France was the first country to ask payments to its media firms for using their content. Australia followed suit. Google’s response is to point out the use of its search engine is free, and if it is forced to pay, such free use is at risk. It is too early to say whether Google will implement its threat, but there is a possibility that business model of tech firms may change — the way they operate may change. At the heart of all this is data dominance. By offering free services, firms earn by data gathered which allows them to offer superior advertisement services to their clients. In case of retail giants, the data may allow them to sell their own products by making use of data about the competitive products.

Governments expect these firms to share data and make the data public after suitably anonymising it. However, this is not easy. Data collected by the Government is easy to share relatively. However, a business firm cannot be asked to share data to benefit the competition. Even consumers would not like tech firms to share data with others, though they get free services from them. Consumers get ‘takeout’ to download their data while leaving and migrating to other services. Few use this. Government will have to encourage competition as these tech giants are known to stifle it.