Over the past decade, China has built an alternative online reality where Google and Facebook barely exist. Now their own tech corporations, from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to Tencent Holdings Ltd., are testing what a shutdown feels like.
India's unprecedented decision to ban 59 of China's largest apps is a warning to the country's tech giants, which for years thrived behind a government-imposed Great Firewall that kept out many of the Internet's names.
America's best known. If India finds a way to carry out that threat, it can present a model for other countries, from Europe to Southeast Asia, seeking to reduce the pervasiveness of apps like TikTok from ByteDance Ltd., while safeguarding valuable data from its citizens.
The surprise moratorium hit Chinese internet companies just as they began to move forward in the world's fastest growing mobile arena, on the road to globalization and challenging the supremacy of the American tech industry. TikTok had registered 200 million users there, Xiaomi Corp. is the number one smartphone brand, and Alibaba and Tencent have aggressively promoted their services.
But India's policy jeopardizes all of those successes and could have broader geopolitical consequences as the United States seeks to bring countries together to stop using Huawei Technologies Co. for 5G networks.
With China's tech companies on the verge of becoming some of the most dominant in emerging industries such as artificial intelligence, India's actions may spur countries around the world to weigh the extent to which they allow China to collect data. of users, and potentially economic leverage in future disputes.
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