Developing nations need policy space in ecommerce: India to WTO

NEW DELHI: India has told the World Trade Organization (WTO) that developing countries need to maintain policy space in certain aspects of ecommerce such as ownership and use and flow of data in “sunrise sectors like cloud computing and data storage.” Citing gaps in understanding on effects of ecommerce on competition and market structures, India said policy space is needed in the facets related to hosting of servers as well as big data analytics and M2M (machine-to-machine) communication in the era of internet of things. “Advance of digital technologies, automation and robotisation will result in the loss of a large proportion of traditional jobs in the technology sector,” India said at a meeting of the trade negotiations committee in Geneva last week.