See you later, tech regulator

I, V, M. on behavior of that's on politics, behavioral science. No way. That's a scene in the unseen.

Welcome to the show. That's about the hidden side of everything. No, sorry. That's economics.

Welcome to the recipes or fiction, no way. That is the show on the Constitution, the US one of those. Welcome to a show that does not have opening yet. And that, yes, that was the one that simplified.

Yes, sorry, I had to bring it back over eventually. Hi, guys. Amazing. Hi.

Yeah, yeah. So, I show that the government has not been able to regulate it. It's like the big four. OK, anyway, and by government, just to be clear, we're talking about government as an abstract concept and not like it could be the government of simplified government of IDM, the Ministry of like Ministry of city walks.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right. The city is indeed the government that we are under.

So anyway, guys, today we are going to talk about the technology platform. So it only makes sense to ask you what your first social media profile looked like. Wow. I'm speaking and yeah, it has to be what could for me or who was the first one.

And I mean, the only thing I remember is just like getting a bunch of viewer testimonials from a bunch of friends that was on my profile. I don't remember any of the interests or any other crap that I put there. But I remember like exchanging scraps with a bunch of like my cousin used to be insane on awkward and she used to like she wrote me some five testimonials and she was a kid. Like she was younger than me.

So she was a kid and like she put all of these these exchange scraps and all that stuff. And like I mean, scraps is about right because I remember it could be absolute trash can anyway. I mean, even back then, even when we didn't have a clean like at least early Facebook clean world, I mean, I think my memory is just like totally revolving around awkward, just being totally trash. Like it was like this trashy message board where the UX was terrible.

Like the interface was just garbage with garbage colors all over the place. And like that dirty pink color that it was there. Just I was just like awkward. Just I remember it to be great concept, but extremely terrible execution.

Wow. Okay. That was a scathing review. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I think my first social network was high five, but I don't remember anything about it. But I think awkward was the one where I spent a lot of time on it. It had some really cool features, which, you know, took a while for like, like, for instance, you could mark someone as you have a trash on them. And if they did the same to you, they'd send you a read, which goes you never reciprocated to mine by the way.

I'm just saying. You know what the what the mail said, take a deep breath and ponder this or could test unmask the shared affection and show twin wounds from Cupid's nuts. But while we ate in love's detection, its future path lies to your hearts. You have a meal.

You have this made and you just search for it. Okay. So my way to search for it is the word two weeks, which no one ever uses. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Except for the exotic kind of piece, please. There's a famous, there's a famous Ogden Nash poem.

The turtle lives with plated decks that practically conceal its sex. I think it's clever of the turtle in such a fix to be so fertile. American. I'm very sure that Marine recalled that from memory and Tony, that he read out how to read it from me.

This is all he needed over. So my answer is that's how old Marine is. He needs to remember. He comes from an oral tradition.

I like the testimony of the future. I thought that was pretty cool. The testimony was written on the awkward words I thought. Yeah.

The worst nickname, send me a teste. My first voice like Tony's high five as well. And one thing I remember, and I can't believe I'm showing this to you guys, is I still remember the first profile because I just started learning the guitar that when I was kind of cool doing all those kind of things. Thankfully, our listeners will not be able to see this.

I want to tell me what you just described in your own words. So what you see on the line. I see a tree devoid of coconuts and all the oil on your head. It was amazing.

This is short. Yeah, it's short. On 2005, not too far away from today. So this is arguably because yeah, this is GC.

How is your t-shirt so white? They just gave it to you for the best environment. You know, this is a baryant t-shirt. You'll notice that this thing is from baryant.

My parents just got me. It's actually white for a won't t-shirt. It's not a one t-shirt if I'm trying to tell you. It's not a won't t-shirt.

In any case, I'm making engineering. You have ways of doing it. I'm very proud of this guitar. I got a strat copy for 400,000.

It's only enough of that ISO. And that's the last time I promised you would use the share screen feature on Zumba recording. And also for you to actually want to see what I look like, just write into us and we will obviously what we can do. Maybe tell us on that.

Just on that topic, when you mentioned chemical engineering, I just remembered you keep referencing us to reaction, right? Yeah, yeah. And now I thought that's the only other time I can now seek that Zillensky. Wow, I did not realize that.

Yeah, Zillensky. I was like, when I thought of that reaction, I was like, hey, Zillensky is a mainstream name. Wow. So it's hell for him.

But it's hell. Oh my God. Excellent. Yeah, so good.

Who's there? I just got an awkward altogether. I don't know if blog counts as a social media. I mean, you went over an awkward.

I was never an awkward. Well, you just jumped directly to Twitter. Yeah, just I'm just a... Wow.

I don't know how I got into Twitter. When the one way of tweeting was to text an SMS to an Indian number and it would come out to you. No way. Is that?

