📱E-India

India wants to change the way its citizens shop online. Currently, the country's e-commerce is a duopoly, with Amazon and Flipkart (which is owned by Walmart) controlling some 60% of the country's market, notes Reuters. This month, the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), a government-backed initiative, will roll out to 100 cities and give smaller businesses in the e-commerce sector broader access to India's growing market.

• India's official estimate is that the nation's e-commerce value for 2021 was $55 billion in gross merchandise. That number is expected to grow to $350 billion by the end of this decade. 

• According to The Hustle, Infosys founder Nandan Nilekani told Fortune he hopes the ONDC will “provide a glimpse for the whole world of how open commerce can drive positive non-zero-sum outcomes for business and society.”

A Shifting Market

The global e-commerce market is changing in other ways too. As 2PM notes, Google and Facebook/Instagram ad revenue have taken a hit thanks in large part to Apple's new privacy settings. This means that some online retailers are using Apple Ads now more heavily than traditional Google and Facebook ads. In fact, this could spell a bigger shift in online retail, a report by Fast Company details, adding “The rise of retail media ad networks is now intersecting with a softening of the digital ad market, brought on by a combination of macro-economic factors, and more secular shifts in the online-ad business resulting from Apple tightening the ability to track user behavior across the Web.”

The Verdict

It's fascinating that while the US and EU are attempting to break the oligopoly of Big Tech through laws and regulations, India is taking another route: creating public platforms that democratize and directly challenge Silicon Valley's dominance. Will the strategy work, though?