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Will the new e-commerce rules really favour consumers? -Prashanth Perumal

-The Hindu

The intent of the rules is unclear and there are several consumer protection rules already in place

In June, the Union Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution came out with a list of proposed amendments to the Consumer Protection Act of 2019. These include appointment of a Chief Compliance Officer and a Resident Grievance Officer, provisions of fallback liability, registration of e-commerce entities and a ban on flash sales. The Centre claims that these amendments try to rein in unfair trade practices adopted by e-commerce companies and intend to take care of the interests of consumers. But not everyone agrees. Anupam Manur and Prithwiraj Mukherjee discuss the proposed amendments in a conversation moderated by Prashanth Perumal J. Edited excerpts:

* What is your view on the draft e-commerce rules? Do they favour the consumers as the government claims?

Anupam Manur: I’m critical of these new set of rules on multiple accounts. The first is the sheer scope of the law. The rules are applicable to all goods and services bought or sold over a digital or electronic network. When we say “all goods and services”, it includes your food delivery apps, hotel booking websites, etc. So, basically any kind of e-commerce. That’s a large move to be coming from the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, which brings me to my second point about overlapping jurisdictions. There’s a lot of talk about dominant firms. The regulation of these firms should actually come within the ambit of the Competition Commission of India. Then there’s talk about data privacy, which again is an issue which should be addressed by a data protection law. I think the rules are largely trying to push the government’s ‘Make in India’ initiative and favour small and medium scale enterprises, all under the veil of consumer protection.

Prithwiraj Mukherjee: The draft is very complicated and the intent of the new rules is not clear. I’m assuming that the intent is to prevent one or two dominant firms from taking over not just e-commerce but commerce in general. But it’s one thing to have a law and another thing to uphold that law. I’ll give you an example from a slightly different domain. For a long time, we have what is known as a ‘Do Not Disturb’ list in our mobile phone sector. And most of us are probably registered on that list. Has that stopped you from getting spam? In fact, my service provider is sending me spam from scammers. And I am reasonably certain that these people are doing it through the service provider and that they didn’t get my number through any other way. If we were to bring this into e-commerce, the question is whether the same thing is going to happen with the new draft rules. I don’t know. So, how you uphold a legislation is just as important as the legislation itself.

* Don’t you think putting the rules down on paper gives power to government officials to go after companies that break the rules?

Prithwiraj Mukherjee: In principle the draft rules seem okay. There might be hidden consequences that we’ll discover only with time.

Anupam Manur: Even in principle, the draft rules are unnecessary. E-commerce platforms already have customer care centres where you can lodge complaints. There is competition between platforms. Beyond that, there are a lot of other quality checks that these marketplaces put in place. There are consumer courts that cheated customers can access. I don’t think you need a separate nodal officer or a grievance officer. That just adds to the bureaucracy. Anyway, there’s not enough state capacity for implementing some of these rules. If you start a law knowing that you can’t implement it, I think it’s bound to fail.

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