China over the past years developed an alternate online truth where Google and Facebook barely exist. Now its own biggest tech corporations from
Alibaba Group
Holding Ltd. to Tencent Holdings Ltd. are getting a taste of what a nothing seems like.
India’s unmatched choice to restriction 59 of China’s largest apps is a cautioning to the country’s tech giants, who for many years prospered behind a government-imposed Excellent Firewall program that stayed out much of America’s best-known internet names. If India finds a method to carry out that hazard, it might present a model for other countries from Europe to Southeast Asia that seek to reduce the pervasiveness of apps like ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok while securing their people’ enormously valuable information.
The surprise moratorium hit Chinese internet business simply as they were starting to advance worldwide’s fastest-growing mobile arena, en path to going international and difficult American tech market supremacy. TikTok had registered 200 million users there, Xiaomi Corp. is the No. 1 mobile phone brand name, and Alibaba and Tencent have strongly pushed their services.
But India’s policy endangers all those successes, and could have wider geopolitical effects as the United States looks for to rally countries to stop using Huawei Technologies Co. f