India looks to fight the battle on global rules for e-commerce trade at WTO as about 70 countries have expressed support to USA to have a multilateral mechanism. On this issue, only South Africa is with India. The government, under pressure, had to drop the mention of this issue in a declaration at a ministerial meeting hosted by it in New Delhi in May 2020. The draft prepared by India had mentioned restraining from plurilateral agreements where a group of countries came together for an agreement and not the WTO as a whole. The US, Europe, Japan, and China seek some sort of rules to benefit their companies like Amazon, Alibaba, and Uber, etc. However, India, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa are not in its favour. The Indian government has said that even if 160 countries were in favour of global e-commerce rules, India will seek to stop it.
The European Union, in its submission to the WTO, has sought an expansion of the Information Technology Agreement (ITA) to cover more goods, which India had tried to avoid. And so, India did not sign the Information Technology Agreement (ITA-2). The EU and US have also sought removal of data localisation requirements despite recognising that privacy should be protected. It is believed by many policymakers in India that ITA-1 was a mistake because it restricted the governments to impose import duty on several electronic items.