I think we can all agree that the chokehold that Amazon wields over the ecommerce landscape is, quite frankly, a pain in the ass. It’s a pain in the ass for the millions of third-party sellers at the mercy of its platform. It’s a pain in the ass for the lawmakers who’ve spent the past year and change desperately trying to wield some sort of congressional power over a tech giant. It’s a pain in the ass for unions, for lawyers, and for the reporters who are stuck writing about it.
This is probably why one country’s government is mulling over the idea of instating a window into the algorithms that keep money flowing into the Amazon machine. As detailed in a new Bloomberg report, the latest draft of India’s proposed national ecommerce policy includes mandated federal access to the “source codes and algorithms” underlying digital behemoths like Amazon—a step that local authorities say will cut down on the “digitally induced biases” that these companies have been proven to have.
The document draft that Bloomberg got ahold of is the latest update to a proposed national policy that’s been roughly two years in the making, and is largely being written to undercut the power that certain tech companies currently hold over India’s ecommerce market. While the country doesn’t hold a candle to the more than $600 billion that Americans spent online by the end of last year, India’s numbers are definitely booming: Over the next twoyears, the local ecommerce sector is expected to be worth more than $71 billion dollars. Over the next six years, that number’s expected to surge to $200 billion.
For the most part, these dollars are controlled by two global companies: Amazon and Flipkart, an India-based online marketplace that was bought out by Walmart for a good $16 billion back in 2018. Respectively, each of these companies controls nearly a third of the country’s overall ecommerce market, according to analyses run last year. Local alternatives, like Paytm Mall or Bigbasket, control less than 5% each.
With that in mind, it’s not too surprising that past drafts of India’s proposed policies were grilled for placing what some called unnecessary levels of scrutiny on foreign startups while giving locally held companies a pass. The latest draft, per Bloomberg’s report, doesn’t play favorites, but does leave the possibility of whether companies like Amazon would have to store their India-centric data on local servers, rather than keeping them on U.S. soil. Whatever data’s held in those servers, in tur
