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India, Jio, and the Four Internets

stratechery.com

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Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#131

Post by blocked_again »

ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote: post #13

Ben says: “Any company that wishes to achieve scale needs to do so in its home market first, before going abroad” Not really sure why this would be the case. Spotify didn’t do this did they?

Language barrier, cultural differences, time difference, payments, compliances, government regulations, initial userbase, network effects, hiring etc. It's so much easier for a startup to deal with these issues in home country than dealing with them in a different country.

Also why will the investors give you money for starting in some other country than investing in someone who is already in that country.

Ofcourse there are exceptions and you can start a lot of companies without dealing with these issues as well.

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#132

Post by craigsmansion »

bgorman wrote: post #111
tsss wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why is that bad? I don't care if the software I'm using is coming from the US and if there are going to be globally dominant European internet companies. The only thing that counts to me is getting a good product, which privacy regulations are critical for, and getting taxes, which also requires more regulation not less.

If you were a European citizen you might be concerned about Europe's ability to compete in the Technology sector.

Europe's ability to compete in the Technology sector is just dandy. It's the EU's ability to compete in the "tech" sector that might fall behind, and maybe that's a good thing.

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#133

Post by posguy »

product50 wrote: post #130
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…

Where is the Europe's alternate to US's or Chinese companies? Please give examples to support your cases vs. just calling out your biases. It is so unfortunate that Europe has just allowed itself to be so dominated by US' and Chinese (in the case of Huawei) companies.

Spotify, Qwant, Here Maps, Minecraft, etc

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#134

Post by spians »

el_programmador wrote: post #120
bluecatswim wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usual reasons monopolies are bad. Jio in particular is known for being highhanded in blocking websites. A couple weeks ago duckduckgo was unavailable on their network across India. [0] Last week, the government of India proposed some changes to the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process which would make it easier for corporations to cause ecological damage without repercussions. A couple organizations publ…

Firstly, DDG was blocked by ALL Indian ISPs during that instance, not just Jio. People using Airtel, Vodafone, etc. were as much complaining in forums as the Jio users. From what I recall, BSNL was the only one who didn't block (due to their inefficiency perhaps!) Secondly, with the kind of minuscule market share DDG has, they or their users can hardly get impacted by a couple hours' block. If anything, Indian govt.…

> Secondly, with the kind of minuscule market share DDG has, they or their users can hardly get impacted by a couple hours' block

I would like to know the exact market share of DDG in India.

Also people who use DDG use it as their search engine. It would impact that "minuscule" percent of people the same way the majority of people would get impacted if google.com was banned for a couple of hours.

> If anything, Indian govt. made them a favor by making them more famous

Really?

> I for one don't recall #DDG ever trend on Twitter in recent history

So it's not that minuscule market share?

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#135

Post by petre »

xavi wrote: post #125
tsss wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why is that bad? I don't care if the software I'm using is coming from the US and if there are going to be globally dominant European internet companies. The only thing that counts to me is getting a good product, which privacy regulations are critical for, and getting taxes, which also requires more regulation not less.

I think European regulations like GDPR or cookie laws have made the Internet worse, not better. They're not effective and make things more complicated for everyone. I think that people in government should design rules to provide equal opportunities to everyone. I think that will benefit you even if you see yourself only as a consumer. I agree with what the article says, the European regulations only benefit the bigg…

Don't forget articles 15 and 17 (former 11 and 13 I think) of the copyright directive. Link taxes and content filters which only benefit the big tech corps.

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#136

Post by dariosalvi78 »

azinman2 wrote: post #59
mola wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said unicorns are good? Money =\= value. It's just a proxy, which doesn't always work. You know how you can prevent regulation? Don't be excessive and greedy.

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?

Skype, OVH, Zalando. There are surely others, but, yes, most internet companies are in the US. The question is why? I can think of two reasons: the US is more uniform (one language to start with), so once the business starts to go well it explodes quickly, whereas in Europe it may go well in one country, but expanding to other countries is harder. The other is because it's where the big investments are, so people, also from Europe, go there to get funded, which attracts more investments. It's a positive feedback loop and it's hard to stop it.

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#137

Post by dmitriid »

stickfigure wrote: post #56
jfk13 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UX nightmares are not the fault of cookie laws, they're the fault of companies that don't want to respect users. If the companies behaved more ethically, there'd have been little impetus to even create such laws.

"The system is perfect; it's the humans that are flawed!"

The system isn't perfect. But those cookie consent shit that the vast majority of websites peddle? It's directly against the law

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#138

Post by cosmodisk »

"The U.S. Internet model is a laissez-faire one, and it is hard to argue against its effectiveness."

That's pretty much all it was needed to know about the article: one-sided, unbalanced opinion aka 'ours is good the rest is shit'.

Having read some of the comments here, I want to point out to a few things.

Number of Unicorns in the US vs Europe. There are a few reasons for this and not because US don't have GDPR. The US is massive market. 300M people speaking one language, having similar culture and etc. Europe is not one market. It's a mix of mainly small/medium size countries,where all speak different languages,have different cultures and etc. I'm Lithuanian.My country has fewer people than a few block in NY. So what do I do if I start some SaaS company? I start international business from day 1. So while my American competitor from the bay area is happily on the phone with the guys in NY closing deals,I'm still figuring out what my liability will be if I sel to someone in Boston. I can't get sales people working for me because nobody wants to work at night so they could do some call calling to the software companies in California. Finally,once I get some traction,I meet the local VCs. They give me 200-500K tops. My American counterpart gets 20M for the same stuff. Ok,so by now I've got money and I go to other western markets. Guten Morgen...You said what?? Wass?? Hi,I've got a great Saas offering! Wass??? So now I need to hire German,French, and Spanish speaking salesmen to sell into their markets. Ok,maybe it's easier just to open an office in France and get some local guys.Right,who knows French employment laws.. Shit..The American guy already closed B series by then and his company worth $5B.

So: 1) US market is huge. That's why China is having so many Unicorns recently. China is maaasive. 2) VC industry in Europe is where the US industry was 20-30 years ago.You started earlier,got more experienced and are less conservative. 3) It's not the entire US producing tech unicorns. Majority are located only in a few clusters that happen to be very good at it. World is full of such examples: Italian optical glass makers, French high fashion clusters, Danish design agencies and etc. It's not that Kentucky and Alabama are producing the Facebooks of this world. 4) Internet needs to work for all stakeholders, not just giant US tech monopolists or average Joe in Europe. Right now it has a lot to be desired,while still providing tons of value. 5) The size of the company doesn't always make it better. Sometimes it's better to have a few smaller ones than one large( Oracle, SAP) that tend to stifle competition, push price up and not care about anything else( any fans of the US telcos here?)

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#139

Post by product50 »

posguy wrote: post #133
product50 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the Europe's alternate to US's or Chinese companies? Please give examples to support your cases vs. just calling out your biases. It is so unfortunate that Europe has just allowed itself to be so dominated by US' and Chinese (in the case of Huawei) companies.

Spotify, Qwant, Here Maps, Minecraft, etc

Wow - such great companies. I am flattered. Please be real. US has FB, Google, MSFT, Apple. China has Tencent, Alibaba, Bytedance. And look at the list you have come up for Europe.

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#140

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

mola wrote: post #63
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?

A lot of infrastructure. A lot, industry is not tech. The world is not the US.

And pithy one-liners are not arguments. OP is specifically asking for examples.
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