For the longest time, yeah, I was just sort of shooting our machines into the wild without knowing what was happening. Then I realized that a whole bunch of people actually listening. So I'm reading my messages and then it was, I'm not a bit like I know. There's a relatively each person who thought Twitter was same as the search button.

Apparently, we did everything he meant to search. Oh, no. No, this actually feature reminds me, I do remember this, but I remember this in context of Facebook. So in the early days of Facebook, because you didn't have the Facebook mobile app, you could actually turn on notifications for a post on mobile and you get on SMS.

You get all the notifications on SMS and if you reply to those SMSs, they would actually go and post themselves as comments on your post. I'll reply to comments on post. So I actually use that quite often in 2008 or so. And then obviously I got a smartphone later.

But that's how you use Twitter in that time. So Twitter and Facebook. So yeah, that reminds me of that particular. Early days.

Early days. When you were also keen enough to spend money, I'm actually posting to it. Yeah, Twitter. So SMS would cost, right?

Yeah. So from the early days of using social media and spending money to do so. So what is the topic of that? I'm actually wondering myself, because I'm actually part of me is tempted to keep talking about the old days of social media and how we use them, but maybe another time.

So very recently, the European Union, those troublemakers, they passed something called the digital market stacks, the DMA. And it isn't at the tries to regulate big technology firms. They have a sliding into their DM. Done.

Now, this is what we were missing when Tony was absept. I always felt that if I were to equate Tony to a musician, I always feel he's like Martin of like, so there's a beautiful little business coming in and then going out. Not vital to the song. But just adds so much color and flourish.

So Tony, thank you for being our Sultan of Spring. Yeah. That is the dark book. Basically, you're saying we are in diastrates because we're not.

Well, we're not. Well, we're very very very very. Yeah. So they want to regulate big tech.

And I mean, it's quite obvious who they were after because they even set like criteria like this much amount of revenue, this many number of users and all that. And the EU, I mean, actually does a slow moquer. So it's even differentiated between users and actual paying customers, hence differentiating, like solving like clever enough to realize that just because a platform has say 100 million users doesn't mean that all of them are actually paying. It might only be 10,000 advertisers who are actually paying and funding the platform, etc.

So it meant to rain them in some way. And essentially what the regulation is fairly huge and there are lots of things that happened as a result of it or other will happen as a result of it. But there were two, three large points. One of the biggest ones has been a talking point for people who analyze the spaces mandating interoperability and the easiest way to explain interoperability would be with an example.

So somebody using WhatsApp should be able to message somebody who uses Telegram should be able to message somebody using iMessage should be able to message somebody using say can you read some things of internet? Yes, you did. I don't know what. Thank you for that.

Wow. What a honest plug. No, because like I read this exact same example. Yeah, the exact same thing is what I'm going to say only.

I literally have it open in front of me and I'm going to read it. But yeah, that's one big thing that was taken. I have to interject one, one of whose is one of whose is novel scariest of preface saying that critics that much hated try feature some critics have accused me of writing stories with the same characters under different names. So I've outwitted them in this novel.

I am writing the story of the same characters with the same names. Yeah, I thought you were talking about interoperability. I thought it was on different characters, same medium, something. So that's one interoperability, a couple of other things as well.

One which was that a big tech platform should not get into, it should not to self preferential treatment. The example Google has been known to cut off traffic to a lot of websites, not on its own by introducing a feature that doesn't necessitate people clicking and going to a website. And we all do that. For us it's a convenience to see whether the clickets or the flight status right over there.

But it's causing some website or app for instance. It's actually also a form of a violation of net neutrality in some way. So the concept of net neutrality while you're talking about net neutrality in context of internet service providers, but there's also a neutrality issue when it comes to inside the internet with simple flow of information within the internet. That also is, and especially now with these big full tech companies having as much, I got tolling as many portions of the internet as possible.

What they are effectively doing is they're building what are called walled gardens. Yeah. So in the net neutrality context of walled garden is something on the lines of what GEO and Facebook were attempting to do before net neutrality was kind of like codified in India, where GEO had its own ecosystem where you could use Facebook and Facebook's products for free, but everything else would cost money. And that kind of created this walled garden effect.

And that's precisely what Google is also trying to do in some ways over here. Completely agree. So those are a couple of the major rulings. There are like a whole bunch of others which I won't get into.

I mean, if you just search for DMA online, I'm the Wikipedia article itself is a good explanation of it. A lot of the commentary has been focused around the interoperability aspect, but I want to use that as an example to illustrate how the topic of this, which is how dam complicated this whole thing really sort of. So before you go into that, there was a similar kind of situation with Google and Australia to remember. Yeah, the media thing.

The media thing. Yeah, the media bargaining law or whatever. Yeah. They're basically the idea was that Google needs to pay a certain amount to like show news or something like that.

