GOVERNMENT POLICIES

In most of the developing countries, laws that govern commerce did not treat electronic transactions. Electronic signatures are not legal. There are no laws to govern Ecommerce disputes, data privacy and cyber taxation issues. Thus, governments in these countries should drive laws and policies in order to facilitate the activities of electronic commerce. The establishment of Ecommerce laws and policies is the basic and mandatory step to do online business. Therefore governments in these nations should prioritize this task for the advancement of Ecommerce.

E-Commerce Industry in India Government Regulations and Policies. The Government of India laid down the Information and Technology Act in 2000 and became the 12th country in the world to have cyberlaws. The IT Act of 2000

Covered the following aspects: a) Legal recognition of electronic documents. b) Legal recognition of digital signatures. c) Offences and Contraventions. d) Justice Dispensation Systems for Cybercrimes.

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The IT Act 2000 was substantially modified through the Information and Technology Amendment Act, 2008, which came into effect from October 27, 2009.

The IT Act of 2008 covered amendments that provided additional focus of information security. It has added sections on offences, such as Cyber terrorism and Data Protection. This act, however, has been criticized because of lack of legal and procedural safeguards to prevent violation of civil liberties of Indian people.

Cyber Laws and Crimes as per the Indian IT Act

The IT Act covers cyber laws and crimes, which are subject to the Indian Penal Code. Such crimes include:

Crimes related to technical aspects, such as unauthorized access and hacking, Trojan attack, virus and worm attack, email related attacks(email spoofing and email spamming, email bombing), and denial of service attacks(DOS), DOS include:

Consumption of limited or non-renewable resources like NW

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bandwidth and RAM, alteration or destruction of configuration information, destruction or alteration of network components. Forgery IPR violations, which include software piracy, copyright infringement, trademark violations, etc. This also includes cyber terrorism, Banking and credit card related crimes, e-commerce and investment frauds, sale of illegal articles, defamation. Cyber stacking, Identity theft, data diddling , theft of internet hours. Breach of privacy and confidentiality.

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Monitoring of Online Payments by Regulatory Bodies

Online payments are generally credited to the intermediaries like PayPal, who transfer these payments to merchants. To address this situation, Reserve Bank of India has issued new norms for facilitating eCommerce transactions. As per the directives, the payment will be credited directly to the merchants and not the intermediaries. With this arrangement, money will be available to the merchant within 3 days of transaction. This will expedite shipping of goods to the customer on time.

Online transactions require use of electronic cards credit or debit. The credit card market is currently not too vast, with less than 25 million credit cards issued in the market. However debit cum ATM cards are widely used by account holders.

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Steps by RBI to Improve e-Commerce Transactions

Issue appropriate instruments (cards) to facilitate online payments: For example, all debit cards are ATM cards, but all ATM cards are not debit cards are not debit cards. Additionally, there are some co-operative banks offering internet banking facilities. This facility is mostly for checking account balance, and this should be extended to online transactions as well.

Take steps to improve debit and credit card penetration. RBI should specity a time frame to banks to issue credit cards, debit cum ATM cards.

Improving the network connectivity of ATMs: Users can use one banks ATM card for holding transactions with another Bank because these ATMs are connected to BANCS ATM network. Several banks still need to be connected to this network. RBI should facilities to expedite this connectivity.

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 Improving payment gateway infrastructure: There is a need to improve payment gateway infrastructure in the country. The payment gateways should accept all credit cards, debit cards and internet banking facilities that all banks are offering. RBI should provide a mandate to the payment gateways to integrate such services of any new bank within some stipulated duration of the new bank operations going live.

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