Just to provide some context on the whole "why gobarmand eej not banning Tweeter" rona-dhona...
Look at what's happening in the US itself these days. Forget the Republicans. The Democrats (yes, Democrats) are now in an all-out war against Silicon Valley.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07 ... final.html
The Democrats’ Divorce From Silicon Valley Is Almost Final
The last few years have seen a slow-motion breakup between the big-tech companies and Washington — especially Democrats skeptical of their market share, anticompetitive behavior, speech policies, and labor practices. But this spring and summer have seen the divorce papers finally being drafted. It’s a pronounced shift in the landscape that’s been understandably overshadowed by D.C.’s other dramas, and it’s an area where lefties are mostly happy with the Biden administration’s moves while most centrist Democrats and even some of their GOP colleagues are coming around, too.
It’s still pretty slow-motion, of course — it’s Washington. Not long ago, Google & Co. were the darling of the Obama-era center-left, and the current retreat from that posture is still probably far from what we’d be seeing in an Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders presidency, considering their campaign-season pledges to centralize this fight. The dismissal of the states’ case against Facebook was a significant setback to the argument against the company, and even as Biden’s government has signaled its willingness to take on the big tech companies more aggressively than its predecessors did, it’s been slow to fill some important roles in that effort, like an assistant attorney general for antitrust. Meanwhile, much of the D.C. power structure is still enthralled by the tech titans: Just a few hours before the ruling on Monday, Politico’s Playbook spent a paragraph musing about when Jeff Bezos would start throwing parties at his Kalorama neighborhood supermansion. As such, some of the companies’ biggest critics remain pessimistic about how much will change. It doesn’t help, they say, that Biden himself has far less of a history as an outspoken skeptic than other members of his party.
But the evidence of a new environment is piling up. Momentum had been shifting toward the tech skeptics since Democrats won back the House in 2018, at which point David Cicilline, a Rhode Island congressman who serves on Nancy Pelosi’s leadership team, took over the Judiciary subcommittee overseeing antitrust law and launched a massive investigation into Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. When Biden won and Democrats took back the Senate, Klobuchar introduced legislation to reform antitrust laws in her own committee. She proposed more funding and regulatory teeth for the FTC and Justice’s Antitrust department, and aimed to put the onus on the companies to prove their mergers were above board.
Biden, too, stepped in. First, he hired Tim Wu, one of the country’s leading big-tech critics and scholars, to his National Economic Council with a mandate to focus on competition. Soon after, the president weighed in on a bitter dispute in Alabama, where Amazon employees were considering whether to unionize. The union drive failed, but Biden’s expression of support for the workers’ right to organize was a presidential first, and in June Kamala Harris met with unionized Google contractors in Pittsburgh, too. By that point, Biden had nominated Lina Khan, another leading scholar on tech companies’ anticompetitive practices and an adviser to Cicilline’s investigation, to chair the FTC. When she was easily confirmed in June, she almost immediately moved to review Amazon’s proposed acquisition of MGM.
Soon thereafter, the House Judiciary Committee approved six bills over the objections of some Republicans and California Democrats, including a measure to stop tech companies from giving preference to their own services over competitors’, another that would make it harder for them to acquire their growing competitors, and one that would grant federal regulators more avenues to sue to break up such companies.
“Most of these bills are going to have a fighting chance on the floor in the House and the Senate, just given the energy of these issues,” predicted Luther Lowe, the senior vice-president for public policy at Yelp and a longtime and outspoken Google enemy. “It’s clear that the Overton window has totally shifted and we’re in a different place from even six months ago.”
Even on the day Facebook won its big court victory, countervailing winds were blowing. News broke that the Biden administration was considering issuing a new executive order to spark competition and degrade the power of corporations that grew too dominant in their field, and that Department of Justice investigators were redoubling efforts to investigate Google’s ad practices.
So in short:
Facebook, Twitter, etc. gained a lot from essentially selling tickets to the circus of the Trump Administration. They were very happy to have Trump issuing his headline-grabbing Tweets day after day, the more outrage-fueling the better.
However, once it became clear that Trump was not going to be the new President (and not a day sooner!) Twitter abruptly kicked Trump off the platform; Amazon cloud services went a step further, deplatforming Parler, etc. These Tech Companies were acting with the utter cynicism of corrupt flunkies who realize there is a new boss in town and roll over to placate him in the hope that he will let them conduct business-as-usual.
Essentially they were telling the Biden Sarkar: just let us do whatever we want to do without regulation, and we will use all the power of social media to ensure your political gain.
Apparently it has not been enough and Biden Sarkar (at least for now) is making concerted efforts to cut down Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple etc. to size. It remains to be seen where this goes. They could quietly reach some back-room negotiated deal, whereby the Big Tech companies throw themselves
even deeper into the tank for the Democrats and are left alone to pursue their predatory trade practices. Or there might be a series of huge showdowns where we see these Maharathis of Silicon Valley getting cut down to size, one by one.
So where does India come into all this? Well, if the power of these Silicon Valley giants is significantly curtailed by the Democrats, they are out of options in the USA. The Republicans hate them for deplatforming Trump and many other conservative commentators. They are
Dhobi ka Kutta, na Red ka na Blue ka. They are going to be reformed, like it or not.
In China, there isn't much room for these companies to operate at all-- let alone increase their profit ceilings. So how are they going to make up for the losses inflicted on them by new antitrust legislation in the United States? What is the ONE market in the world where they can possibly do this?
Hamaara India, of course.
The more the US government cracks down on Silicon Valley companies, the more leverage Modi Sarkar is going to get over them. They have to make their profits somewhere.
So it is in Modi Sarkar's interest to at least let these companies think that they should keep India (and GOI) happy. As long as they have hope that Modi Sarkar will facilitate them to do business in India, they are likely to agree to all kinds of things (including, perhaps, data localization) in exchange for the chance to maximize their revenues.
This does not mean Modi Sarkar should not act against (or even ban) Twitter. Twitter is not one of the Big Four Silicon Valley companies. Indeed, making an example of them may even be useful-- it will show the others exactly where GOI's redlines are.
But for those wondering why GOI hasn't just gone ahead and banned Twitter already-- I would encourage paying attention to the overall context. I am sure MEITY (and probably PMO itself) is watching the developing conflict between Silicon Valley and Biden Sarkar like a hawk. I trust that they will respond to the evolving situation when they judge it will give them the most leverage (maybe after a big US supreme court decision is handed down against the Big Four, and they become a little desperate, is the moment when sudden sharp pressure can be exerted for maximum gain).
In any case, please realize that GOI is not going to ban Twitter over this or that micro-outrage. When the ban comes, it will be a strategic decision taking the whole environment and India's best interests into context.