"So they've they've assumed that everybody is an Amazon or Flipkart and they've come up with a policy trying to curtail and regulate that and they want to try and apply it across the board. This is just a vision, so to say, but this vision doesn't make distinctions based on the actual harm that an entity could cause because of their size." The #NAMApolicy discussion on the draft E-Commerce Policy released by DPIIT got into exactly how the Policy intends to regulate e-commerce entities, and brought up Policy's has repeated mentions the phenomenon of network effect, and the need to regulate for it, while failing to even define the term, or explain what this entails. The panelists and audience at the discussion helped shed some light on what outcomes the Policy might have been trying to achieve in this regard. The discussion was supported by Amazon. Definition and Impact of Network Effect Smriti Parsheera of NIPFP explains that the Policy has not taken the necessary time and space to explain what exactly it entails and and the problems it brings to the Indian e-commerce market. "Network effects are basically a market or a situation where my value of utilising a particular product or service increases with the number of of other users of that service. So this could be direct like in the case of social media, Facebook, telecom networks etc, where more and more users similar to me are using the service, I can call more people, contact more people,…
