMA. I had some of these domain names, so building independent brands wouldn’t be bad idea. We never did this.

But back to the design, I wanted a design that would stand out. My first plan was a repeated hashtag. So I pinged a designer friend, paid an initial amount, and filled out a long brief within a day about what we wanted. Then she went AWOL. After a few days I got awful designs that in no way reflected how I thought about it. By the time I got through with this designer, we had lost 10-12 days, had 20 days to go for the conference, and with a small team, with mostly me trying to figure out speakers, sponsors, designs, speaker gifts, and much more, without what I wanted as an iconic design in place, I thought it was all falling apart. That evening, after I politely told the designer that we would go elsewhere and she can keep the deposit, I called up another designer friend: Himanshu Khanna of Sparklin.

30 min after my call with Himanshu, I got a lovely, calming email from Deepikah, who led design there then, telling me that she’s got it covered. A few days later, we met at a hotel to discuss it, and she already had 3 options of design that I liked. The backdrop was a bright yellow, with repeated hashes of white, offwhite and yellow. Another had a yellow background with strange pipes of sorts all across the design. The third had a yellow background with all sorts of internet centric emoticons combined.

I looked at all three, and I liked what they brought to vibe of the design. Much to Deepikah’s shock, I asked her to combine the three. I wanted chaos and unpredictability in the design. I didn’t want the basic boiler plate designs. Like an intricate piece of art, I wanted that people to spot something new every time they looked at it, or every part of it that they looked at. Something, that even if people saw without the logo, they’d know its ours.

It’s something that I will always be thankful to Himanshu and Sparklin for: they didn’t just save us at a time when we were left in the lurch, they also gave us a design that I personally love. To me it’s art.

We’ve done several MediaNama events since, and the design, at least offline, has remained the same. It’s been difficult to make this design work over a period of time, for venues of different sizes, because of the lack of repeatability.

So we’re simplifying it now…there’s enough chaos in our lives already, isn’t it? 🙂 I just wanted to leave this here, as a matter of record. I still love this design.

The problem with what’s new?

A question we ask in the editorial team is: is this news? Within that question lies another one: is this new? When a news organisation reports, the focus is often on what’s the latest. It’s what defines what news channels report, what makes the front page of a newspaper, and the home page of a news website.

This is perhaps because people attach a great premium on what is news. Reuters was built around the idea of reporting the news faster than anyone else. The Bloomberg terminal does this too. Short, sharp. New. The short news business does this too.

Two things: Firstly, there’s a significant premium that people attach to what is new. They have a need to know something before anyone else. It moves markets. There’s money there. It’s a favor someone can trade: you tell someone something important that they didn’t know about, and there’s perceived value in the fact that you provided them with some new information.

The problem here is that the value of many things that are new is limited: what works is the dopamine effect it causes, and people then have an addiction to staying on top of everything. The problem for publications is that what is new brings commodified audiences, and the news gets commodified very quickly as well. The new-ness has a transient lifecycle, a very low shelf life. So because people keep chasing what’s new, publications have to keep chasing it too.

Not enough people value what’s deep.