The worldwide disruption to services of Google, especially outage of Gmail, on Thursday has exposed the vulnerability of clients and nations to any accident or possible monopolistic practice by tech giants.
So, the relevant Bangladesh minister states, the country should explore alternative platforms to get rid of excessive dependency and safeguard the national interest and ensure the privacy of people and security of national organisations.
“Yes, it’s better if we have a national platform/s. However, it would be a herculean task to build something like tech giant Google and it requires a well-planned project with huge investment,” Telecom and ICT Minister Mustafa Jabbar told The Financial Express on Friday.
Asked how far Bangladesh and clients were affected by the tech glitch, he said it created a huge disturbance to internet users and it shows “our massive dependence on such services”.
However, he felt, immediate solution to the problem lies with Google, the giant web platform which offers a variety of solutions apart from search engine and Gmail.
Services offered by Google-owned entities such as Gmail, Google Meet, Google Drive, and Google Docs came to a halt for around seven hours on Thursday Bangladesh time, affecting users in America, Europe and parts of Asia. Google later said in a statement that the problem has been resolved but did not mention what led to the outage.
In Bangladesh, according to complaints, Google clients could not access and transfer their data and some online activities were affected. The current pandemic has made such clients more dependent on platform companies for many of their day-to-day works.
Such dependence on extra-territorial platforms is not a good sign for any country, the minister admitted, saying, “Companies like Google and Facebook are here only to do business.
Mustafa Jabbar, also a former president of Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services (BASIS), underlined the importance of developing national capacity for securing safer information and communications technology services.
Citing the example of China, which created WeChat, a social media platform, and Baidu, the number one search engine in that country, the minister expressed his views that Bangladesh should have initiated steps a long time ago to create such platforms.
In recent years, concerns arose among the users and policymakers in different countries over possible data breaches by tech giants.
A December 2018 report said social network Facebook shared access to users' data with other tech firms, including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify and Yandex. Earlier in July, 2018, Google was fined a record $5 billion by the European Union for Android antitrust violations.