One of the most talked-about pre-coronavirus trends was the controversial collaboration between the Big Tech, Biotech and Big Pharma players and some major sections of the Western press were involved in the discussions around these emerging trends. From an outer view, the post-coronavirus lockdown world seems like a playground of well-scripted efforts, where fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) strategy are nourishing the fortunes of these three booming industries. If we consider that this current trend is going to continue for a much longer period then we should prepare not just an exit strategy but a future roadmap too.

Big Tech – Biotech – Big Pharma Loop

It is interesting to see how the biotech investments of Big Tech companies, which initiated with the R&D goals, have eventually ended up in the controversial partnerships with some Big Pharmaceutical players. The pattern and ease with which these tech giants have shifted their domains to entirely different areas (in a similar timeframe) raise some serious questions.

Google

In 2007, Google backed a biotech and personal genomics company 23andMe (founded by Anne Wojcicki, who married Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin in the same year). Since its launch, the underlying medical purpose of 23andMe’s Personal Genome Service has been highly controversial and several times this entity fell under the scrutiny of the US and UK government agencies. On 25 July 2018, to leverage the DNA test results from 5 million customers, 23andMe and drug giant Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK) entered into a partnership, too.

On 18 September 2013, Google announced its new initiative called Calico (California Life Company), and Arthur D. Levinson, Chairman and former CEO of Genentech and Chairman of Apple, took up the charge as the CEO of this healthcare venture. Calico made some interesting R&D partnerships with AbbVie (a global biopharmaceutical company), Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, QB3 (California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences), Buck Institute, Ancestry DNA, Jackson Laboratory, and C4 Therapeutics. And, in November 2018, it entered into a collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics (ITMAT). The stated mission of Calico was to explore advanced technologies and their possible role in controlling the human lifespan and to “to devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives” but it is surprising that even after extensive research, their expected interventions and findings are still in shadow, even for the scientist fraternity.

Another Google/Alphabet subsidiary, which often made headlines is Verily Life Sciences or Verily, an R&D organization devoted to the study of life sciences. Last year, Verily formed strategic alliances with Novartis, Otsuka, Pfizer and Sanofi kind of leading biopharma organizations, to develop digital clinical research programmes using Project Baseline’s (an initiative of Verily, started in 2017) evidence generation platform and tools. Its official objective “Making information work better so that healthcare works better” may sound philanthropic to some but the company is purely commercial. In 2016, Verily formed a joint venture called Galvani Bioelectronics with British pharmaceutical giant Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK). In 2015, Verily and Johnson & Johnson’s medical device company Ethicon, launched a startup called Verb Surgical, a robotic surgery platform. The company has delivered some health-tracking wearables including smart spoon, smart lenses and smart shoe kind of projects.

It is also interesting to note that biopharma and life sciences investments make up more than a third of Google Ventures’ portfolio. Google Ventures, the venture capital investment arm of Alphabet (an American conglomerate and restructured parent company of Google and several former Google subsidiaries) invested in some thriving biopharma/biotech companies including Editas Medicine (a leading genome editing company), Foundation Medicine (a molecular insight company), PACT Pharma, Magenta Therapeutics, Flatiron Health (a cancer research company, which was acquired by Roche, a Swiss pharma), One Medical, Arcus Biosciences, 23andMe, Grail, and Denali Therapeutics.

Microsoft

Last year, Microsoft and pharmaceutical company Novartis formed a strategic alliance “to transform medicine with Artificial Intelligence,” which is seen as one of the most expensive tie-ups between Big Pharma and Big Tech. Since 2010, tech giant Microsoft’s biological computation arm has been working on a wide range of projects including “designing molecular circuits made of DNA, and programming synthetic biological devices to perform complex functions over time and space.” The company has quietly built up a stronghold in the medical research and biological computation domains and their researchers are exploring moonshot possibilities in cell programming (to fight serious diseases) kind of emerging sectors and developing computer modeling tools to assist Big Pharma companies in drug discovery and development.

