The future of the internet

In the late 1990s, I moved from Delhi to Stanford for a master’s degree in computer science. Getting off the plane in San Francisco, I was ecstatic about the amazing computing power, lightning-fast internet and easy access to knowledge available at an American university. Back home, most people across Asia could only get online at an internet café or over dial-up modems, and internet speeds weren’t great. Computing power was still a luxury.

Today more than three billion people, more than half of them in Asia, own smartphones. But despite this shift, many of us in the tech industry often find ourselves stuck in a previous way of thinking, where we assume that ‘computing’ is something that starts with the privileged few in places like the Silicon Valley and trickles down slowly to everyone else. This isn’t just an old idea, but one that has become completely wrong.

The future of the internet is in the hands of the next billion users — the latest generation of internet users to come online on smartphones in places like Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. As time goes on, the average internet user will be more like these ‘next billion users’ than the first billion who started on PCs. That means we need to look to places like Karachi and Dhaka to truly understand where the internet is going.

The NBUs are already changing the internet in three key ways: a mobile-only mindset, an instinct for ubiquitous computing and a demand for localised content.

First, let’s start with the mobile-only mindset. Most of the NBUs have never used a PC and may never use one. A computer for them is a smartphone, and it also doubles up as a television, a wallet, a classroom, and a portal for government services. Their expectations on how mobile apps should work is also completely different. When building our India-first, mobile payment app Tez, for example, we focused the app around ‘people and conversations’ rather than the financial features, to reflect familiarities with chat apps. All successful global apps in the future will need to speak the universal design language of people who grew up on mobile phones rather than PCs.

This brings me to the second point: ubiquitous computing. This means having natural interactions with a computer that can hear, see and understand — for example, asking “Do I need an umbrella today in Lahore?” rather than typing “Lahore weather forecast.”

Because the breakthroughs that make ubiquitous computing possible rely on cutting-edge work in artificial intelligence. We tend to think that advances will start in the most prosperous parts of the world and expand from there. But we’ve found with the Google Assistant, for example, that the next billion users adopt cutting-edge technology astonishingly quickly.

Which brings me to the third way the internet is changing: local languages. There are estimates that web content is more than 50% English. And in countries like India, the generation coming online now is more comfortable in their native language than in English, and so language can be a big blocker to expanding internet access.

You should not have to learn English to use the internet. The NBUs expect more content in their languages. And video is turning out to be the medium where they create and enjoy this content. YouTube has seen an explosion of non-English content. Going forward, we believe the demand for local content will reverse the language imbalance, leading to an internet more inclusive of the entire world’s language diversity.

For a long time, we talked of a ‘responsibility’ to make our technology work for the NBUs. But as the internet follows their lead, serving people in these locales has become necessary for companies that want to stay at the cutting edge of consumer innovation and the future. The next billion users are not becoming more like us. We are becoming more like them.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 17^th, 2018.

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