Number One Rogue Technology
Monopoly proserve providers
Can slow down Indian progress.
The biggest risk for a viksit Bharat are cartelised monopolies with a stranglehold on the customer. One such cartel which affects almost every single Indian is the proserve lock on smartphones.
Proserves are products bundled with services where one cannot be separated from the other. The most glaring example is the iOS ecosystem of Apple. You cannot use their products without availing of their service. And you can’t avail of their service without buying their products. The products are over priced, unregulated and pretty much out of control.
They can bring millions of smartphones to death by just switching off their service. With no option for the poor subscriber to go anywhere. By controlling both the product and service, they can force you to upgrade your hardware by just doing a few rogue acts which they have perfected by now.
Then you prevent the second hand smartphones from coming to the market by doing two things. First you prevent a buyer from using most apps (all of which were working perfectly fine till you signed out). Second you offer a buyback under the garb of sustainability. Apples con job is to explain that they buy back the handsets to recycle valuable materials in the device. Nothing can be further from the truth. Extending the lifespan of devices is the most responsible behaviour for sustainability.
Google pixel is no better. And now even the Chinese are catching up with proprietary versions of android OS. All this does not go to good places. The American OS players could collectively act to kill all smartphones instantly. Even governments can only shut down networks but not the phones.
It is imperative that suitable orders be passed to ensure that an indian operating system like cyberkyro can be loaded onto any hardware approved to be sold in India. In technical parlance it is called “jail breaking a device”. There is no technical problem in doing it. We have every single model of iPhone, iPad and MacBook jail broken in the cyberkyro labs. Ditto for all Google or windows devices. To be fair, Microsoft is playing it more fair than the other big tech are. They realise that you cannot fool all the people all the time and it is thus bad business to fool all people for some of the time.
Apple and Google think otherwise. Remember these are the two companies struggling to be relevant in the ai age. It is almost a foregone conclusion that niether is going to lead. This is going to make them desperate. And that desperation will manifest in malpractices. Not letting old devices work properly is the least of them. In the event of war or pandemic, they can extort from each subscriber. What is worse is the risk of they getting cyber attacked. It is one thing for Apple and Google to have access to all your data but something else to have the underworld accessing it. Or selling it.
Ai brings new threats.
Proserve cartels are the biggest.