India reluctant to give special tax incentives to Apple | Reuters

India is resisting Apple Inc.’s (AAPL.O) demand for tax incentives to make iPhones in the country, with the trade minister saying on Thursday that New Delhi may not make exceptions for the U.S. tech giant.Apple wants to open its own stores in India but has been asked by the government to locally source at least some of the components, as part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bid to boost manufacturing in the country.Apple has sought tax concessions, including lower import and manufacturing duties, to make iPhones locally, according to a government official familiar with the situation.Trade Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said if India were to agree to any concessions, they would likely apply to all smart phone manufacturers, and not just Apple.Smartphone component maker Wistron Corp (3231.TW), whoch counts Apple Inc among its customers, has applied for permission to expand its plant in Bengaluru, a regional government official told Reuters on Monday.Apple declined to comment.

Tech Giants Seem Invincible. That Worries Lawmakers. – The New York Times

In the technology industry, the sharks have never long been safe from the minnows. Over much of the last 40 years, the biggest players in tech — from IBM to Hewlett-Packard to Cisco to Yahoo — were eventually outmaneuvered by start-ups that came out of nowhere.The dynamic is so dependable that it is often taken to be a kind of axiom. To grow large in this business is also to grow slow, blind and dumb, to become closed off from the very sources of innovation that turned you into a shark in the first place.Then, in the last half decade, something strange happened: The sharks began to get bigger and smarter. Nearly a year ago, I argued that we were witnessing a new era in the tech business, one that is typified less by the storied start-up in a garage than by a posse I like to call the Frightful Five: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent company.