Which way will it go?

"The 2018 Union budget, for the first time, mentioned an intent to tax digital businesses by modifying Section 9 of the Income Tax Act," wrote V Dalmia and S Mehra. Companies like Facebook and Google offer free service, prompting J Lanchester to write that "if the product is free you are the product". "For example, anyone using Facebook is working for it. In 2014, The New York Times found that users collectively spent 39,757 years on the site, every single day, at the time. This was 'almost fifteen million years of free labour per year'," With over 450 million internet users, India has become "data rich before it has become economically rich". Speaking at the India Mobile Congress, Mukesh Ambani, India's richest man, said that "data is the new oil and India does not need to import it". The authors feel that foreigners are looting us. "Raw material (data) is extracted without payment from a source country (say, India) and then processed offshore and sold back as finished products (targeted advertisements) back to the source country. This sounds strikingly similar to the operations of the erstwhile East India company." Providing free services by technology companies is a form of "digital colonialism", wrote M Choudhary and E Moglen. They recommend competition by Indian companies. Data is not the new oil because there is too much of it and it will never run out, wrote A Schlosser. New regulations to control tech companies may actually be an advantage to Facebook because startups may not be able to build a huge user database like Facebook already has. Facebook has 2 billion users whereas the total population of Canada is only 36 million so it will be difficult for Canada to regulate the company when most of its database is outside, wrote R Pringle. Technology has turned nation states into Gods, wrote D Pattanaik. The government gets to know everything about us while restricting our access to information about what it is doing. The US wants details of previous phone numbers, email addresses and social media histories from every visa applicant. Our government argued in front of the Supreme Court that there needs to be privacy on social media while submitting that Indians have no right to privacy. Even better, seems that the US and Indian governments are going to share data which means we will be naked in front of the whole world. Governments across the world are legislating severe punishment for fake news, probably because a camera in every cell phone means that they cannot lie anymore. When farmers were shot to death during a peaceful protest in Madhya Pradesh the Home Minister of the state said that police did not fire on the protesters, probably implying that protesters had been responsible. Technology is here. Whether it will liberate us or be used for mind control remains to be seen. 1984 could yet happen.