Yeah. Yeah. And they had something similar in France as well if I remember. Yeah.

I mean, that's a great example to add to this because all of these things together just show how damn complicated it is to these things. So because it is Australia and not a big one, what Facebook did was it took all news of Facebook. So if you posted a news link in Australia, you wouldn't show up. It was a new site in Europe.

Yeah. In fact, I remember seeing some new papers or news organizations who are wondering how to tackle this problem by not replying to comments or something to either work around this ban or I forget exactly what it was. But yeah. So all this just shows how complicated it is.

And just want to use interoperability as an example before we jump off to other things. So on the surface, it looks like a great interoperability is a good thing. What's that you should be able to message it. I'm using whatever it might even help younger messaging services that are innovative to come up in some way.

But then there is a dark side to this. There is a problem, which is it might mean the end of end to end encryption for instance. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, one of the few things that WhatsApp has done right, I guess, is or rather Facebook itself has been pushing for so much is is trying to have user privacy in its messaging apps and that to a large degree has happened with WhatsApp. If a ruling like this comes in is could severely compromise privacy around the could severely compromise privacy and it could also lead to a lot of spam. Like we'll cut the now head of WhatsApp said in interview that, you know, sure, while within WhatsApp, we can control spam and misinformation and all that. Once a message is sent from WhatsApp to a third party service, we don't know what's going to happen over there.

Right. And it also throws it. This whole thing was a throws up and I'm just sticking with interoperability itself just to show how many different angles are there to this one thing alone. There's an app in Germany.

I forget the name, but it's a paid messaging app. It's got a feature of signal and then some super private and all that. And I think people have to pay some 10 euros a month or a year or something to be part of it. They see you said that a ruling like this can completely destroy their only revenue stream and which is the only thing that they can charge people for which is the security and all that.

So what if an other message comes in? Are we going to say that if it's coming from a third party, you're going to block that altogether and obviously people are going to leave the platform. What if somebody from our platform wants to message somebody who's on a non secure platform? How's that going to work out?

So I get no right or wrong answer. So we're here. It is just that the thing is so darned. I mean that guy is business folding up.

I mean, which constitution has guaranteed him that is not going to fold up by change in policy. So that's not a good metric. No fair enough. If you have to debate the business models as such, it's just that it is very difficult to regulate these things.

I'm not even going to pass that. The meta is doing something right or this guy is not. You know, I'm just saying I don't really thought much about it. It's not actually because most people have to have a lot of models.

So interoperability. So you know, let's say I'm on WhatsApp and you're on Telegram and now you can send messages to me and I don't like it. What I should do is get off WhatsApp too. I don't understand.

It's a function of what I, if there is no choice at all, that's a different thing. I do have a choice. I have a choice not to be on WhatsApp. I choose to be on WhatsApp because a lot of, you know, everything in our little universe, everything walks around people message you on WhatsApp, they send you payment links and why everything happens on WhatsApp.

So if you really feel spooked and creeped by this, so this is my thing about Europe is I don't know in this case they might be absolutely right. But Europeans love to regulate everything. They're like Indian bureaucracy on steroids. They just want to regulate things because they can't just regulate anything.

And the obvious things like, you know, can you not wear a mustache? They can't regulate that. But they can't let all this other thing. I mean, who you can talk to?

What you can see on the internet? If they don't like it, they should just step away. Like over regulation, that's my problem. And I understand the problem because companies like Google and Facebook do end up doing a lot of very unfair shit.

Facebook is absolutely a criminal enterprise. There's not even, should do and call it a company. It's just, it's all right. Yeah.

So now that everybody has been battled by, I'll take a break. I have to raise my hand. Yeah. And I don't submit a stock.

Should we give this disclaimer now? Should we give this disclaimer? Yeah, I don't. It's like a three-shelf.

Is it invested in Ken basically? No, I don't want to debate about whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Okay. Let's go to, as a British sales cross the pond and go over to the US where they've been speaking about regulating big tech companies for years now ever since regulating or breaking up.

Yeah. So that's the thing, right? So again, so regulation, why are breaking up a regulation on its own or whatever the case may be? But it's more, rather than breaking up a small, high-usion of power kind of thing.

Yeah. That's why I'm like, the Hjibanyha. One, take the hammer to it solution is so these companies have become too large, break them up. It seems like a great rally cry in the Trump era, but analysts have shown that breaking these companies up are only going to make individual people more powerful.

And the example they use is as always a standard example, which there was one company that got too large and they took it up and then you had 16 or 17 companies, both as a result, the combined worth of which was bigger than the original company. So these things can have consequences that way as well. I mean, there are people who are waiting and relishing for Amazon to be broken up because AWS on its own is likely to then become the largest company in the world. And things like that.

