Legal Issues in E-Commerce Regulation and Consumer Data Protection in India

Fast growth in electronic commerce in India has exceeded the existing regulatory regime created to govern traditional trade operations, which has led to an inconsistent set of laws consisting of the Information Technology Act of 2000, the Consumer Protection Act of 2019, the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules of 2020, competition laws, sectoral instructions of the Reserve Bank of India, and recently passed Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. This research carries out doctrinal examination of the legal framework that governs e-commerce and consumer data protection in India, describing the development of the regulatory regime from the intermediary liability provisions of the Information Technology Act to the rights-based framework of the new data protection law. It is going to explore the constitutional foundations of the right to informational privacy in the landmark case of K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, consumer protection rules that apply to e-commerce companies, as well as the problems of competition law that arise due to the dominance of online platforms and their algorithms. This paper draws attention to persistent gaps in the regulatory framework, including insufficient law enforcement, ambiguous regulations on cross-border data flows, and the absence of consistent e-commerce law, and is followed by several suggestions on how to improve the situation.