Tech This Week | Data is not national wealth, must not be regulated in same manner

2020 is going to be a defining year for technology policy in India. We entered into this year with developments expected on several major fronts. There is the long overdue revision to the Intermediary Guidelines, the impending Personal Data Protection Bill, the Cybersecurity Policy, and a new E-commerce policy. Earlier this week, The Economic Times ran a piece stating that the draft of the E-commerce policy was imminent.

The article touched upon what the policy was going to cover, and among other things, that included a new regulator for E-commerce. Since then, we have also had reports claim that a government panel is looking at establishing a regulator for non-personal data. While we need to have regulation for both these spaces (non-personal data and e-commerce), this is the wrong way to go about it.