Moneycontrol | Karnataka’s plan to fix prices for Uber-Ola cabs is going to boomerang badly

There’s ridiculous and then, there’s this! In a long list of antagonist policy decisions taken against cab-aggregators by Indian state governments, the latest one by the Karnataka government takes the cake. In a policy that plans to emulate the pricing structure of the city’s autos, the Karnataka government plans to fix prices for all taxis in the state. In the new fare structure, all taxis will be categorised into three segments based on the purchase value of the vehicle and the prices will be fixed for each segment. Read the full article here.

Russia, The West, And The Info War

Fears of war breaking out between Russia and Ukraine have dominated headlines in the international press. Information warfare is an undeniable reality of modern conflicts, and its impact is often strategic in demoralizing the adversary’s forces and populace.

In many of its doctrinal and strategic publications, Russia acknowledges that the information domain is an active battleground, regardless of the contending sides being in a state of war or peace. Despite spirited official denials, it is fair to say that Russia gives as good as it gets in the information domain.

In the latest round of public jousting around hybrid and information warfare, both sides have led with accusations and official public statements.

The Russian Ministry of Defense has alleged that American mercenaries are present and looking to orchestrate a chemical attack in the Donbas region of Ukraine. Meanwhile the US State Department has released a fact sheet detailing the alleged Russian “destabilization campaign in Ukraine.” British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has made a statement accusing Russia of planning “to install pro-Russian leadership in Ukraine.”

Russia’s approach to building up forces on Ukraine’s border is best characterized as Clausewitzian, meaning it’s aimed toward achieving political goals through other means.

E-commerce: Don’t let Protectionism Drive Policy

It is hard to imagine how prohibiting high discounts and attractive offers is supposed to protect consumer interests. It is easier, however, to imagine how this move can help the “offline” stores in their competition against the online ones

The new rules also mandate e-commerce companies to provide a domestic alternative for any imported goods or services offered for sale. Consumer protection rules imposed on e-commerce firms should not be used for the atmanirbhar and swadeshi drive.Perhaps the most contentious rule, which highlights a misunderstanding of how marketplaces work, is the “fallback liability” clause. In short, this clause makes the e-commerce entity responsible for the goods and services sold by sellers registered on the platform. This is not dissimilar to holding a mall responsible for the products sold by individual retail shops within it. This is impractical and unfair to the marketplace.Further, there is an array of rules that increase compliance requirements, such as registering with the department for promotion of industry and internal trade, mandatory partnering with the National Consumer Helpline, and the appointment of compliance officers. Every e-commerce platform must appoint a chief compliance officer (who will be liable for third party information on the platform), nodal contact person (to coordinate with law enforcement), and a grievance officer.In the final analysis, though, these rules will fail the test of necessity and proportionality. Most e-commerce firms have fairly robust systems of customer care, which consumers can approach for grievance redressal. Further, e-commerce platforms facilitate refunds and returns in cases where customers are dissatisfied with the products. Beyond that, they have built a network where users rate and review both products and sellers of the products that can provide crucial information to any potential customers.

It would behove the government to withdraw most of these proposed rule changes, as the veneer of consumer protection peels away rather easily to reveal the underlying protectionist motivations.Read the full article here

It’s Not Just About 50 Tweets and One Platform

This article originally appeared in TheWire. An excerpt is reproduced here.Transparency and a voluntary actThis latest attempt came to light because Twitter disclosed this action in the Lumen Database, a project that houses voluntary submissions. And while Twitter is being criticised for complying, reports suggest that the company wasn’t the only one that received such a request. It just happened to be the only one that chose to disclose it proactively.Expanding on legal scholar Jack Balkin’s model for speech regulation, there are ‘3C’s’ available (cooperation, cooption and confrontation) for companies in their interaction with state power. Apart from Twitter’s seemingly short-lived dalliance with confrontation in February 2021, technology platforms have mostly chosen the cooperation and cooption options in India (in contrast to their posturing in the west).This is particularly evident in their reaction to the recent Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code. We’ll ask for transparency, but what we’re likely to get is ‘transparency theatre’ – ranging from inscrutable reports, to a deluge of information which, as communications scholar Sun-ha Hong argues, ‘won’t save us’.Reports allege that the most recent Twitter posts were flagged because they were misleading. But, at the time of writing, it isn’t clear exactly which law(s) were allegedly violated. We can demand that social media platforms are more transparent, but the current legal regime dealing with ‘blocking’ (Section 69A of the IT ACT) place no such obligations on the government. On the contrary, as  lawyers Gurshabad Grover and Torsha Sorkar point out, it enables them to issue ‘secret blocking’ orders. Civil society groups have advocated against these provisions, but the political class (whether in government or opposition) is yet to make any serious attempts to change the status quo.