So the biggest challenge is how the only reason I brought that up was the time when I bought this talk was also the time when Facebook's valuation had reduced below the threshold where this would apply in the US. It's not a question. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was really bad.

Yeah, it's back about that. Yeah. So a lot of the US rules, one of the things that makes this whole endeavor of regulating breaking up these companies is one, how different they are from traditional companies in the past, traditional companies, be it oil or be it shoes or be it services of some kind, all involved end users paying some money to the company in some way and getting some product or service in return. Many of these companies are very different in the sense that the end user, you and me, don't necessarily pay meta or Google or anything.

And we are in some sense of product that is being used and you can argue that the actual users are advertisers who are using the platform. So in that sense, Facebook, Google and all that are B2B platforms and we just happen to be features in some way. So that's one way in which these companies are different, which makes using past regulation as a standard, very difficult because by US antitrust rules, they're like, as long as they're paying less, it's kosher. But hey, you're not paying anything at all.

So how do you regulate a company like Google or Facebook or do you regulate the AI? What is the rationale behind bringing them up? Like what will you touch you? Yeah.

So again, complication number three, which we will get to in a bit of second problem. I said one problem was the current companies are so different from previous companies. So that makes regulation difficult. And the second thing is these companies are also different from each other.

It's not like Facebook business model is equal to Google's business model. And then you have Amazon in some sense, which is the largest of the lot, yet is in some way the most similar to companies of the past where you're paying the company and getting something in return. So they kind of make sense. And then you have others like Microsoft.

And one problem that we have, one problem that everyone has realized is that a big just keep getting bigger. And that's something that the pandemic has shown. Maybe before there was a risk of it, like that not happening, but during the pandemic is very clearly shown that whoever has market power, whoever has money sitting in coffers, be it Apple, be it Amazon, be it alphabet, be it meta or even be it market leaders in this particular sectors like salesforce, Zoom to some extent, Netflix, all of these guys have just used their existing power and their user base in order to grow bigger, invest more in R&D to some extent, squash competition, acquire competition, all that sort of thing. So I can see where this is going.

I see where this sort of discomfort from a public point of view is coming as well. It's just surprising to me because all of us at least we have been observing technology firms and all that since our days in digital marketing and we have known about the risks of targeted advertising from way back in 2012 and 2013 and then in early 2016, 17, the average American knew about it. The average public got to know about things like privacy and all that. So it seems like there's sort of like a groundswill against big tech companies.

I've been from being America's most trusted brand in 2017 to one or two, I think somewhere in the 40s or 50s last year. So the public image that these companies have taken is at one level, they are more vital than ever before and being used more than ever before at the same time. The reputation is totally in the battle, at least in the US. That's just a slice of the media that we are exposed to.

The size of the other meets the road is the number of users that we have, which stands at 1.92 billion. So if people were actually leaving, absolutely. No, completely. Tony's justifying his talk with you.

Yeah. And to some extent, Facebook has the parent blue app or whatever it is there. The usage of that app is reducing. But that's the other contradiction that we keep criticizing big tech, but we are using them directly or indirectly more than ever before.

In 2016 or 1970, there was a fascinating experiment that some journalists are expecting from Gizmo, her name is Kashmir. She did this fascinating experiment where for one day of the week, she would vene herself of one of the big tech players. And what that meant was not just not using the website, but also all the other things that happened here. So on the day that she was not using Amazon, it didn't just mean using not using Amazon the app.

But also everything hosted on AWS, which meant that inadvertently she couldn't use Netflix for that particular thing. Similarly, Google, so Google meant no Google Maps, no Uber because it uses Google Maps. So once you get down to realize how entrenched each of these, each of these companies are again, no judgment on any of them. It's just my whole point over here in this conversation today is how difficult it is to regulate these things, regulate these companies because they're so different from companies to the past.

And they're so different from each other in some sense. So if you're, so one of my favorite authors to follow, think is to follow, he's just linked out in that piece which Tony was talking about is a guy called Ben Evans, he's a British show, and this and all this. I can consider him in Scott Galloway essentially reading for anyone who's interested in this space. One of his points was exactly this.

If you are bringing out regulation, keeping one company in mind, say Apple, you see that it does not necessarily very cleanly apply to Amazon. And if you do that for Amazon, it won't be applied to Google. And even if you apply to Google, so what is like one overarching ruling that's going to apply to everybody together? And breaking up companies might make sense in Amazon's case, but it's not going to necessarily make sense for the others.

Or if it's going to be regulating, say, number of users or interoperability for one player, it may not necessarily work for the other. So yeah, overall point just circling back. I'm spoken a lot about my point is just that simple thing. Regulating is damn difficult.

