Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

India, Jio, and the Four Internets

stratechery.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 279 posts

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#81

Post by el_programmador »

victor106 wrote: post #17
hesarenu wrote: post #2

Jio is the only option for a huge number of Indians - I don't how the author got this impression. There are many other players Airtel,idea even bsnl. The offers are more or less similar. Anyone can switch or use both. My main number is on Airtel and i use jio as well.

The monopoly of Jio is extremely bad for India. It's an open secret that the Ambani's have significant control over most politicians and political parties in India. Any of the big tech companies who wish to make a significant presence in India have to go through Jio. The monies that Facebook and Google spent buying stakes in Jio is to assure them that their operations wont be hurt.

As a plebeian, the only thing I'm worried about is my internet bill. Why should I worry who Ambani has political ties with as long as I'm getting cheap bandwidth?

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#82

Post by sbmthakur »

tchalla wrote: post #12

Jio monopoly is a series of convenient regulations tailored to them over the last decade [0] . [0] https://caravanmagazine.in/reportage/government-helping-reli... I know the article is paywalled but it's the most comprehensive piece on the matter

Where were these regulations when mobile network companies refused to bring down prices in pre-Jio times?

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#83

Post by [deleted] »

rendall wrote: post #36
RestlessMind wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need an internet that works for its citizens and members, and on that front I have still more trust in the old continent I broadly agree with the spirit of this line. But I fail to see how Europe is achieving that. Can you share a few specific (and meaningful) examples of how European approach has created an outcome which works better for its citizens and members? So far from what I have seen, European companies…

"the key regulatory initiatives either haven't proven effective in curbing US giants' powers (eg. GDPR)" Would you mind expanding on that? Perhaps you have information that I do not, but from what I understand, large US tech companies with a presence in Europe do abide by the GDPR, which includes data privacy audits and large fines for non-compliance.

[deleted]

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#84

Post by sbmthakur »

signal11 wrote: post #22
varbhat wrote: post #5

Back in 2015, costs for internet were not cheap,here in India. There were many who couldn't afford (including me).In those days(2015), I used to be on 2KBps network(You read it right, kilobytes per second). It was Idea Cellular's ₹68 2G plan(USD 0.91) where it provided 1Gigabyte of data for month. 3G plans were costlier. There was no 4G until Nov/Dec of 2015 when Airtel introduced 4G(it was hyped,but it was also cost…

Jio’s offer is really good on paper, but it’s got to be one of the slowest 4G networks I’ve used when I tried it in February. Anyone know if this is because of a lack of competition (there’s effectively one other serious player left in the Indian telco market right now), or capacity constraints?

It's a function of many factors. Vodafone's reception is abysmal where I live but Jio works fine.

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#85

Post by adventured »

azinman2 wrote: post #73
adventured wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Outside of Spotify, what do I use on a daily basis as an American that's a valued EU-based company? ARM Holdings (to be fair they did spend 99% of their life up to this point in the EU) and SAP are two reasonable examples derived from the EU that have products that are used by Americans regularly. ARM was co-founded by two American companies and is now owned by a Japanese company, so that's not exactly a shining in…

It's not an 'internet' based company, which this article is specifically talking about. German cars are heavily used by Americans, and I have many German appliances, but again that's not what the subject matter is.

ARM and SAP are both Internet companies without question.

ARM wouldn't be relevant at all without the Internet. In practical terms its product is entirely linked to the Internet, specifically the mobile Internet.

ARM is not a website, sure, nor an app. It's as much an Internet company as AWS is. One could pretend AWS could exist in some formulation without the Internet, but that would be silly. The same is true with ARM as it exists today, the Internet made them what they are. If you remove the Internet, which neuters smartphones, ARM all but vanishes; thus, they're plainly an Internet company. You don't have to be strictly software to be an Internet company.

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#86

Post by op03 »

Too much overconfidence in Reliance. This is the same firm well known for totally missing the boat on India's IT boom.

It has done a great job deploying the network. Unmatched probably anywhere in the world. But that set of skills has nothing to do with charting out a vision that will work in future.

That set of skills to rollout a network at huge scale quickly, existed in India because of cut throat competition in the Telco space over 15 years.

But the skills to handle the sociological, political and psychological fallout from Scale that Zuckerberg, Dorsey et al have to deal with 24*7 does not exist in India.

They will get the Amazon/payments/delivery/cloud stuff,the easy stuff, right cuz the talent, cash, ambition and drive exists.

But the other stuff, the stuff that actually requires vision, is waiting to blow in India. If you think polarization/inequality/fake news etc etc in US is bad, go and visit India. I was there in Jan and the whole place was burning.

