Regulators need to stop influencers who may be acting for bad players. A classic case is banks cross selling products and fooling consumers with all kinds of impulse purchase offers. 90% if the golf card holders of the private banks have never played golf nor do they know how to. Airport lounges are sold as a freebie when in practice each visit to a Rs 450 meal at an airport sets the card holder back by at least Rs 4500 in interest loss. Insurance products are top of the charts on fooling people to invest in schemes which give almost nil return – with income tax exemptions being used as a hook.
A RBI approved bank is uniquely positioned to fool people. Since they have the hard earned money of the middle class, they intimidate them saying RBI has mandated all kinds of things which have not been mandated.
This culture of intimidating your core supplier of raw material has led to things like digital arrest which is now a Rs 10,000 crore industry exporting all its proceeds.
Google promoted YouTube channel is happy to allow anyone to host content in any subject provided they can get some advertising revenue in it. Human attention is being sold by barter evading taxes. Google claims that human attention is not a saleable or purchasable service because it has no hook for value. This is not true. The price of a premium you tube account is the value being paid for the attention of a “free” user. When aggregated, these are very large numbers.
Whilst we have an elaborate transfer pricing mechanism for small time GCC work, the big tech players go Scot free. No judge dare pass an order against big tech, no tax department can dare to raise a demand. And the government wrongly believes that they will be a source of investment and jobs.
It is because of these unregulated “free” services backed by multi billion dollar development budgets that our Indian companies are not able to compete – allowing the malafide overseas companies to become cartelised monopolies.
The first step to preventing foreign monopolies is to ban them. In very little time, Indian competitors will emerge.
The e-commerce space is even more challenging. fDI rules do not allow multi brand retail. Amazon claims it is a marketplace and not a retailer. Similarly google pay claimed it didn’t neee a new payments license. Nothing can be farther than the truth.
The same story is playing out for influencers. China has mandated that only qualified experts can give advice on social media. And they don’t have Google.
One NRI with an engineering education had achieved a guru-like cult following promoting absolute nonsense like low protein diets as a pathway to lose weight. He proposed one diet for all – irrespective of gut biome build up or native diet. He was just a WhatsApp wonder.
The end result was that people started losing mobility. Some died. The guru is an educated good engineer.
But he is not a doctor.
So even WhatsApp groups have to be regulated.