A lot of law, okay, jurisprudence is about distilling principles, which, you know, which are supposed to guide a policy or a decision. So that's what it was, principle of natural justice or principle, those kind of principles are things which are distorted. Now it's incredibly difficult to distill any kind of things into, you know, for, in the case of big tech companies, because there are things that the human species is not encountered with. And that makes it very difficult because you're there's a huge aspect of philosophy as well.

So what, what, when you take a very, very meta decision, I mean, meta is in meta and yeah, small and you have to sort of resort to things like philosophy and ethics and whatnot. And then that, that opens a different kind of being altogether. And as far as the big tech is concerned, it's literally too complicated and complex to, you know, even the. I think the, the, like most famous quote from Eric Schmidt quite a while back was the internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand the largest experiment in anarchy that we've ever had.

So it's always meant to be that way. One person I wish where around for all of this is actually Douglas at it. I was also saying on tech are actually much, much more profound and like missionary that I would say. And he just understood everything like very intuitively much before, you know, basically people got onto it.

Like I think, uh, Jack on your reading group, you had posted one thing about the first sort of digital advertising when they spoke about what I get. Yeah. And we are going to interrupt this little conversation on big tech because we need to take a break right now. So I'm going to break up this interview and the other side nicely done.

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Just to put another point also, I was just thinking back about the point that you made about the whole interoperability aspect of say, a messaging app and how that interoperability will work. I think the other aspect of big tech that we have gotten with me to understand is that I think at this point, any kind of regulation that would come into tech would be extremely technical and highly detailed and would require a lot of boxes to be ticked. And at this point, the only people capable of following all these regulations without losing massive revenue or even taking it and losing the revenue is the big, big force. Absolutely.

Right. So in that context, and like you were talking about that German app or any other apps that would be there, this any kind of regulation that would be looking to break them up, we end up making them stronger. Yeah, absolutely. I was about, yeah.

In fact, they say that email is the most democratic or the ideal standard because, hey, you can have a account on Gmail and you can mail me on my say, what may look like, what is it? What is it? Like the standard 90% of all mail is owned or in that sense, by three companies, Gmail is also different. And that's a great point.

All these big tech players, they actually want regulation in some way because that's going to actually entrench their own position. Facebook has been running ads for a while now that says, welcome regulation. And it's also a development purpose, right? One, it's kind of like builds a mode for them and it also whitewashes to some extent.

One point of concrete. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. No, I think one of the ways in which we've seen interoperability work out to some extent is the early days of Twitter when you didn't need to use Twitter or the website. Yeah.

Yeah, when you think about you and all that stuff, yeah. So then the, so you can pick Twitter for the network, but you pick the specific app for the features or whatever. And to be honest, I don't know why they died out, but they did. So I mean, I mean, it died out purely because Twitter killed API access to a lot of them because they couldn't because a lot of them were able to monetize or they could monetize it and be able to filter out the ads, which are now like everywhere between every five weeks.

Yeah. So yeah, so I've been thinking about this. So do we then say regulation should be one's platform reaches a certain threshold that is just given a lot of money and then it becomes a standard rather than a privately held company that has a generic profits would that have solved the problem? Because I know what you're talking about at least those glorious old days of one person using Echo phone and the other person using Twitter.

The magnificent that was the magnificent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Which is what I mean, that's what also, I mean, it's almost referencing that point that I made earlier about that thing. It's almost like, you know, after a point, everybody needs that common set of governing rules like net neutrality as far as physical internet is concerned. Yeah. And then you need to follow that.

You need to follow that. This is how it will work. Similarly, like say, for example, if you are a large player and like you said, you process a certain threshold to become a large enough player of sorts, you need to follow a certain set of governing principles of how you provide your service to your users. So but then again, I mean, that's where that is regulation and that gets that, I mean, framing it in a way that cannot be gained by the big tech companies is what is.

It's a massive challenge, right? Scott, I always often fond of saying that Amazon has more lobbyists in Washington than Washington has employees. But yeah, you can send the amount of these guys spend on government lobbying, complicating all of this, like everything I've spoken about, like we hardly have any ideal solution for one country. Now imagine that all these are actually global companies.

So how do you have one regulation that spans all countries or do you have different regulations for different countries? The thing that you spoke about, Artoni, Ashikai, I forgot the Australian example. Now you have, look at the complications. You have, okay, what, how is media regulated in that particular geography?

How is technology regulated in that particular geography? Now look at all the levers over here. You have culture, you have censorship, you have media laws, you have technology laws, you have online laws and passing orders together, Sakaper gets probably saying, I just wanted to rank hot women. How do I just happen?

