India’s most current e-commerce plan draft includes measures that could aid community startups and impose governing administration oversight on how businesses take care of the information provided by their consumers.
Under guidelines specified by a 15-page draft seen by TheBloomberg, new e-commerce rules have been suggested in a draft prepared by the Ministry of Commerce’s Department for Promotion of Industry & Internal Trade. The draft suggests at the appointment of an e-commerce regulator that will keep an eye on the industry and ensure that it works affably. The authorities has been engaged on the coverage for at the least two years amid calls to scale back the dominance of world tech giants like Amazon, Alphabet’s Google, and Facebook.
The Ministry would be offering the draft policy for stakeholder comments on a website of the government. The draft further said that there is a tendency among some of the leading companies to exercise control over most of the information repository. It said that it’s in the interest of the Indian consumer and the local ecosystem that there are ‘more service providers’ and also that ‘the network effects do not lead to the creation of digital monopolies that are misusing their dominant market position’.
The draft also states, “They are successfully exploiting the significant first mover’s advantage in the data-driven ecosystem. Once a certain scale is reached, it becomes virtually impossible for the ‘second mover’, on its own to, make an entry in this ecosystem” further implying that this draft will let small local businesses provide a fair chance of growing.
The draft additionally talks of ascertaining whether or not e-commerce companies have “explainable AI,” referring to the usage of synthetic intelligence.
“Government, in consultation with applicable stakeholders, will define the categories of e-commerce that would need mirroring or localisation,” the draft stated.
The draft also states that “However, certain categories of data are exempted from restrictions on cross-border data flow. Data not collected in India, B2B data shared between business entities under a commercial contract, data flows through software and cloud computing services, data shared internally by multinational companies are exempted from restrictions on cross-border data flows.”
Apart from this, foreign e-commerce companies that provide live streaming services that have been using payment tokens that must be regulated to ensure that users would route such transactions via formal and regulated payment channels.
