E-commerce moratorium proposal worries India

India along with South Africa has raised concerns over a proposal at the WTO seeking to expand the scope of global moratorium to include digitized and digitizable goods such as books, video games, software and music.

New Delhi has maintained that the globally agreed ecommerce moratorium has led to loss of revenue besides restricting use of tariffs as a trade policy and hence, should be done away with.

Introduced in 1998, the moratorium has been extended by the World Trade Organization (WTO) every two years. It got temporarily extended for six months in December 2019 and a final decision to continue it or not is expected in June.