How to Regulate Internet Platforms Without Breaking Them

The biggest anticompetitive element of platforms is the violation of neutrality. When the platform, such as Amazon, also acts as a player on the very platform, it can lead to a conflict of interest. Once vertically integrated, the platform has an incentive to exclude competitors either directly by delisting competing vendors or indirectly through higher commission fees and manipulating the rankings.

Anticompetitive mergers and acquisitions of platforms also tend to go under the radar, as competition authorities normally make the decision to investigate cases according to a monetary threshold. However, the monetary value of a deal may not always highlight its anticompetitive effects. Stories of big technology firms acquiring small start-ups at bargain prices are quite common. The value of these start-ups could lie in the networks (user bases) or the data they possess. Thus, it would make sense for competition authorities to automatically review any deal that involves an exchange of certain forms (or a certain quantity) of data. If this principle had been in place, Facebook’s acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram would have come under greater scrutiny.

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India’s smartphone revolution is a phenomenon on the scale of Independence in 1947

Media headlines reporting research results often distort findings — substituting ‘newsworthiness’ for accuracy. The newsworthiness falls into two broad categories: “Whatever you thought you knew about this subject is completely wrong” or “research confirms what we knew to be right all along”. So, when a headline on BBC World this week announced that “a rising tide of nationalism in India is driving ordinary citizens to spread fake news”, we should wonder which of the two newsworthy categories it falls into.Unless you’ve been blissfully living under a rock somewhere without internet, the BBC’s principal claims aren’t too surprising: A lot of fake news that is circulated seeks to promote pride in national identity; Right-wing networks are better organised to push such narratives; and finally, there is “overlap of fake news sources on Twitter and support networks of Prime Minister Narendra Modi”.Now, your decision to believe and forward a particular tweet, image, or text message depends on four things: What you believe must be true (conditioning and bias); what you’ve said about it in the past (history); what others in your groups are saying (social proof); and what someone you respect says (authority). Your “fast brain” processes all of this in less than a second, and your fingers do the forwarding immediately after. You don’t look for evidence, you don’t look for counter-claims, and very often, you don’t even reflect on what you’ve read and forwarded. In fact, you don’t use the “slow brain” at all, because you’ve scrolled down and moved on to the next message. Don’t feel bad. You are not alone. Most of us are like that.Read more

The Answer is Blockchain

This is the third edition of The Jobscape, our fortnightly round-up of news and opinion on the state of employment and job creation in India. In this edition, Industry 4.0 holds a lot of hope for the future of jobs.Read more 

Empowerment and Fragility

Zeynep Tufecki’s book, Twitter and Tear Gas, is an insightful analysis of the impact of social media on protests and social movements in today’s radically networked societies.

Most of the commentary about the role of social media in creating political communities either glorifies these media platforms (think Arab Spring) or vilifies them for their propensity to spread fake news and to create echo chambers (think Trump’s election campaign). Zeynep Tufecki’s book, Twitter and Tear Gas, however, provides a much-needed nuanced analysis on how digital platforms have altered the way in which a social movement’s dynamics play out. With the aim of understanding the challenges and strengths of digital activism, Tufecki tells a fascinating story of how social media empowers protests while simultaneously also exacerbating the fragilities of these movements.It is well known by now that the primary strength of networked public protests is the speed with which a large number of people and resources can be mobilised. This is because social media makes it easy to find people who share your political viewpoints even across geographical boundaries. What is not obvious, however, is that the speed and ease of participation also become a weakness of the networked movements. This is because ad hoc planning doesn’t allow for building capacities among protesters, which is needed to sustain a movement in the long-term. Often this results in the networked movements facing a tactical freeze in the face of changing circumstances.Read more here>

C is for Cyber

Susan Landau’s Listening In is an encyclopedia of cyber security, but misses out on the opportunity to set the stage for policy dialogue.

After the San Bernadino terrorist shootings of 2015, the FBI recovered an iPhone belonging to one of the attackers. FBI and Apple Inc came to loggerheads when Apple declined the FBI’s request to create software that would unlock the security protection on the iPhone. FBI wanted “exceptional access” to be built into the encryption systems on Apple’s iPhone, using the pretext of national security. However, Apple argued that in an age of cyber attacks, weakening of security should be the last thing to do, even if that means that the data of terrorists and criminals remain hidden from law enforcement. The basis of Apple’s argument was that security loopholes would be eventually found and exploited by hackers, presumably causing more harm to national security.Using the above case as the background for her book Listening In Cyber Security in an Insecure Age, Susan Landau, a cryptography and cybersecurity expert, studies the clash between the individual’s need for privacy and the law enforcement agencies’ need for access to information. Landau unequivocally bats for not weakening security standards, even if that makes government investigations difficult. She sets the stage for her argument for stronger encryption standards by narrating one example after another of cyber espionage, exploits and attacks, and how these have been getting more sophisticated over time. She traces the first cyber espionage to 1986. With the involvement of the CIA, KGB, and a student in Germany hacking into systems at an energy research lab at Berkeley, this story makes for a fascinating read.Read more here>

Modi govt must punish lynch mobs, not coerce WhatsApp into curbing users’ freedoms

WhatsApp is doing a lot of things in response to the union government: tagging forwarded messages as such, testing “a lower limit of five chats at once”, removing “the quick forward button next to media messages”, and promoting digital literacy. It also plans to introduce its “fake news verification model” in India ahead of the coming general elections in 2019. It has also announced a public competition to identify solutions on how to counter the spread of mala fide information.Yet, in the absence of any measures of its own to deter and punish violent lynch mobs, the government’s determination to move against one specific channel of communication could well end up as a wild goose chase.Conceptually, laying all the blame at WhatsApp’s door is a lot like blaming bus service operators for allowing criminals to ride to the scene of the crime. Not that the bus operator has no role to play in preventing the crime; but that it is not solely or primarily the bus operator’s fault that criminals ride their buses to work.Read more

Social Media Censorship Won’t Stop Lynchings. We Need a New Gandhi

That social media in general — and WhatsApp in particular — are important channels through which bigotry is spreading, is now well-known, if less well-understood.Around ten years ago, I had begun to speculate that as mobile internet pervades societies and they become radically networked, we will see both entirely new forms of politics and new forms of political expression.Read more

On Sale: Your Vote

Our data, taken without our consent, can be used for informational warfare that harms our democracy.

The Cambridge Analytica (CA) controversy has captured international mindspace over the last two days. In an interview with the Guardian, Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower at CA, laid bare the facts of how the company, under the influence of Steve Bannon (Donald Trump’s former chief strategist and former executive chairman of Breitbart) and Robert Mercer (an AI billionaire and Republican donor) used data from social media for “information warfare”. Wylie claims that over 50 million Facebook user profiles were harvested under false pretences, and then used for ballot box gains in the 2016 US presidential elections.People not only share and like things on social media, but often participate in “free” quizzes and personality tests that let these social media companies gather data on their personal and ideological preferences. The analysed data can  then used for commercial purposes, by either directly displaying ads and news tailored to particular demographic groups, or by further passing this data (knowingly or otherwise) to analytics companies like CA. The data analytics firms combine data from multiple sources and, using highly advanced algorithms, can generate sophisticated psychological profiles at group and individual levels. They can sell these to anyone who stands to profit from exploiting this data. These profiles are powerful tools, and can be used for tactical and strategic purposes against one’s opponent, or for spreading propaganda and fake news to influence  susceptible people. Thus ensues “information warfare”.Read more here>