A moment after I had ordered tea, I noticed that the promised delivery time changed from 10 minutes to 45. I looked for the familiar button to cancel the order, but it was no longer there.
Navigating my way through the delivery app to customer service, which now didn’t have the familiar option to chat or speak with a support executive, I arrived at a chatbot that did not have an option to cancel the order.
Finally, after typing “I want to cancel the order” three times, it informed me that the cancellation charge was 100% of the order.
The options that I had until recently had been taken away to the advantage of a big listed food delivery company. I, the consumer, was disempowered, left ruing the senselessness of paying for tea that had not even been prepared and would arrive long after I’d left home.
After complaining on social media (and receiving the usual corporate-speak response), I used the Union government’s National Consumer Helpline to complain. A couple of weeks later, I got an email from the food delivery firm denying that it was its fault but refunding me the price of the tea in vouchers. I rejected its explanation but the issue was marked as resolved anyway.
You might find this familiar. It has now become common on social media to see people post complaints to the handles of airlines, telecom firms, consumer appliance brands, taxi aggregators and e-commerce companies because there is no other way. Those with fame and followers are fortunate to get a private response seeking details of the case. Others are left in the lurch.
This is just one example of the ongoing disempowerment of the user, consumer and citizen. Your social media account can be suspended without notice or reasonable recourse. You cannot speak to a customer service operator. You are repeatedly asked to prove who you are, with multiple KYC loops with their own Byzantine logic.
More than a decade after an unprecedented exercise of issuing identity credentials to over 1.4 billion people, the state now wants large numbers of voters to effectively prove their citizenship.
Now, technology has certainly empowered the user, consumer and citizen, which is why they would prefer using digital platforms. However, platforms, corporations and governments have used their influence over the direction of technological development to create a sharp asymmetry that empowers them disproportionately over their stakeholders.
Market forces—to the extent that they work—are the only instrument that can discipline private companies. Elections might temper politicians, but the state itself is a monopoly, with little to discipline it. A private company that leaks your personal data is liable to pay severe penalties. A government department that leaks the same data effectively gets away with it. The rules are written in ways that put the onus on citizens to prove their bona fides. The corporation and the state get to sit in judgement.
This is not new. Every economic and technological epoch over the past few centuries first empowered one section of the population over others: generals, traders, land owners, factory owners, financiers and so on.
This led to an accumulated societal backlash that took various forms and led to new policy epochs. Representative government, human rights, labour rights, anti-trust legislation and social welfare are some of the outcomes of previous ferment. In India, for instance, consumer rights came after civil society organized itself to demand them.
With artificial intelligence (AI) knocking on our doors, our society is at a point where it has become urgent to renegotiate the relationship between the citizen and the corporation. We have seen that market forces themselves are not adequate to discipline the corporation. Elections are insufficient to restrain the state.
The world needs a new digital consumer rights movement to re-empower the consumer-citizen.
Proponents of AI argue that it will solve the consumer rights problem at scale because overwhelmed humans will no longer be a bottleneck. Platforms that have used online dispute resolution have done pretty well even before the AI era began.
If corporations and governments are earnest, then yes, AI would be a big part of the answer.
Yet, it is unclear whether AI will change intentions, which are shaped by incentives. Will a food delivery company that enjoys market power have a greater incentive to maximize customer satisfaction or profits? Will a government strive more to deliver public goods or create an impression that it is doing so? What can we the disempowered do to change these incentives?
It is clear that the tools we have—competition and consumer protection laws, free-and-fair elections—must be strengthened. My complaint to the National Consumer Helpline worked. So existing machinery should be put to good use.
Telecom is perhaps the only industry whose rules require a clear option to speak with a human executive. Such effective mechanisms should be replicated.
We will, however, need new public policy approaches to correct the imbalance between consumers and corporations, citizens and the state. If this takes too long, a backlash is inevitable.
The author is co-founder and director of The Takshashila Institution, an independent centre for research and education in public policy.