India’s new e-commerce policy could make Amazon share what?

For the past two years, India has been working on an e-commerce policy intended to take away some of the power that tech behemoths like Amazon wield in the country’s e-commerce market. According to Gizmodo, the latest draft of this policy, obtained by Bloomberg, contains a provision that could give the country’s federal authorities insight into the algorithms that keep the money coming for massive e-commerce companies.

The policy would do this by requiring that any large e-commerce company that wishes to operate in India give federal authorities access to its “source codes and algorithms.” The authorities claim that access to this information would help clamp down on “digitally induced biases” within the e-commerce market.

The policy was likely created with Amazon in mind, as well as the Walmart-owned Flipkart. Together, these two online platforms control two-thirds of India’s e-commerce market. By comparison, local e-commerce companies like Bigbasket and Patym Mall only control less than 5 percent each.