Homecoming for Big Tech Boys

Also in today's edition: Think like Yoshua Bengio, Objection, Milord & AI is Recession Proof

The FDI press note 2, released in December 2018, put the likes of Flipkart and Amazon in a quandary. According to the new FDI policy, a B2C e-commerce marketplace shall not have control over inventory. It further plugged loopholes by limiting the percentage of sales to not more than 25% of such vendors from the marketplace entity or group companies.

A year later, in January 2020, Jeff Bezos landed unannounced in India and made some big investment announcements. But the government was not impressed. This became evident when Bezos failed to bag a one-on-one with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. 

Just two days prior to Bezos’ visit, India’s antitrust regulator had launched a formal investigation into the practices of Amazon and rival Flipkart.