Yeah, well, yeah, that's what, I mean, it does become even more complicated because, I mean, fundamentally, and that's what the world has been dealing with for the past three decades, is that while laws and rules and regulations are geographically inclined, the internet is not, the internet is not geographically dominated. And the greatest example of it is like something like the Pirate Bay, right? The Pirate Bay, which is the grand old torrent website, which started off as this global website based in the US, then went into a safe haven and now just bounces off mirrors of any country that allows for it and then moves on to another country, which absolutely makes a mockery of any kind of physical laws that you can set anywhere. And so that's where the entire thing needs to be, and that's where I think it's almost like the Kyoto treaty or some kind of major global treaties that need to be treaties that go around about the internet, where I don't think any, there is any treaty that is global that has any kind of agreement about how the internet needs to be regulated.

And that is a country, a country hello English, trick or treaty. Trick or treaty. Yeah, so yeah, go ahead. No, so my basic point is, I mean, all respect to bureaucrats and journalists and all of that, but there is this thing called the gel man amnesia effect rate, which basically says that the more you know about something, the more you realize what crap people write about it in newspapers, right?

This is like, I mean, you'll give everything else. Yeah, you'll give everything else. But like the report on Facebook is so skewed and so bad, it's awful, right? And like as two things as a digital marketing professional, I know how Facebook has been beneficial for the community as a whole.

How does that out the fact of agencies, how it's basically made sure that even if you're a small business, you have a chance to start marketing. And secondly, like just the reporting is so bad. Like for instance, Facebook and it's sort of annual report or whatever had this thing where you're supposed to provide future risks to shareholders as commentary, right? In which it had written that one of the risks that it seems that can disrupt your business and future, which is a guidance that you're supposed to give your shareholders is that if European laws become very strict and does not allow for transfer of data from Europe to the US, it might need to a stage where we need to pull out a Europe.

It's been put as a risk in some form of the number in the next day, all newspapers. Facebook says it will pull out of Europe. Europe says thank you. This was on for 20 days.

Okay. And I'm like, why? Like this, this one read the original source document. No, Facebook is not saying it's not going to pull out of Europe.

It's saying it is a risk that if regulation happens, then we might need to pull out of Europe. So that's the major problem. Yeah. Yeah.

And mainstream media in turn then influences these lawmakers because they're like, oh, this is a popular thing that I can pick on. This was the most stark during COVID, right? Mainstream media did a lot of panic mongering according to me. A lot of unnecessary panic, my education India and probably all over the world.

And they would greatly exaggerate risk and affect policies and affect people's behavior. In a lot of countries, people scrambled for hospitals and things like that under the mistaken assumption that they were going to die. Yeah. Yeah.

They somehow got the impression that if you get COVID, death is 100% certain. Yeah, like 0.5%. That's where I was actually telling you the point that you made, which was extremely important to know is that what also is true of the internet and the world that is linked to it is that this frightful information asymmetry, right? Like there are people who are, so there are people of the cutting edge of the blockchain who are envisioning worlds that there is the other end of the world that are still thinking of internet as a connection or series of pipes, right?

Like they're like, oh, this is like interconnected very, very, I mean, there is a world that thinks they can control what will go on the internet by banning a few sites, right? So that information asymmetry currently versus what the average knowledge of the internet and its systems and what governs it in the mainstream versus where the actual knowledge of internet is varying by the day is actually is actually going is already causing issues, but it's also like probably the forebearer of what is going to be the differentiator for the haves that have not seen the future, right? Yeah. Like this, I mean, this goes even beyond just like normal education.

Like if you were to see like being knowledgeable about something and being illiterate, the gulf between someone who knows about like say blockchain technology in detail versus someone who doesn't understand internet very well is even more deeper beyond that point. So yeah, that gulf is what is the biggest, it's almost like the biggest flash point for the future in some way. Yeah, but there are two parts, right? One, you're absolutely right.

There is huge information asymmetry. That's what why the agencies are getting plump on one side and obviously why journalism is bad on the other side. And the point is you're always going to play catch up in this case, right? We just to say that let's say you regulate this big tech today, it doesn't work like a COVID vaccine where now we've identified it and in future no big kind of situation will occur, right?

It will again happen 10, 15 years later with blockchain and whatever else meta was whatever it is and then the lawmakers will again be playing catch up. And to me, that is the most frustrating part, right? It's not like you learned a lesson for the future and you're going to fix something. It's just that it is a popular thing to beat on right now.

So I'll do it because it gets me in some popular mode, which is why I'm so blatantly mistrusting of the whole. Yeah, because it's a big company. Clearly, I mean, this technology across the board is this many headed mutating beast, right? It's not even like, okay, there is a single authority responsible for mutating it or anything like it's just mutating in every different front and you don't know like even the person who's most who's probably extremely knowledgeable in one area, any entirely ignorant of the other end of the spectrum, which really impacts their life and like you and coming back to the original point with that, it's that it's totally the invention that we made that we do not understand and it also looks by design in the way that there is no way at any point any single person or group of people can ever understand the internet fully.

