The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) urged the Indian government to establish a unified cyber regulator to tackle issues related to e-commerce, in a letter to Union Minister for Commerce Piyush Goyal on February 28. Claiming that India's regulatory architecture has not evolved properly over time, CAIT said that this was causing friction between companies and regulators. In a recent trade conference, CAIT along with 152 trade leaders passed a resolution calling upon Goyal to roll out an e-commerce policy. It has also sent a similar letter to Union Minister for Electronics & IT Ashwini Vaishnaw. The unified cyber regulatory authority should regulate and monitor not only e-commerce trade but also issues incidental to e-commerce, the traders association said, while recommending that the authority look into areas such as — Data Use and adoption of technology Online behaviour Consumer welfare It also suggested that the authority should be supported by a specialised investigatory and adjudicatory mechanism. This new demand comes after the government proposed amendments to the E-Commerce Rules last June in response to repeated antitrust complaints against e-commerce giants Amazon and Flipkart. However, it appears that the government is yet to finalise the proposed rules and is still reviewing and soliciting feedback from concerned stakeholders. What are the gaps in India's regulatory architecture? "India has a legacy regulatory architecture across sectors wherein the subject-matter jurisdiction of each such regulator has evolved over time in a fragmented manner to address present concerns. This has left a significant portion of emerging technologies, products, services,…
