The Next Step for Quad: A Dialogue on High Tech

This article was first published in Hindustan Times. Views are personal.T-12 is the new G-7. We are not talking about your airport boarding gates. T-12, Tech-10, Democracy-10 are some proposed multilateral mechanisms to enable international cooperation in technology governance.Cooperation, however, won’t be easy because there is significant dissonance even amongst democracies on issues such as competition in the digital economy, privacy, and data governance. The European Union (EU) prefers a regulation-heavy approach centred on protecting users’ data; the United States (US) prefers a less-restrictive approach allowing technology companies to gain scale; and India is considering data localisation measures. Such divergent outlooks run the risk of derailing collaboration.