India, May 3 -- For nearly two decades, the digital age has operated on a deceptively simple bargain: we surrender our data, they provide the services. It felt symbiotic-perhaps even egalitarian. A student in Mumbai, a banker in New York; both accessing the same blue app, the same video-sharing platform, the same microblogging site. often for free. We assumed this model was sustainable, that attention economics were universal, and the "free internet" a permanent public good. But that assumption is being dismantled in Washington, D.C., and the tremors will be felt acutely in New Delhi and beyond. The era of the universally free internet, subsidized by surveillance, is drawing to a close. India stands at the precipice of a painful but neces...