In 2000, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft started what he called his “second career” in philanthropy with the foundation of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whose primary goal was working globally to enhancing healthcare efforts and reducing extreme poverty. In the same year, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invested in the GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization) – a public-private global health partnership, which is also the third-largest financial contributor (8.39 per cent) to World Health Organization (WHO), next after USA (14.67 per cent) and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (9.76 per cent) itself.

These days GAVI is in news for COVID-19 vaccine funding and distribution to poor countries, too, but it is important here to recall that in the past (2011-12) this alliance received some serious criticism for higher pricing of vaccines and for providing Advanced Market Commitments to companies like GSK and Pfizer and was also blamed for encouraging a duopoly situation in the sector.

Amazon

Big Tech and Marketplace player Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos have a growing inclination towards the biotech sector, too. In 2016, Jeff invested over $100 million in Unity Biotechnology, an anti-aging startup. Jeff Bezos invested in other healthcare startups, viz, ZocDoc, Mindstrong Health and cancer research startups Grail and Juno Therapeutics. These were some of Amazon’s most talked-about biotech investments but there are some lesser known initiatives too, ie, Project Gesundheit, which is a part of Amazon’s Grand Challenge R&D initiative. In 2017, CNBC channel reported that the marketplace giant Amazon has a dedicated team (led by Babak Parviz, ex-director and distinguished engineer at Google X), which quietly works on the healthcare projects. According to recent media reports, this year this group (which is sometimes called 1492) is working on a cure for the common cold and its revelation made headlines amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Facebook

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan’s biotech initiative – Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, frequently makes headlines. One of its ambitious initiatives is the Cell Atlas project, which aims to map every type of cell in the human body. The CZ Biohub is also working on infectious diseases and rapidly developing capabilities in diagnostic tests, drug and vaccine development, using advances in biotech and machine learning technologies. Last year, Facebook acquired CTRL Labs, a startup working in non-invasive neural interface technology. After that acquisition, Facebook Reality Labs (an Augmented and Virtual Reality initiative) and CTRL labs joined forces and announced to work together on advance projects including wearable and implantable devices.

There is a lot of noise about several other moves of these Big Tech players, whether IDSeq open-source tool of Facebook or Google’s Project Nightingale (a data storage and processing project by Google Cloud and Ascension, a Catholic health care system) and its recent collaboration with Sanofi and other pharma players, which at the end signifies the growing synergies between Big Tech, Biotech, and Pharma industries. There are also lots of discussions going on whether Big Tech companies should be allowed to handle the sensitive health care domain.

India’s Concerns

Discussing only vulnerability on every global trend will not suffice. Today, India is in a position where it should make a calculation about how wise is it for a huge and diversified democracy like us to wait till the real disruption in our national security posture occurs and how much are we prepared to face the consequences of delaying the actions that we should take now to protect our national security interests?

Imagine a possible situation when the same set of players, who dominate our narrations, observe and trace every single pulse of our activity, control what we read/listen and watch, suddenly start prescribing to us X and Y medicines and tests (for diseases which may not be known to us). We will end up using the search engine algorithms that are again sorted by them. This is like an endless loop, where finding the right fact/solution or any sort of cure for a normal user will become remarkably difficult. And it is more of concern for a country like India, because none of the leading actors involved in these pursuits belongs to our land.

India certainly has tremendous capabilities in technology, biotech and pharmaceutical sectors, but we could not succeed in disrupting the existing dominance. Time for brainstorming in this direction has come and today we are already in that perfect ‘pause’ phase which is needed for such moves.

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The role of Big Tech in challenging the idea of democracy, idea of government and the idea of the nation itself in the battlefields of public opinion is one of the most crucial and least discussed subjects of our time.