Yeah, and to Tony's point, I think that like if there is regulation just because of the nature of if there is some perfect regulation that covers all the big tech players today, because of the nature of the internet, it will be a company and there will be a business model that manages to find their way around this and start on something that's completely legal, which somehow works around this entire thing and then what do you do? Update regulations every year. Again, no rights, no wrongs anywhere. It's just how complicated is the entire thing.

Yeah. I just remembered our episode with Satan, where he said, you know, there's a meta to every board game, which is basically like, you know, the best way to play it or the one that wins out. Yeah. I think the meta to the internet world might be meta itself.

So the one, I mean, we can go on talking about this and we will, about the one prediction that I have, which I also mentioned that you said is I think that somehow these companies are going to try and diversify into other streams of revenue as quickly as possible. That's mostly alphabet and meta that I'm talking about because for them, both of them are over 90% of their respective revenues still comes from one source and we've seen how susceptible that is to be taken away. Apple, for instance, they just added one message on their screen saying, Hey, do you want more privacy and boom that immediately affected that immediately affected. Again, not saying, saying whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it happened.

And these, no, I think that is a fundamentally good thing. I mean, maybe for now again, let's not give up whether that's putting up at the point being that these things can be taken away very quickly. So I wouldn't be surprised, for example, if these platforms start trying to diversify in various other ways. I think Amazon's very well placed in that respect.

It's got massive amounts of revenue coming in from three different sources, which is advertising, which is of course their retail and then which is AWS and very soon they will start getting into things like health and I'm very sure that their own devices like Kindle and Alexa are multi-billion dollar businesses by themselves. Apple, to some extent, already has that. And what's very heartening for Apple is that their services is taking up greatly and they've been recently talking about a hardware subscription as well. And if they ever decide to launch a car, then that's obviously going to be it.

So I wouldn't be surprised if more players are going to do this because one thing I've sort of noticed over the years is these companies sort of anticipate and they self-regulate before regulation happens. Apple was not ordered to have more privacy, just did that. And of course, the second thing is that it is very self-serving for many of these companies to actually put out these tons. It's great for Apple to say, oh, we are doing this for the privacy of the users and all that, but at the end of the day, it's a huge marketing tool for them as well.

Similarly, when that happened, the fallout was Facebook obviously would have a hammer blow to the head and it took out full-page ads that said, oh, small businesses are going to suffer because this is true to some extent, but it sort of seemed like they were trying to, that they were like, really? Like, is that really your number one concern? Yeah, I mean, this is the equivalent of where there is a grassroot football getting developed in the Yuki on the other side. And that grassroot football is being funded by oil money and by slave labor in China.

So it's also integrated. It's so integrated that you can't really, you can't really, you put it in one strand, you can do fantastic PR with it, but there's also some really early stuff behind it. So that's where, which is what is the scary part of tech right now is there are these really, really powerful forces that determine our future that are currently being, that is basically a bunch of frat kids who are running around with decursful of secret stuff that the moment they drop will change the world on an instant because, again, the example that you said about the Apple privacy thing, Apple just decided to pay a specific position on a specific thing, which may well have come from a tech solution or a certain engineer thinking one way, right? That there is no movement, it's so concentrated right now that a couple of engineers or a group of engineers or a single meeting can determine the fate of how humankind will be over the next decade or so.

It's crazy to think that. It's crazy to think that. It's crazy to think that. Yeah.

Yeah. So just a slight, you know, sort of, I think it's already happening, but also a slight prediction and why I bought stock in meta after the Apple privacy thing is that basically Facebook's initial years for advertising were hard, right? Like we needed to convince people that you can advertise on Facebook. Now that has already happened.

Now, even if your privacy thing kicks in, what's going to happen is that your attribution and targeting gets reduced to a certain level. Yeah. But then as a marketer, I'm looking at, okay, now this has been taken away by Apple, which is the channel which will give me the best returns and the best targeting, right? And inevitably it's still going to be Facebook.

Yeah. Which means you'll see probably a dip in advertising on Facebook. Yeah. Yeah.

And then you'll see like 10 years from now. Plus the other debts in there, other, you know, they've basically rebranded it. Yeah. Yeah.

So like a prediction then from my side will actually be, I have a feeling they're going to see paid services coming from people who we never thought paid services would be launched by I would not be so proud. And I'm actually still shocked that they haven't done this that Google will actually offer sort of like a paid service to some users who actually want it right now. The only paid service that many of us might actually be using is when our Gmail runs out and we have to buy that extra storage. And that's only because now we have reached a point where it's become cumbersome for us to sit and search for and delete a heavy attachment, something that we wouldn't have done.

