Toddlers, preschools, leverage and parental agency

You remember that old saying that “if something is available for free, you’re the product”? In the age of AI, even if you’re paying for something, you’re still the product. A few weeks ago, I got a cheerful but worrying email from an AI app on behalf of a great preschool that my child was about to join. The app, it seems, serves as a…

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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…

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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…

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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.

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:

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,…

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