Today, we are observing a strange scenario where Google search algorithms can be corrected on demand (from Muslim community) to display the desired results on the search of words like “Jihad” and “Sharia” but newsfeeds  on a democratically elected government’s decisive moves – from Article 370 to Ayodhya verdict to CAA – can never be sorted to reflect the truth, balanced and real information. Big Tech platforms like Facebook, which supports “voice and free expression” can openly assure full support to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan for their brutal blasphemy laws but when the security agencies of democratic countries like India seek their cooperation in decrypting terrorists’ communications and ask for data on potential national security threats, they play the weird “privacy” card. On one such hearing on privacy rights (October 2019) India’s Attorney General KK Venugopal told the Supreme Court that “a terrorist cannot claim privacy,” and these Big internet platforms “can’t come into the country and say we will establish a non-decryptable system.”

From many years, headlines about China’s counterfeiting and hacking capabilities and its censorship on internet/US tech products have caught attention the world over. From 2016, Russia’s attempts to influence U.S. elections have also been subject of popular discussion but, in between all these somewhere, serious threats that Big tech products (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc) can pose to national security, often get ignored.

There is a need to remember that, in 2014, Islamic State’s invasion of Iraq launched with the Twitter hash tag #AllEyesOnISIS, which later become its key propaganda machine and ISIS leveraged these popular tech platforms particularly Facebook and Twitter as its key instruments. From recruiting terrorists to calling foreign fighters (from some 100 countries) and to making Islamic State’s propaganda viral across the continents, these apps had facilitated almost everything.

These Big Tech platforms proudly claim that their goal is to provide the “power of voice” to billions of people across the world but does that claim give an excuse and scope for the exploitation of the same platforms by the terrorist elements too. Jihadist use of Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. is a hugely debated issue and with each passing year new dimensions are emerging – merely discussing them as they come to notice is not sufficient.

Sometime back android users of India have reported an app called “2020 Sikh Referendum” which was made available for download on Google Playstore – the official app store for Android apps. This app was linked to the US-based separatist group “Sikhs for Justice”, which the Indian government had banned in July 2019 for spreading secessionism and carrying out anti-national activities. In November 2019, on similar lines, it came to notice that some Apps at Google Playstorewere spreading literature on ‘Ghazwa-e-hind’ – a Islamic doctrine aimed at the conquest of India, which Pakistani terrorists groups were propagating since several decades. According to some social media users, who first reported this app, more than 5000 users had downloaded that app from the Google Playstore before it came to adverse notice.

Misinformation Campaigns on CAA

One of the most recent examples of these popular tech products’ experiments was seen in India, where, on the issue of amendments in the Citizenship Act, hundreds of people from the Muslim community, backed by Communist Party of India (CPI and CPI-M) and some opposition leaders, put the lives and properties of the common people in danger. The manner in which mobs organized via social media apps terrorized the common people including school going kids, attacked public transportation&railways, burned several buses and private vehicles and attacked the police and security agencies with stones and bricks in different locations – was disturbing for all democratic societies.

During January, security agencies traced more than 5,000 Pakistan-based social media handles, which were involved in actively spreading false propaganda on CAA. Some of them were using deep fake videos of protests to incite communal violence in the country. When violent protests in Jamia Millia Islamia and Jawaharlal Nehru universities broke out, then these Pakistan-backed Twitter handles, Facebook posts and YouTube videos were used widely to spread incitement and hatred against the Indian government and Delhi Police. The problem escalated to an extent that the Ministry of Home Affairs had to issue an advisory to States and Union Territories to act against fake news and rumors on social media.

Pakistan’s Warfare of Narratives

Lately, Opposition parties have repeatedly questioning the Modi government’s decision to shutdown the Internet in Jammu & Kashmir (after the abrogation of Article 370) and tried hard to internationalize the issue but they have completely rejected the alarming incidents, which have shaped a new form of militancy in the region. In promoting militants and their ideas, these popular tech products are playing a key role. Militants do not now need print or electronic media’s support to spread their “Call for Jihad.” They can simply share their videos or pictures on social media platforms and before they come to the notice of the security agencies, they reach thousands of users.

