Centre holds talks with digital commerce firms in run-up to G20 summit

More than 25 major digital commerce companies, including Amazon India, Flipkart, Ola, Paytm, and MakeMyTrip, met the government on Monday in the run-up to the Group of Twenty (G20) Summit scheduled to be held next week, said sources.

The commerce and industry ministry on Monday called a meeting ‘with industry stakeholders on e-commerce and data localisation’.

According to sources in the know, the industry might not debate digital taxation, data localisation, proposed e-commerce policy and so on at the event, given its curiosity about the government’s slant. 

“The meeting has been called quite unexpectedly. We are just going to meet the government representatives. They wanted to meet us before they attend G20. We will discuss our issues with them later in a more systematic manner,” said a senior public policy representative for a major tech firm.

Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal pushed the private sector to suggest new opportunities in the growing digital economy and ways to raise value addition in  GDP.

The common agenda for the meeting, a copy of which Business Standard has reviewed, included discussing opportunities for India in a growing digital economy, value addition to Indian GDP due to advent of e-commerce, understanding data flow from the aspects of privacy, security, safety and free choice, ownership and sharing of data, gains and costs of cross-border flow of data, and means to monitor the use of data.

There were separate meetings and discussions scheduled with Indian e-commerce companies, Indian information technology (IT) companies, foreign e-commerce companies, and foreign IT firms.

In a meeting with Indian firms, threats from large foreign competition and the lack of a level playing field were stressed upon by most companies. 

However, sources said the government was keen on discussing the impact of anti-competitive practices such as predatory pricing and asked companies to focus on identifying their strengths and weaknesses in the current ecosystem.

On the other hand, foreign entities continued to complain that data localisation, or storing data in local servers, would entail a rise in costs and major efficiency losses.

Both the government and foreign firms have levelled allegations against each other of supporting the misuse of private consumer data. 

As a result, the monitoring of data from the lens of privacy, security, safety, and choice was discussed threadbare, said sources.
 

(With inputs from Subhayan Chakraborty)