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TROM Voices

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Internet Data,
The New Gold

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It's data an asset? Can it 
be privately owned?

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Is it okay for a company like Google

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to collect my data while 
I'm using the service,

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then claim it as their own,

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and then basically derive all sorts of benefits, 
including financial benefits, from that data.

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You know, when I used to 
use the post office,

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I would have never thought that 
the post office would ever claim

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ownership over the 
contents of my letters.

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You have to understand what drive 
those companies. Those companies

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are not really interested 
in immediate payoffs.

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They're only interested in 
convincing their investors

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that they will keep on 
growing indefinitely.

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So as the user growth slows down in
North America and Western Europe

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they have to convince the investors 
and financial markets

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that they have the capacity to capture the markets in India, China

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Russia or Latin America and so forth.

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And the easiest way to convince the investors 
is by basically striking this deal

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with telecom operators (in the case of Facebook 
and the same also in the case of Google)

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to bring in more and more people on board, in the hopes of convincing the investors

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that once is people on board they also become 
users of Facebook, Google and so forth.

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Facebook they consider themselves to be
the biggest community in the world.

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The biggest democracy because there are more 
people on Facebook than in China or India.

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So what Facebook 
did recently was... They

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offered something that was always 
called "free-basics" in India.

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Free basic means that they want to give free 
Internet to the poorest people in the India

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at a cost. 
And the cost is

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that you have only access to what Facebook 
wants you to have access to.

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It's the complete opposite to net neutrality.

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And there was a massive 
sort of protest against this

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and so what Facebook did to try to

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push it even further was 
that they sent a message

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to all the Facebook users in India to urge
them to sign a petition for free basics.

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They were testing how far they could get away with it. 
And they didn't start with a small country, but

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the largest populated country in the world.

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And, you know, if there had not been

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some resistance towards this 
and awareness building

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then they would have 
gotten away with it.

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