A number of countries have realised that they need to extend their data protection frameworks through new measures that will unlock data silos in order to make it easier for data to flow from one entity to another with the permission of the data subject. However, if these measures are adopted solely through legislation they will fail. Technology businesses must be regulated through a mixture of law and technology - strong principle based laws and protocol based technology guardrails to ensure compliance.

Policy-making requires an understanding of the reciprocal relationships inherent in regulation. Focusing on a policy outcome in a narrow area of specific intent will result in unintended consequences in reciprocally related areas. In these instances it is important to think about policy making as a dial. Tilting too much in one direction will cause harm elsewhere. It is about finding the right balance.

The proliferation of micro-entrepreneurs in India has been enabled by India’s radically unbundled e-commerce ecosystem. However, given the expansive wording of the new Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, the flourishing of this important ecosystem is threatened as the platforms enabling these entrepreneurs will have to comply with so many obligations as to make their operations commercially infeasible.

The technology to create the metaverse is at the stage where it could well become a reality. However, unlike the internet that was created by patient capital, the metaverse will be created by big tech. We need to develop open standards and regulations so that we can ensure that there are no walled gardens in the metaverse. India has already built interoperable infrastructure to address essential aspects of the metaverse like payments. It has the opportunity to be a leader in its development.

On the one hand the internet is so good at remembering things that we have to create legal frameworks to force it to forget. On the other hand, in those instances where we expect the internet to remember things in the same way we used to rely on libraries link-rot and content-drift has resulted in valuable information no longer being traceable.

The DEPA framework encodes most of the privacy principles that run through most privacy regulations into the framework of data transfers. However, while it solves the questions of notice, consent and purpose limitation, once the data is in the possession of the transferee, the traditional DEPA framework has no control over what is subsequently done with it. This means that it will no address issues of use restriction, data minimisation and retention limitation. If we can integrate into the traditional DEPA framework the concept of Confidential Clean Rooms we should be able to address these remaining privacy principles as well.

Advertising became the business model of the internet because we did not implement micropayments. However advertising has created perverse incentives and it is time we returned to the original idea of the founders of the World Wide Web and build micropayments solutions for the internet.

By repealing the drones regulations it passed just 4 months previously the government has demonstrated that it is willing to listen to public feedback and promote a more business friendly regulatory framework. What is critical is for the new regulations to carefully define the airspace map for drone operations and to remove the penal consequences that the new framework has imposed.

The pandemic forced us into a natural experiment that has given us valuable insights about the natural world in the absence of humans. It also allowed us to experiment with changing various regulations to continue to operate in a lockdown. We should use the learnings from this natural experiment to figure out how to implement empirical policy-making by implementing regulatory sandboxes for our policy endeavours.

If we had built our grid based on renewable power generation we would have made battery storage a part of grid design. Now as we transition away from centralised to distributed power generation V2G solutions offer a useful alternatives that India, given its recent policy changes, is ideally suited to implement.