It’s a marriage that is mutually beneficial to both partners and has tremendous growth potential. In a burgeoning digital and mobile centric market, Telecom players and social media platforms have come together to benefit the user, expecting the partnership to be the next big revenue driver. Research shows that social media platforms, online advertising and increasing Internet access speed would be the key revenue generators for the telecom sector and sure enough, the Indian Telecom Sector has been seen engaging with the leading social media platforms.
For Twitter India, this is not the first time when they have been involved in such an association with a telecom company. Earlier this year, Twitter India tied up with Reliance Communications allowing the Reliance GSM prepaid users in the country to get a free Twitter access.
Airtel was the first in the country to directly associate with social media when it partnered with Facebook to offer its users free access to Facebook for two months. Later they joined hands with Google to launch ‘free zone’ allowing users to use various Google services like Google plus and Gmail for free. However, the first page which was available to the users featured advertisements. At the same time, Airtel’s data segment’s revenue generation rose up to 6.5 per cent from 5.7 per cent in Q4 FY13.
During the launch of ‘Freezone’, Rajan Anandan, VP and Managing Director, Google India said, “The mobile Internet user base is growing really fast in India. Working with Airtel on this exciting trial means that we can offer Internet services at no cost to anyone with rtls. This gives people easier access to information in a way that benefits everyone, whether it’s an individual or a small business that wants to reach more people on the web. We hope this initiative will encourage more Indians to experience the value of the Internet and gain from it.”
On being asked about the objectives of Vodafone behind this association with Twitter, Vivek Mathur, Chief Commercial Officer, Vodafone India said, “Vodafone India has always been at the forefront of providing innovative and user friendly mobile internet experience for its customers in India. Our partnership with Twitter and this offering is yet another step in our ongoing endeavour to make mobile internet more fun, smart, engaging and easy.”
Twitter India’s Market Director, Rishi Jaitly, said, “As a real-time information network full of links, media, and content, our platform offers the mobile ecosystem novel ways to introduce their subscribers to all that Internet has to offer. We are pleased to partner with Vodafone India to offer its subscribers a unique opportunity to use Twitter to follow the people and organizations they care about. Whether it’s hearing the latest news, connecting with cricket stars in real time, or laughing at the day’s best jokes, Twitter brings Indians together and closer to our interests.”
This attempt, however modest it may sound is far from just being a step to promote data usage. Mobile based data market is still in an evolution stage and it will take another two to three years before it could overtake the voice services offered by telecom service providers. As of now, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are reaching out to the Indian mobile user base only to lure the telecom brands and the end users, and using the association as a marketing tool.
According to the UN watchdog, Paulo Pinheiro, speaking in the General Assembly on 29 July, Syria is in free fall: 100,000 dead; refugees and displaced persons in the millions; atrocities of every kind; no end to the fighting in sight. Both Barack Obama and David Cameron have been under pressure to ‘do something’, and most media attention has focused on arming the rebels – as if they were short of arms. Both leaders were initially tempted but seem to have come off the boil.
In Washington, General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote an open letter to Congress spelling out the costs and benefits of US military involvement in terms which seem to have succeeded in tilting the political debate against military action.
In London there was a debate in the House of Commons on 11 July on a motion put down by the Conservative backbencher John Baron, a former army officer, stipulating that no lethal support should be given to the rebels without the prior consent of Parliament. It was an encouraging occasion for those who believe in parliamentary democracy (not so encouraging for those who rely on our media, which largely ignored the debate). Speaker after speaker asked how arming the rebels could help bring an end to the fighting, and how we could be sure that the weapons would not end up in the wrong hands. The government had earlier been tempted by the argument that everybody in Syria has access to weapons except the good guys, and had expended a lot of effort trying to get the EU embargo on arms sales lifted; but Alistair Burt of the FCO, winding up the debate for the government, did not oppose the motion and it was passed with 114 votes in favour and 1 against.
One does not have to be a cynic to ask what on earth such a conference can be expected to achieve. The answer is that civil wars do come to an end, although it can be an agonisingly slow process, and outside assistance in finding a political solution has sometimes been effective. There are plenty of precedents (none of them perfect): the Taif Agreement which ended Lebanon’s civil war in 1989, the Dayton Agreement for peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Anglo-Irish Agreement between Margaret Thatcher and Garret FitzGerald. A political solution results from a process, not an event. A conference can be part of that process, indeed can start it. The Anglo-Irish Agreement was top-down, an agreement between London and Dublin not endorsed by anyone in Northern Ireland (and heartily loathed by the Unionists).
The process has to be organic, incremental, multi-dimensional. No superpower, no group of powers can predict let alone dictate its evolution and timing. But they can get it moving. In the Syria case it would not be possible to bring all the interested parties together now, but it would be possible, with political will, to bring together America, Russia, the other permanent members of the Security Council, the EU, the Arab League, the Islamic Conference and others with an interest and record in peacemaking such as Canada and Japan. Such a conference could not solve the problem but it could start the process.
Why doesn’t it happen? ‘Political will’ is a mysterious concept. To a retired diplomat like me it is obvious that Washington and Moscow, to say nothing of the others, both stand to gain from engaging in such an enterprise together. Perhaps the first step in creating the necessary political will would be for the media to abandon for a moment their obsession with guns, blood and spies, and succumb instead to the seductions of diplomacy. But that is like asking little boys to stop playing soldiers and start playing municipal waste recyclers.
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