 "Weekend Bites: Google, Sebi, fraud accounts, and a new Space Odyssey")
Welcome to Weekend Bites. The markets regulator went into overdrive this week, India finally announced its trade policy, there was a rethink on fraud bank accounts, and old fears related to artificial intelligence resonated among boundary-pushers. But first up comes Google. Tuck in!
Story of the week: Google’s search for succour
It is a search that is not throwing up all the desired results for Google. On Wednesday, the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal upheld the Competition Commission of India’s penalty of Rs 1,338 crore on the search giant for misusing its dominant position in Android mobile devices.
However, in a bit of relief to Google, the NCLAT reversed four directives that could have led to uninstalling of pre-installed apps on Android devices and set aside the CCI’s directives that would have forced Google to allow individual app store developers to distribute their stuff through Google Play Store.
Google vs CCI is a saga that has been running for a while, with both sides taking tough positions ever so often. Google, for instance, has said the CCI's orders can strike a blow at digital adoption in India.
The competition watchdog, for its part, was reported as saying that Google had used its money-spinning search engine as the castle and the rest of the other apps to play the defensive role of moat, and that this “castle and moat” strategy was nothing but data hegemony, which meant a big market player would get bigger and bigger while a small entrant struggled to attain a critical mass of users and user data. The CCI went to the extent of saying that companies that did not sign Google’s contracts to use Android and developed their own version of the operating system became extinct.
In other news…
Sebi, the stock markets regulator, approved far-reaching changes in the governance of mutual funds, brokerages, and alternative investment funds, including the creation of a Rs 33,000 crore backstop facility for debt MFs to prevent contagion from a market dislocation event. It extended the deadline for updating the “choice of nomination” by existing investors holding trading and demat accounts to September 30 from March 31. And it rectified the penalty on Samir Jain, vice-chairman and managing director of Bennett, Coleman & Co, which owns The Times of India and The Economic Times, his wife Meera, and four others to Rs 20 lakh from Rs 1 crore in a matter of violation of minimum public shareholding norms in PNB Finance and Industries.
The Supreme Court said borrowers should be allowed to be heard before a bank declared their account “fraudulent”. The Reserve Bank of India had issued a master circular in 2016 that allowed banks to classify accounts of wilful defaulters as fraudulent without hearing them.
India unveiled its much-anticipated foreign trade policy on Friday with the objective of raising the country's outward shipments to $2 trillion by 2030.
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Tech that: Word from the world of technology and start-ups
Reports say OYO is reducing the shares it aims to sell in a stock market debut by about two-thirds, an effort by its founder to get the sale done even after tech valuations plunged. Earlier this year, Sebi had asked Oravel Stays Ltd, OYO’s parent, to refile the draft IPO papers with updates.
In more bad news coming out of EdTech, Unacademy announced another round of job cuts — the fourth in the last one year — trimming 12 per cent of its workforce, or 380 employees, in its bid to “meet the goals in current realities".
Watch it: From our hot audio-visual serving
Today is the beginning of a new financial year, with which a new personal finance regime will dawn on us. The bevy of tax changes announced in this year’s budget kick in today. The default tax regime has changed and taxation of mutual funds and market-linked debentures has changed as well. Brace up for it with The Morning Show.
What is Suveen obsessing over these days?
It is 55 years since HAL 9000, a computer with a human-like personality, developed a mind of its own and tried to kill the crew aboard a spacecraft bound for Jupiter. That was in Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Last June, Blake Lemoine became famous. He was in Google’s Responsible AI organization and part of tests to see if artificial intelligence used discriminatory or hate speech. He made headlines for his claim that during an interface with LaMDA, Google’s AI chatbot generator, during which Lemoine was typing about religion, he found the chatbot talking about its rights. He reported other, probably more intense, chats with the chatbot and presented what he thought was “evidence” that LaMDA was sentient. He thought the technology was amazing.
For his troubles, he was first placed on administrative leave for violating Google’s confidentiality code. Later, his services were terminated.
This week, 1,100 people in the global technology industry signed a petition calling for labs to stop training powerful AI systems for at least six months to allow for the development of shared safety protocols.
The call comes in the wake of AI projects in the recent months that do a good job of imitating human work – some say better – in tasks such as writing emails and articles. “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” said the open letter published on the Future of Life Institute website.
The signatories to the letter include Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, both of them known pushers of technological boundaries.
Make of it what you will.
Have a fun weekend and a productive week ahead. This is Suveen Sinha, Chief Content Editor, Business Standard, signing off. See you next Saturday. Please send comments, news, or views about anything – be it fraud accounts or murderous robots -- to suveen.sinha@bsmail.in.