This bet on 4G/cloud/platforms etc is not because of some great vision of the future. It's really about crashing crude prices resulting in a huge pivot from their bread and butter Oil/Refining Business(they own the largest refinery in the world).

It can all collapse or go nowhere as that start hitting issues no one has dealt with before.

Plus there is the small issue of huge existing players who are not exactly lining up to bend over to the Ambanis.

To sum up, the Indian Internet or whatever emerges there is in for a unpredictable wild ride over the next few years and the current rose tinted view of Reliance matches what Facebook had in its early year. Expect that to change.

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#87

Post by adventured »

babesh wrote: post #65
azinman2 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But where are the examples of the valued products in large use? Let's see.. Spotify ok, Mojang hmmmhmmm.... Rovio? Outside of Spotify, what do I use on a daily basis as an American that's a valued EU-based company?

Not going to take sides but Europe does have innovation. It’s just not necessarily commercial or they have been bought out. JetBrains, Minecraft, Python, Linux, HTTP/HTML, ARM, DeepMind.

Linux isn't a good example. Torvalds abandoned Europe a mere five years into Linux, and has lived in the US ever since. For 80% of the development of Linux, he has been in the US, almost a quarter of a century. His home is in the US, he's an American citizen. He has lived in the US as long as he lived in Europe at this point (except he chose to live in the US, he was born in the Europe and left by choice).

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#88

Post by warpech »

zpeti wrote: post #43
Barrin92 wrote: post #8

I feel like every Stratechery piece on Europe is just plain bashing because Ben Thompson is allergic to regulation. Somehow extrapolating from one Indian company, Jio, to some sort of global vision of an internet while completely disregarding the European continent (which in pure market value obviously still is large) just seems like bad faith. Every time I read one of these pieces about growth, growth and growth I'm…

What exactly gives you more faith in the old continent? The thousands of unicorns Europe has? No, there are hardly any. The UX nightmares cookie laws create? No. Lower bandwidth fees than in the US? That is actually because of regulatory capture in the US, plus the sheer size of the continent, nothing to do with free markets. So how exactly is Europe so great? The most unicorns came out of the UK who have just decide…

Another problem created in Europe by iverregulation is MOSS. EU is a "single market" but with thousands of rules when it comes to taxation. It is very hard for B2C digital services startups to sell on the European market, because you have to charge taxes according to the rules of any of the 27 countries. Of course, this is an easy problem to solve for the behemoths.

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#89

Post by azinman2 »

adventured wrote: post #85
azinman2 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an 'internet' based company, which this article is specifically talking about. German cars are heavily used by Americans, and I have many German appliances, but again that's not what the subject matter is.

ARM and SAP are both Internet companies without question. ARM wouldn't be relevant at all without the Internet. In practical terms its product is entirely linked to the Internet, specifically the mobile Internet. ARM is not a website, sure, nor an app. It's as much an Internet company as AWS is. One could pretend AWS could exist in some formulation without the Internet, but that would be silly. The same is true with…

You could then call Nokia and Ericsson Internet companies, but they also existed for purely voice-based services. ARM chips go into all kinds of things like hard drives and microcontrollers that are not Internet based. Yes it's true that ARM has exploded due to cell phones, which in turn heavily rely on Internet-connectivity for their value proposition, but the Apple Newton used an ARM-chip well before 3G.

This article is talking about 'internet-vision'... I don't see how ARM fits into that vision, especially since it effectively predates it. Plus it's now been sold to Softbank at any rate.

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#90

Post by dragonelite »

babesh wrote: post #65
azinman2 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But where are the examples of the valued products in large use? Let's see.. Spotify ok, Mojang hmmmhmmm.... Rovio? Outside of Spotify, what do I use on a daily basis as an American that's a valued EU-based company?

Not going to take sides but Europe does have innovation. It’s just not necessarily commercial or they have been bought out. JetBrains, Minecraft, Python, Linux, HTTP/HTML, ARM, DeepMind.

Wouldn't really count the UK as part of continental Europe, i see them more as a part of the anglo sphere(US,UK,AUS and NZ). But wouldn't also say programming language can be claimed by a continent because most are global effort or contributions.

The scenario in my head is what if the US decides to put the same kind of sanction/embargos they have put on Russia, Iran and China how well will the EU handle such a economic/technological warfare, can we in the EU continue to function by flipping a switch and have cyber sovereignty. Because as far as i can see the EU tech sector got colonized by US companies, and i wouldn't be surprised if the same happen with India in 10~20 years.

Post reply on HN