We probably would have done as broke college students. I think you're going to see them trying to get out more money from people who are willing to pay more money for say better email management or a concierge service or something. I think that's something that could very easily happen. Like Twitter and I'm splans to do that.

For example, make a. I was just been listening to. So I've got a, I've been listening to post Corona. That's what I love with the most Corona.

And I mean, his perspective, all of these new services, from his perspective, Amazon is the one who's the best place to kind of take all of this stuff on because I mean, they are like, I mean, Apple is just like Apple and Amazon are fighting for that, but they're like the next billion dollars in market cap is definitely a billion dollars in market cap. Definitely belongs to Amazon because of their, their, their, their entrenchment behind the scenes with AWS and that AWS animal, even if it, even if it breaks off its own company in any kind of like, it's going to be huge and it's going to be so intertwined with everything else that it's, it's, it's almost like a chain reaction that's bigger than that nobody can stop. Yeah. You know, one thing that interests me about this whole thing and okay, this is going to be a, we've actually spoken about this for a long time.

So it's going to be my last point. I was like, you know, we can, if you get the four of us into a room and say the word big tech, then we can go on talking for 24 hours. Can you be sure I'm glad at some point of time. No, but not big tech.

One, one very interesting thing about what's happening right now is that all of these, they're not colluding with each other in any way. They're like, they're all in the trenches together, but they're all fighting each other because what's happened over the last few years is that they've all increasingly started getting in on each other's toes. Google is making hardware. Apple actively wants Google not to be its default search engine and is working on privacy focused search engine of its own.

Facebook is trying to get into hardware. If Apple comes up with something else, Amazon is getting into parts of Google shopping. Google shopping is still a thing and it wants to be the best destination for shopping. And there are so many intertwined things, right?

Amazon's advertising revenue has grown at the expense of Google, all these sort of things. It's very interesting to see. And for people like us who like observing the second and third of the effects, okay, Apple's Facebook's taken away privacy. Now, what all has, sorry, Apple has taken away privacy and apart from the temporary dip in stock price of Facebook, what further ramifications will that have?

What will that talk, how will creative messages in the future change? How will this impact say the advertising that happens on Amazon? So all these dominoes are pretty interesting too. Because to me, that's one thing that's very interesting about this face.

So whenever there is headlight, like, big tech is being summoned to Washington. It's not like all four of them are joining hands and like, they're all bitching about each other behind each other's back because all of them hate each other's guts as well. So that's one thing that's very interesting to me this time. It's not like big oil is in it together.

It's not that way. You're the best, best fallout of this whole privacy thing. And the headlight you never thought would happen is that Mozilla and Meta are now actually working together to get into the privacy realm. So it's probably going to be.

And that's the idea. I almost find it common analogy in some ways with the current big tech competition and like that's happening is almost like the colonial powers having a scramble for Africa. Right? Yeah.

That entire thing was Africa was this big unknown continent and they discovered all of these riches and the same and they were the natives were completely unaware. And these guys were like, you know what, we're going to take all of this over as quickly as possible because who were they like they say, maybe Joja, Berd, right? So the point is these guys have understood that like at this point before the entire awareness of what the internet can be and what these different assets can be comes into the mainstream focus. These guys have the awareness of it.

And so that's where they are trying to occupy these positions like Apple is taken upon fear privacy. Facebook is trying to fight it before this privacy stuff becomes standard. Different guys are trying to scramble for different parts of the internet before like there is a certain point of no return that gets passed and then they can kind of squat on the area that they are in and different that. Yeah.

And also, yeah, it's scary to think that the internet hasn't been fully built yet and for only we might just be on the cost, early days of the internet in some sense. So pretty much. Yeah. Oh, I think this was extremely wide ranging.

So what have we learned? What have we learned? Oh my. One, this one entire thing is complicated.

Two, Tony has met us. I think that has been reasonably well established. And we believe that as a disclaimer now, even if it has nothing to do with Facebook. Yeah, we should also record like we've already done an episode of the Sri Lankan crisis and how we need to give Tony's disclaimer.

And we have also learned that Narain is so wise because unlike the rest of us, he has gained knowledge through oral traditions that have been asked. Yeah, fantastic. I think simplified is an oral tradition and I think it should be faster. Wow.

I did not think that is that profound but given your reaction, I think it should actually give that some of you should be able to have you finally found out that simplified is an oral tradition. Yeah. Excellent. Wow.

So we have no conclusion. No, no, no, no, nothing to conclude. I think just as the big big four we all, we are the big four. Yeah, yeah.

The only conclusion. Yeah, the only conclusion. Okay. Good.

Good. So just two things. One, if you want that photo of me with the guitar on top of my colleagues, then just ping us and let us know. And two, of course, is Narain sign off.

Yeah. So the only takeaway from this whole thing is stay safe, stay oral and stay. I hope not the way about the secular right now.