Ola Founder Takes on Big Tech Bullying

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Ola Founder further said that he will work with the Indian developer community to build a digital public infrastructure (DPI) social media framework….reports Asian Lite News

In a hard-hitting post, Ola Founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal on Saturday said that Big Tech platforms like LinkedIn will bully Indians into agreeing with them or cancel them out and if they can do this to him, “I’m sure the average user stands no chance”.

After a sour experience with Microsoft-owned LinkedIn which deleted his posts where he shared his thoughts on “gender pronouns”, Aggarwal took on the professional networking platform.

“Clearly, Linkedin has presumed Indians need to have pronouns in our life, and that we can’t criticise it,” he wrote on a blog post.

“They will bully us into agreeing with them or cancel us out. And if they can do this to me, I’m sure the average user stands no chance.”

He further said that he will work with the Indian developer community to build a digital public infrastructure (DPI) social media framework.

“DPIs like UPI, ONDC, Aadhaar etc., are uniquely Indian ideas and are even more needed in the world of social media. The only ‘community guidelines’ should be the Indian law. No corporate person should be able to decide what will be banned,” said Ola CEO.

Ola has one of the largest ‘women only’ automotive plants.

“Regarding gender inclusivity, we don’t need lectures from Western companies on how to be inclusive. Our culture didn’t need pronouns to be inclusive for thousands of years,” he noted.

He pitched about the need to build homegrown Indian tech platforms.

“I’m not against global tech companies. But as an Indian citizen, I feel concerned that my life will be governed by western Big Tech monopolies, and we will be culturally subsumed,” said Aggarwal.

Taking on Satya Nadella-run Microsoft after a frustrated experience with LinkedIn, Ola Founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal on Saturday announced to leave the tech giant’s Azure cloud services and move the entire workload of his company to his own artificial intelligence (AI) venture Krutrim.

The decision came after Aggarwal slammed the Microsoft-owned professional network LinkedIn for deleting his posts without notifying him.

“Since LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and Ola is a big customer of Azure, we’ve decided to move our entire workload out of Azure to our own Krutrim cloud within the next week,” he said in a blog post.

“It is a challenge as all developers know, but my team is so charged up about doing this,” the Ola CEO added.

Aggarwal also told developers who want to move out of Microsoft’s Azure cloud to offer them “a full year worth of free cloud usage, “as long as you don’t go back to Azure after that”.

He had criticised LinkedIn, saying their AI tool was imposing a political ideology on Indian users which is unsafe and sinister.

There was no immediate word from either Microsoft or LinkedIn on Aggarwal’s announcement to drop Azure Cloud for his own Krutrim cloud.

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