“People have confidence that, long term, India is going to be a good market, that long term, its regulations are going to be fair and transparent enough,” said Jay Gullish, who heads tech policy at the advocacy group US-India Business Council. “I think these are just … deepening roots that already exist.”

The China factor

“It is harder and harder to do business with China,” said Mark Lemley, director of Stanford University’s program in law, science and technology. “There is also a growing sense that doing business with China involves troubling moral compromises.”

“India and its Southeast Asian neighbors have tried to balance the two powers by forging greater economic ties with China while holding on to the security umbrella provided by the United States,” said Ravi Shankar Chaturvedi, research director at Tufts University’s Institute for Business in the Global Context. “China, through recent actions, has effectively delivered the US to India for a generation.”

“There’s natural synergy between India and the United States in the digital realm,” said Gullish, adding that the boost to internet usage from Indian households socializing and working more from their homes during the coronavirus pandemic may further enhance India’s appeal as a market. “It’s easy for American companies to look to India for opportunities,” he said.

The richest gets richer

At the same time that US tech companies were eying India’s market, Asia’s wealthiest man appeared to position himself as a willing gatekeeper.

And Silicon Valley clearly wants in.

“US tech hasn’t been able to penetrate the ‘Great Firewall of China’ but it has been easier for it to enter the ‘Great Paywall of India’ created by Jio; all it had to do was pay Reliance the toll fees to enter,” said Chaturvedi.

As one of India’s biggest companies run by the country’s richest man, Reliance has an enormous amount of local influence and is unencumbered by many of the regulations on data storage and e-commerce that have been roadblocks for Facebook, Google and Amazon.

“No global entrant could have managed this as successfully and as quickly on their own as Reliance has,” Chaturvedi said. “Much of the ecommerce regulation and data localization laws have been influenced by Reliance.”

“Much as it pains me to say it, the US isn’t nearly as attractive a place for innovation as it was five years ago,” Lemley said. “As the Trump administration makes it harder and harder to bring the best and brightest people from around the world to Silicon Valley, I think tech companies may be looking towards a world where we are no longer the center of innovation.”