{"id":103292,"date":"2020-03-05T00:44:20","date_gmt":"2020-03-05T08:44:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/big-techs-honeymoon-with-the-worlds-second-largest-internet-market-is-ending"},"modified":"2020-03-05T00:44:20","modified_gmt":"2020-03-05T08:44:20","slug":"big-techs-honeymoon-with-the-worlds-second-largest-internet-market-is-ending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/big-techs-honeymoon-with-the-worlds-second-largest-internet-market-is-ending","title":{"rendered":"Big Tech\u2019s honeymoon with the world\u2019s second-largest internet market is ending"},"content":{"rendered":"

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With nearly 700 million internet users and almost an equal number of people yet to come online for the first time, India is too big a market to ignore. But the tightening of restrictions on foreign tech companies and government intervention in controlling the internet are sparking concerns that the world\u2019s largest democracy is becoming increasingly China-esque.<\/p>\n

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In the 2010s, India\u2019s internet exploded. More than half a billion Indians came online in the 10 years to September 2019, according to the latest government data, and the country now has twice as many internet users as the entire population of the United States.<\/p>\n

And Big Tech rushed to cash in. Facebook ( FB<\/a> ) CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter ( TWTR<\/a> ) CEO Jack Dorsey both visited India<\/a> and met the country\u2019s Prime Minister Narendra Modi<\/a>, as did Google ( GOOGL<\/a> ) CEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft ( MSFT<\/a> ) CEO Satya Nadella, both of whom were born and grew up in India. Nadella and Amazon\u2019s Jeff Bezos both made their second visits to the country as tech CEOs earlier this year.<\/p>\n

All those tech giants, along with others including Uber ( UBER<\/a> ) and Netflix ( NFLX<\/a> ), collectively invested billions in their Indian operations, rolling out several \u201cIndia-first\u201d features and local language versions of their platforms. More billions came from their Asian peers like SoftBank ( SFTBF<\/a> ), Tencent ( TCEHY<\/a> ), Bytedance<\/a> and Alibaba ( BABA<\/a> ) \u2014 mostly through investments in India\u2019s biggest startups.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With nearly 700 million internet users and almost an equal number of people yet to come online for the first time, India is too big a market to ignore. But the tightening of restrictions on foreign tech companies and government intervention in controlling the internet are sparking concerns that the world\u2019s largest democracy is becoming [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":417,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1490,418],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/417"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103292\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}