Here's what troubles me most as a developer and researcher: the technology itself rarely has an ideology. A transformer model doesn't care about borders. A blockchain ledger doesn't check passports. The protocols that power the web were deliberately designed to route around centralised control. And yet, the infrastructure, the compute, the capital, and increasingly the code itself is under the control of a handful of nations and corporations.
When a government bans a platform, who loses? Not the government. Not the tech giant. The people — specifically, ordinary citizens in countries without the leverage to negotiate on equal terms — lose access to tools for economic participation, communication, and learning.
When AI models are trained exclusively on data from wealthy, English-dominant economies, they encode biases that marginalise the global majority. When cloud providers store data in jurisdictions with aggressive surveillance laws, users in smaller nations have no meaningful recourse. This is technological intervention in slow motion — and most people don't even realise it's happening.
Shared Resources: The Commons Under Siege
In the early internet era, there was a genuine belief that cyberspace would be a global commons — shared, open, ungoverned by any single sovereign. That vision was never fully realised, but it shaped the architecture of everything from TCP/IP to the World Wide Web. The shared resource model was the design intent.
Today, that commons is under pressure from multiple directions. Spectrum is auctioned by national regulators. Satellites are launched by private corporations with national licenses. AI training data is scraped, hoarded, and monetised behind proprietary walls. Even the ocean floor — where the undersea cables carrying 99% of international internet traffic lie — is now a theatre of strategic competition.
As someone deep in the blockchain space, I find this fascinating because public blockchains represent one of the few genuinely surviving examples of the shared-resource model. No one owns Ethereum. No single government can shut it down. The rules are enforced by mathematics and consensus, not by political authority. It is imperfect, it is messy, it is slow — but it is genuinely shared. That's rare. And it's worth protecting.
The irony is that the countries most enthusiastic about controlling technology resources are the same ones that benefit most from the open commons that made their tech industries possible. The internet didn't grow because of walls. It grew because of protocols that anyone could implement.
Vasudeva Kutumbakam as a Technology Policy Framework
Here's the thought that I keep returning to: what if we applied Vasudeva Kutumbakam not as sentiment, but as a genuine design principle for technology governance?
It would mean asking, before any technology policy decision: does this expand or shrink the family? Does it increase the number of people who can participate, build, learn, and benefit — or does it concentrate that power in fewer hands?
Practically, this looks like: open standards over proprietary lock-in. Multilateral AI governance rather than unilateral export controls. Public compute infrastructure that smaller nations can access without geopolitical strings attached. Data frameworks that give communities ownership over what they generate. And — critically — technology education investments that ensure the next generation of builders isn't concentrated in three zip codes.
India, interestingly, is in a unique position here. As a country that has articulated Vasudeva Kutumbakam as its civilisational philosophy and brought it to the G20 stage during its 2023 presidency ("One Earth, One Family, One Future"), India has a real opportunity to model what technology governance that centres shared benefit actually looks like. The Digital Public Infrastructure stack — Aadhaar, UPI, ONDC — is one example of open-architecture thinking applied at scale. It is not perfect, and the privacy debates are real. But the intent to build shared infrastructure rather than capture rent from it is philosophically aligned with the idea of one family.
"The question isn't whether we can build technology that serves all of humanity. We clearly can. The question is whether we choose to."
Where Does This Leave Us as Builders?
I think about this a lot as a developer. The tools I use every day — open-source libraries, public APIs, community forums, collaborative research papers — exist because someone before me believed that the rising tide should lift all boats. I benefit from a global commons that I did not build and cannot take credit for.
That places a kind of responsibility on me. When I write code, when I design systems, when I choose between a proprietary solution and an open one — those are not neutral technical decisions. They are, in a small way, votes on what kind of world I want to help build.
I'm not naive about geopolitics. Nations will pursue their interests. Corporations will protect their moats. The competition for technological supremacy is real and intensifying. But within those constraints, there is still room for choices — in architecture, in governance, in who we bring along.
Blockchain taught me that trustless coordination between strangers is not just possible — it is engineerable. Climate science taught us that shared resources require shared governance, or they collapse. And Vasudeva Kutumbakam, that 2,500-year-old idea, keeps reminding me that the smartest thing humanity ever figured out is that we are stronger together than we are apart.
The wires may be fragmented. The philosophy doesn't have to be.
वसुधैव कुटुम्बकम्The world is one family — Maha Upanishad, Chapter 6, Verse 72
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