BD needs nat'l web platform Admits minister

The worldwide disruption to Google services, especially Gmail outage, on Thursday exposed the vulnerability of clients and nations to any accident or possible monopolistic practice by tech giants.

Telecoms and ICT minister Mustafa Jabbar said Bangladesh should explore other platforms to rid it of excessive reliance and safeguard national interests.

It should also ensure the privacy of people and security of national organisations, observed Mr Jabbar, also a former president of Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services (BASIS).

"Yes, it's better if we've a national platform. But it'd be a Herculean task to build something like tech giant Google and it requires a well-planned project with huge investment," he told the FE on Friday.

Asked how far Bangladeshi 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, Mr Jabbar feels that immediate solution to the problem lies with Google, the giant web platform which offers a variety of solutions apart from search engine and Gmail.

Gmail, Google Meet, Google Drive and Google Docs services came to a halt for around seven hours on Thursday, 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 coronavirus pandemic has made such clients more dependent on platform companies for many of their day-to-day activities.

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