India to fight alone in WTO |
India is looking to fight a lonely battle on global rules for e-commerce trade at the World Trade Organization (WTO) with close to 70 countries siding with the US to have a multilateral mechanism. US, Europe, Japan and China are seeking some sort of rules that will benefit the likes of Amazon, Alibaba and Uber by opening doors to markets across the globe. India along with South Africa and Saudi Arabia have, so far, been the naysayers. India`s concern stems from the absence of a domestic policy as well as free data flow being pushed by the US and Europe. In addition, the government fears that the architecture being proposed may force developing and least developed countries to lower duties and ease restrictions on services trading, something that was being done autonomously. In fact, in its submission to WTO, the European Union has sought an expansion of the Information Technology Agreement (ITA) to cover more goods, something that India has sought to avoid. ITA-1 restricts the government`s ability to impose import duty on several electronic goods. The US and EU members, have openly sought removal of data localisation requirements, although they recognise that privacy needs to be protected.
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