In June 2021, Google and BYJU’s announced a partnership to provide education services in India. By offering education content gratis and supporting “personalised learning,” Google and BYJU’s see themselves as facilitating the transition from the traditional brick-and-mortar classroom to a virtual learning space, potentially benefiting millions of Indian students during and beyond the pandemic. Examining the implications of this tie-up, in the context of commercialisation of education and the increasing concentration of power with monopolistic corporations, it is argued that private platforms in the unregulated edtech sector are incentivised to prioritise growth above all else and their programmes are sharply opposed to the socially transformative aims of education.
A set of draft rules released by the Cyberspace Administration of China, to regulate algorithm-empowered recommendation activities on the internet, are congruent with the demands made by civil societies worldwide and more substantive than the actions proposed or taken by the governments in western liberal democracies.
The economic power wielded by tech giants has been aided and abetted by the lax enforcement of antitrust regulations by the United States. It has allowed them to create an almost impassable moat around their businesses, while being able to bully, browbeat, and buy out any competitors who look remotely threatening. Calls by politicians to break up these tech giants are more than timely and need to be taken seriously by regulators across the world.
The thought process of major competition authorities across the globe and their response to Google’s conduct in terms of manipulating its search engine is traced in this article.