In 2017, nearly 300 WhatsApp groups (each with around 250 members) were caught mobilizing and coordinating with stone-pelters in Kashmir to disrupt the operations of the security forces by attacking them during crucial operations. Due to their in-built end-to-end encryption features, these apps facilitate in the communication/coordination of the militants. In 2013, Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT) expanded rapidly across all social media platforms and held Social Media workshops at Faislabad, Islamabad and Karachi. In December 2015, LeT chief Hafiz Saeed launched his cyber cell. In April 2017, Jamaat-ud-Dawah (JuD) issued multiple advertisements for social media workshops, which sought volunteers for instigating unrest in the Valley and the cyber team of JuD North Punjab openly posted their campaign posters on Twitter and Facebook with “Join #SocialMedia workshops to know Social Media as an instrument for Kashmir uprise 2k17” kind of statements.

This ‘warfare of the narratives’ has gained new momentum with each passing year. In April 2019, a network of more than 100 Facebook and Instagram pages, run by the employees of the Inter-Service Public Relations (ISPR) wing of the Pakistani military, was caught spreading anti-India propaganda and intense hate content. By disguising themselves as Kashmir activists’ voices these Facebook and Instagram pages/groups were involved in openly facilitating a coordinated strategy of the Pakistani Army. Some of these accounts had been active for five to six years; they spent dollars on Facebook ads to promote aggressive content against India and were openly mobilizing the followers and support for their radical Islamist ideas but strangely remained unnoticed by Facebook itself.

Even U.S. President Donald Trump has tweeted how US-based Big tech companies have not coordinated with his government and security agencies in dealing with criminals, terrorists and drug dealers. When these companies are ignorant about their home country’s national security concerns can we expect them to take our national security concerns seriously?

Time to Step In

These platforms are now becoming the facilitators of Jihadist actors’ intra-group financing and communication tools. Research conducted by the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism highlights how the terrorists use these social media platforms to report about the live status of their operations to their fellow members through pictures, videos, and written statements and to circulate messages among their network.

Launched with the promise of promoting innovation and creativity, these digital and social media products are now the facilitators of lone-wolf attackers. According to a recent study (on 700 terrorists, who took part in 560 attacks in Israel) conducted by Israel’s Public Security Ministry and International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, 60 per cent of lone-wolf terrorists, who carried out attacks from 2015 to 2017, posted preliminary information regarding their intentions on social media and close to 95 per cent of the terrorists used social media at least once before carrying out those attacks, which indicates that an absence of fundamental intelligence and monitoring helped these lone-wolf attackers to fulfill their objectives. If these tech companies had coordinated in time with the security agencies many of those attacks could have been stopped.

It is quite evident that the core purposes of these Big Tech products is not business and profit anymore. They have developed a kind of fantasy to control minds through data and algorithms. Their smart business model allows them to keep the information about their original customers in the shadows.

Even after facing embarrassments from across the world on their careless approach towards terrorist and anti-national uses, instead of developing a mechanism of cooperating with the local governments and their security/counter-terrorism agencies these Big Tech companies decided to establish their own independent counter-terrorism body. In 2017, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and Google’s YouTube founded the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), whose mission statement interestingly says the goal is to “prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms.”

Business and technology are crucial for economic growth, and the concept of “freedom of expression” is one of the essential ingredients of a healthy society. But at the same time, no business idea, activity or product should be allowed to disturb the foundational elements that bind a society and nation together, and can never be allowed to challenge national security goals.

The urgency for disrupting the Big Tech is already there. From time to time our industry leaders and defense personnel have raised voices on the need for building our own tech platforms. The monopoly of only a few foreign tech tycoons is neither a good sign for the tech industry nor our national interests. At the same time, we can neither follow a Chinese model of protectionism nor Islamic nations’ rigid approach. A country like India, which has a surplus of young talent, can deal with this challenge in the Indian way. We have the potential to disrupt the tech industry to make it a level playing field. We can remain open and come up with our popular and robust versions in parallel to Google, Facebookand Twitter.

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