The Indian government will be ‘very careful’ about ensuring that the internet remains free and open in terms of competitive pressures, and is not dominated by big corporations, Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said at Meta’s (formerly Facebook) Fuel for India 2021 event on Wednesday.

       “Over time we have also realised that the internet like any other space also has its challenges that the bad creeps in along with the good. The government's point is that what we want is not just to connect a billion Indians, but that the internet should continue to be open,” the minister said.

       Chandrasekhar was responding to a question from Facebook India head Ajit Mohan on where technology companies in the private sector fit into the government’s vision of digitalising governance and services in the country.

       “We will be full tilt in partnerships with the private sector, companies such as yourself, other foreign companies, entrepreneurs. We will partner to expand the good like delivering access, equity and opportunity to every Indian… We also want to ensure that intermediaries or platforms such as Facebook deveop a culture of mutual respect and accountability with the users,” said Chandrasekhar.

       Big tech firms such as Facebook and Google have come under the radar of India’s competition watchdog, much like in Europe and the US, in the past couple of years.

       For instance, the Competition Commission of India sought to investigate this year whether a new privacy policy of Facebook-owned WhatsApp would lead to excessive data collection and "stalking" of consumers for targeted advertising to bring in more users and is therefore an alleged abuse of dominant position.

       Since 2019, there has been an ongoing probe by the CCI to determine if Google was abusing its dominant position to force app makers to exclusively use its billing system for in-app purchases and bundling the search giant’s payments app with Android smartphones sold in India.