Building Trust in Open Commerce
– Sujith Nair (CEO & Co-Founder, FIDE)
“Open protocols are only as good as the ecosystem that adopts them”
Beckn Protocol allows for a variety of transaction scenarios to be enabled on open networks. It allows the ecosystem to come together to build an open, inclusive and trusted digital commerce network.
It offers the foundation to build trust not just for participating platforms but for the end users of the platforms – the buyers and sellers. Harnessing this foundation, however, also requires rethinking the approach to policy and regulations to shape the ecosystem’s behaviour.
The open protocols with digital programmable policies offer a vantage point to enable “decentralised observability” whereby we are not relying on one agency alone to check for bad behaviour. For example, every seller can do a social audit of a buyer platform to see if they are being excluded (in search listings) due to any unfair referencing or other such ploys adopted by the platform. Building blocks like Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) allow buyers and sellers to report incidents like these. This doesn’t mean the burden of such reporting is left to the buyers or sellers. Network Facilitating Organisations can introduce such checks themselves as part of network behaviour assessments on a real-time basis. In fact, anybody keen to perform such checks can do it on an open network. And that’s just one of the deterrents.
Building blocks like ODR, network-level reputation systems on top of Beckn Protocol do offer an opportunity to allay fears of buyers and sellers. This, however, needs to be backed by regulatory policies and trust the institutions to bring the policies into force. Open networks unlock data for evidence-based policymaking that is responsive and stress-tested.
Here’s an opportunity with open protocols to apply our collective minds to harness the benefits of interoperability in the form of choices, more competition, transparent policies, and decentralised observability to help build a trusted commerce ecosystem. It won’t be perfect, but it allows us to significantly shift the status quo and achieve a new acceptable equilibrium and further advance from there.
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